"Vous avez sauve ma mere!" she cried. "You saved her, you saved her, vous etes un ange, vous etes un dieu!"

"Here now, let up, get off me, I'm a married man," said Alvin.

The girl got up. "I'm sorry, but I'm so full of joy."

"Well I'm not sure I did anything," said Alvin. "Your mother may feel better but I didn't cure whatever caused the fever. She's still sick, and she still needs to rest and let her body work on whatever's wrong."

Alvin was on his feet now, and he looked back to see the mother standing in the doorway, tears still running down her cheeks.

"I mean it," said Alvin. "Send her back to bed. She keeps standing there, the skeeters'll eat her alive."

"I love you," said the girl. "I love you forever, you good man!"

Back in the plaza, Arthur Stuart was sitting on top of the four water jars-which he had moved some twenty yards away from the fountain. Which was a good thing, because there must have been a hundred people or more jostling around it now.

Alvin didn't worry about the crowd-he was mostly just relieved that they weren't jostling around some uppity young black man.

"Took you long enough," Arthur Stuart whispered.

"Her mother was real sick," said Alvin.

"Yeah, well, word got out that this was the sweetest-tasting water ever served up in Barcy, and now folks are saying it can heal the sick or Jesus turned the water into wine or it's a sign of the second coming or the devil was cast out of it and I had to tell five different people that our water came from the fountain before it got all hexed or healed or whatever they happen to believe. I was about to throw dirt into it just to make it convincing."

"So stop talking and pick up your jars."

Arthur Stuart stood up and reached for a jar, but then stopped and puzzled over it. "How do I pick up the second one, while I got the first one on my shoulder?"