"We may as well go in out of the mosquitoes," the doctor suggested. "And I wish you would tell these people what you told me, young man. Don't be afraid to speak frankly; it is rather amazing but not at all impossible, as I can testify. In fact," he added dryly, "my presence here ought to settle any doubt of that. Just tell them, young man, about your mother."
Swan was the last to enter the kitchen, and he stood leaning against the closed door, turning his old hat round and round, his eyes going swiftly from face to face. They were watching him, and Swan blushed a deep red while he told them about his mother in Boise, and how he could talk to her with his thoughts. He explained laboriously how the thoughts from her came like his mother speaking in his head, and that his thoughts reached her in the same way. He said that since he was a little boy they could talk together with their thoughts, but people laughed and some called them crazy, so that now he did not like to have somebody know that he could do it.
"But Brit Hunter's hurt bad, so a doctor must come quick, or I think he maybe will die. It takes too long to ride a horse to Echo from this ranch, so I call on my mother, and I tell my mother a doctor must come quick to this ranch. So my mother sends a telephone to this doctor in Shoshone, and he comes. That is all. But I would not like it if everybody maybe finds it out that I do that, and makes talk about it."
He looked straight at Jim and Sorry, and those two unprepossessing ones looked at each other and at Swan and at the doctor and at each other again, and headed for the door. But Swan was leaning against it, and his eyes were on them. "I would like it if you say somebody rides to get the doctor," he hinted quietly.
Sorry looked at Jim. "I rode like hell," he stated heavily. "I leave it to Jim."
"You shore'n hell did!" Jim agreed, and Swan removed his big form from the door.
"You boys goin' over t' Spirit Canyon?" Frank wanted to know.
"Yeah," said Sorry, answering for them both, and they went out, giving Swan a sidelong look of utter bafflement as they passed him. Talking by the thought route from Spirit Canyon to Boise City was evidently a bit too much for even their phlegmatic souls to contemplate with perfect calm.