with you. And it's apprehension and fear. I don't want to lose him. I do love him, Grant. He is my king, my lover. And I have sat here beside him so many dreadful days now. Oh, Grant, please, please.'
'Just nerves,' he commented drily. 'Stay with it. You can best it. If you were a man I'd say take a smoke.'
She went unsteadily back to the stool, where she watched him and fought for control. From the rough fireplace came the singing of a cricket. Outside two wolf-dogs bickered. The injured man's chest rose and fell perceptibly under the fur robes. She saw a smile, not altogether pleasant, form on Linday's lips.
'How much do you love him?' he asked.
Her breast filled and rose, and her eyes shone with a light unashamed and proud. He nodded in token that he was answered.
'Do you mind if I take a little time?' He stopped, casting about for the way to begin. 'I remember reading a story-Herbert Shaw wrote it, I think. I want to tell you about it. There was a woman, young and beautiful; a man magnificent, a lover of beauty and a wanderer. I don't know how much like your Rex Strang he was, but I fancy a sort of resemblance. Well, this man was a painter, a bohemian, a vagabond. He kissed-oh, several times and for several weeks-and rode away. She possessed for him what I thought you possessed for me… at Lake Geneva. In ten years she wept the beauty out of her face. Some women turn yellow, you know, when grief upsets their natural juices.
'Now it happened that the man went blind, and ten years afterward, led as a child by the hand, he stumbled back to her. There was nothing left. He could no longer paint. And she was very happy, and glad he could not see her face. Remember, he worshipped beauty. And he continued to hold her in his arms and believe in her beauty. The memory of it was vivid in him. He never ceased to talk about it, and to lament that he could not behold it.
'One day he told her of five great pictures he wished to paint. If only his sight could be restored to paint them, he could write
Linday shrugged his shoulders.
'You see her struggle. With sight, he could paint his five pictures. Also, he would leave her. Beauty was his religion. It was impossible that he could abide her ruined face. Five days she struggled. Then she anointed his eyes.'
Linday broke off and searched her with his eyes, the high lights focused sharply in the brilliant black.
'The question is, do you love Rex Strang as much as that?'
'And if I do?' she countered.
'Do you?'
'Yes.'
'You can sacrifice? You can give him up?'
Slow and reluctant was her 'Yes.'
'And you will come with me?'
'Yes.' This time her voice was a whisper. 'When he is well-yes.'
'You understand. It must be Lake Geneva over again. You will be my wife.'
She seemed to shrink and droop, but her head nodded.
'Very well.' He stood up briskly, went to his pack, and began unstrapping. 'I shall need help. Bring his brother in. Bring them all in. Boiling water-let there be lots of it. I've brought bandages, but let me see what you have in that line.-Here, Daw, build up that fire and start boiling all the water you can.-Here you,' to the other man, 'get that table out and under the window there. Clean it; scrub it; scald it. Clean, man, clean, as you never cleaned a thing before. You, Mrs. Strang, will be my helper. No sheets, I suppose. Well, we'll manage somehow.-You're his brother, sir. I'll give the an?sthetic, but you must keep it going afterward. Now listen, while I instruct you. In the first place-but before that, can you take a pulse?…'
IV
Noted for his daring and success as a surgeon, through the days and weeks that followed Linday exceeded himself in daring and success. Never, because of the frightful mangling and breakage, and because of the long delay, had he encountered so terrible a case. But he had never had a healthier specimen of human wreck to work upon. Even then he would have failed, had it not been for the patient's catlike vitality and almost uncanny physical and mental grip on life.
There were days of high temperature and delirium; days of heart-sinking when Strang's pulse was barely perceptible; days when he lay conscious, eyes weary and drawn, the sweat of pain on his face. Linday was indefatigable, cruelly efficient, audacious and fortunate, daring hazard after hazard and winning. He was not content to make the man live. He devoted himself to the intricate and perilous problem of making him whole and strong again.
'He will be a cripple?' Madge queried.
'He will not merely walk and talk and be a limping caricature of his former self,' Linday told her. 'He shall run and leap, swim riffles, ride bears, fight panthers, and do all things to the top of his fool desire. And, I warn you, he will fascinate women just as of old. Will you like that? Are you content? Remember, you will not be with him.'
'Go on, go on,' she breathed. 'Make him whole. Make him what he was.'
More than once, whenever Strang's recuperation permitted, Linday put him under the an?sthetic and did terrible things, cutting and sewing, rewiring and connecting up the disrupted organism. Later, developed a hitch in the left arm. Strang could lift it so far, and no farther. Linday applied himself to the problem. It was a case of more wires, shrunken, twisted, disconnected. Again it was cut and switch and ease and disentangle. And all that saved Strang was his tremendous vitality and the health of his flesh.
'You will kill him,' his brother complained. 'Let him be. For God's sake let him be. A live and crippled man is better than a whole and dead one.'
Linday flamed in wrath. 'You get out! Out of this cabin with you till you can come back and say that I make him live. Pull-by God, man, you've got to pull with me with all your soul. Your brother's travelling a hairline razor- edge. Do you understand? A thought can topple him off. Now get out, and come back sweet and wholesome, convinced beyond all absoluteness that he will live and be what he was before you and he played the fool together. Get out, I say.'
The brother, with clenched hands and threatening eyes, looked to Madge for counsel.
'Go, go, please,' she begged. 'He is right. I know he is right.'
Another time, when Strang's condition seemed more promising, the brother said:
'Doc, you're a wonder, and all this time I've forgotten to ask your name.'
'None of your damn business. Don't bother me. Get out.'
The mangled right arm ceased from its healing, burst open again in a frightful wound.
'Necrosis,' said Linday.
'That does settle it,' groaned the brother.
'Shut up!' Linday snarled. 'Get out! Take Daw with you. Take Bill, too. Get rabbits-alive-healthy ones. Trap them. Trap everywhere.'
'How many?' the brother asked.
'Forty of them-four thousand-forty thousand-all you can get. You'll help me, Mrs. Strang. I'm going to dig into that arm and size up the damage. Get out, you fellows. You for the rabbits.'
And he dug in, swiftly, unerringly, scraping away disintegrating bone, ascertaining the extent of the active decay.
'It never would have happened,' he told Madge, 'if he hadn't had so many other things needing vitality first. Even he didn't have vitality enough to go around. I was watching it, but I had to wait and chance it. That piece must go. He could manage without it, but rabbit-bone will make it what it was.'
From the hundreds of rabbits brought in, he weeded out, rejected, selected, tested, selected and tested again, until he made his final choice. He used the last of his chloroform and achieved the bone-graft-living bone to
