Linday resented Daw's taking the heavier pack, but Daw had his will.
"You got to work as soon as you get there. Come on."
It was one in the afternoon when they started to climb. At eight that
evening they cleared the rim and for half an hour lay where they had
fallen. Then came the fire, a pot of coffee, and an enormous feed of
moosemeat. But first Linday hefted the two packs, and found his own
lighter by half.
"You're an iron man, Daw," he admired.
"Who? Me? Oh, pshaw! You ought to see Rocky. He's made out of platinum,
an' armour plate, an' pure gold, an' all strong things. I'm mountaineer,
but he plumb beats me out. Down in Curry County I used to 'most kill the
boys when we run bear. So when I hooks up with Rocky on our first hunt I
had a mean idea to show 'm a few. I let out the links good an' generous,
'most nigh keepin' up with the dawgs, an' along comes Rocky a-treadin'
on my heels. I knowed he couldn't last that way, and I just laid down
an' did my dangdest. An' there he was, at the end of another hour,
a-treadin' steady an' regular on my heels. I was some huffed. 'Mebbe
you'd like to come to the front an' show me how to travel,' I says.
'Sure,' says he. An' he done it! I stayed with 'm, but let me tell you I
was plumb tuckered by the time the bear tree'd.
"They ain't no stoppin' that man. He ain't afraid of nothin'. Last fall,
before the freeze-up, him an' me was headin' for camp about twilight. I
was clean shot out--ptarmigan--an' he had one cartridge left. An' the
dawgs tree'd a she grizzly. Small one. Only weighed about three hundred,
but you know what grizzlies is. 'Don't do it,' says I, when he ups with
his rifle. 'You only got that one shot, an' it's too dark to see the
sights.'
"'Climb a tree,' says he. I didn't climb no tree, but when that bear
come down a-cussin' among the dawgs, an' only creased, I want to tell
you I was sure hankerin' for a tree. It was some ruction. Then things
come on real bad. The bear slid down a hollow against a big log.
Downside, that log was four feet up an' down. Dawgs couldn't get at bear
that way. Upside was steep gravel, an' the dawgs'd just naturally slide
down into the bear. They was no jumpin' back, an' the bear was
a-manglin' 'em fast as they come. All underbrush, gettin' pretty dark,
no cartridges, nothin'.
"What's Rocky up an' do? He goes downside of log, reaches over with his
knife, an' begins slashin'. But he can only reach bear's rump, an' dawgs
bein' ruined fast, one-two-three time. Rocky gets desperate. He don't
like to lose his dawgs. He jumps on top log, grabs bear by the slack of
the rump, an' heaves over back'ard right over top of that log. Down they
go, kit an' kaboodle, twenty feet, bear, dawgs, an' Rocky, slidin',
cussin', an' scratchin', ker-plump into ten feet of water in the bed of
stream. They all swum out different ways. Nope, he didn't get the bear,
but he saved the dawgs. That's Rocky. They's no stoppin' him when his
mind's set."
It was at the next camp that Linday heard how Rocky had come to be
injured.
"I'd ben up the draw, about a mile from the cabin, lookin' for a piece
of birch likely enough for an axe-handle. Comin' back I heard the
darndest goings-on where we had a bear trap set. Some trapper had left
the trap in an old cache an' Rocky'd fixed it up. But the goings-on. It
was Rocky an' his brother Harry. First I'd hear one yell and laugh, an'
then the other, like it was some game. An' what do you think the fool
game was? I've saw some pretty nervy cusses down in Curry County, but
they beat all. They'd got a whoppin' big panther in the trap an' was
takin' turns rappin' it on the nose with a light stick. But that wa'n't
the point. I just come out of the brush in time to see Harry rap it.
Then he chops six inches off the stick an' passes it to Rocky. You see,
that stick was growin' shorter all the time. It ain't as easy as you
think. The panther'd slack back an' hunch down an' spit, an' it was
mighty lively in duckin' the stick. An' you never knowed when it'd jump.
It was caught by the hind leg, which was curious, too, an' it had some
slack I'm tellin' you.
"It was just a game of dare they was playin', an' the stick gettin'
shorter an' shorter an' the panther madder 'n madder. Bimeby they wa'n't
no stick left--only a nubbin, about four inches long, an' it was Rocky's
turn. 'Better quit now,' says Harry. 'What for?' says Rocky. 'Because if
you rap him again they won't be no stick left for me,' Harry answers.
'Then you'll quit an' I win,' says Rocky with a laugh, an' goes to it.
"An' I don't want to see anything like it again. That cat'd bunched back
an' down till it had all of six feet slack in its body. An' Rocky's
stick four inches long. The cat got him. You couldn't see one from
t'other. No chance to shoot. It was Harry, in the end, that got his
knife into the panther's jugular."
"If I'd known how he got it I'd never have come," was Linday's comment.
Daw nodded concurrence.
"That's what she said. She told me sure not to whisper how it
happened."
"Is he crazy?" Linday demanded in his wrath.
"They're all crazy. Him an' his brother are all the time devilin' each
other to tom-fool things. I seen them swim the riffle last fall, bad
water an' mush-ice runnin'--on a dare. They ain't nothin' they won't
tackle. An' she's 'most as bad. Not afraid some herself. She'll do
anything Rocky'll let her. But he's almighty careful with her. Treats
her like a queen. No camp-work or such for her. That's why another man
an' me are hired on good wages. They've got slathers of money an'
they're sure dippy on each other. 'Looks like good huntin',' says Rocky,
when they struck that section last fall. 'Let's make a camp then,' says
Harry. An' me all the time thinkin' they was lookin' for gold. Ain't ben
a prospect pan washed the whole winter."
Linday's anger mounted. "I haven't any patience with fools. For two
cents I'd turn back."
"No you wouldn't," Daw assured him confidently. "They ain't enough grub
to turn back, an' we'll be there to-morrow. Just got to cross that last
divide an' drop down to the cabin. An' they's a better reason. You're
too far from home, an' I just naturally wouldn't let you turn back."
Exhausted as Linday was, the flash in his black eyes warned Daw that he
had overreached himself. His hand went out.
"My mistake, Doc. Forget it. I reckon I'm gettin' some cranky what of
losin' them dawgs."
III
Not one day, but three days later, the two men, after being snowed in on
the summit by a spring blizzard, staggered up to a cabin that stood in a
fat bottom beside the roaring Little Peco. Coming in from the bright
sunshine to the dark cabin, Linday observed little of its occupants. He
was no more than aware of two men and a woman. But he was not interested
in them. He went directly to the bunk where lay the injured man. The
latter was lying on his back, with eyes closed, and Linday noted the
slender stencilling of the brows and the kinky silkiness of the brown
hair. Thin and wan, the face seemed too small for the muscular neck, yet
the delicate features, despite their waste, were firmly moulded.
"What dressings have you been using?" Linday asked of the woman.
"Corrosive, sublimate, regular solution," came the answer.
He glanced quickly at her, shot an even quicker glance at the face of
the injured man, and stood erect. She breathed sharply, abruptly biting
off the respiration with an effort of will. Linday turned to the men.
"You clear out--chop wood or something. Clear out."
One of them demurred.
"This is a serious case," Linday went on. "I want to talk to his wife."
"I'm his brother," said the other.
To him the woman looked, praying him with her eyes. He nodded
reluctantly and turned toward the door.
"Me, too?" Daw queried from the bench where he had flung himself down.
"You, too."
Linday busied himself with a superficial examination of the patient
while the cabin was emptying.
"So?" he said. "So that's your Rex Strang."
She dropped her eyes to the man in the bunk as if to reassure herself of
his identity, and then in silence returned Linday's gaze.
"Why don't you speak?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "What is the use? You know it is Rex
Strang."
"Thank you. Though I might remind you that it is the first time I have
ever seen him. Sit down." He waved her to a stool, himself taking the
bench. "I'm really about all in, you know. There's no turnpike from the
Yukon here."
He drew a penknife and began extracting a thorn from his thumb.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, after a minute's wait.
"Eat and rest up before I start back."
"What are you going to do about...." She inclined her head toward the
unconscious man.
"Nothing."
She went over to the bunk and rested her fingers lightly on the
tight-curled hair.
"You mean you will kill him," she said slowly. "Kill him by doing
nothing, for you can save him if you will."
"Take it that way." He considered a moment, and stated his thought with
a harsh little laugh. "From time immemorial in this weary old world it
has been a not uncommon custom so to dispose of wife-stealers."
"You are unfair, Grant," she answered gently. "You forget that I was
willing and that I desired. I was a free agent. Rex never stole me. It
was you who lost me. I went with him, willing and eager, with song on my
lips. As well accuse me of stealing him. We went together."
"A good way of looking at it," Linday conceded. "I see you are as keen a
thinker as ever, Madge. That must have bothered him."
"A keen thinker can be a good lover--"
"And not so foolish," he broke in.
"Then you admit the wisdom of my course?"
He threw up his hands. "That's the devil of it, talking with clever
women. A man always forgets and traps himself. I wouldn't wonder if you
won him with a syllogism."
Her reply was the hint of a smile in her straight-looking blue eyes and
a seeming emanation of sex pride from all the physical being of her.
"No, I take that back, Madge. If you'd been a numbskull you'd have won
him, or any one else, on your looks, and form, and carriage. I ought to
know. I've been through that particular mill, and, the devil take me,
I'm not through it yet."
His speech was quick and nervous and irritable, as it always was, and,
as she knew, it was always candid. She took her cue from his last
remark.
"Do you remember Lake Geneva?"
"I ought to. I was rather absurdly happy."
She nodded, and her eyes were luminous. "There is such a thing as old
sake. Won't you, Grant, please, just remember back ... a little ... oh,
so little ... of what we were to each other ... then?"
"Now you're taking advantage," he smiled, and returned to the attack on
his thumb. He drew the thorn out, inspected it critically, then
concluded. "No, thank you. I'm not playing the Good Samaritan."
"Yet you made this hard journey for an unknown man," she urged.
His impatience was sharply manifest. "Do you fancy I'd have moved a step
had I known he was my wife's lover?"
"But you are here ... now. And there he lies. What are you going to do?"
"Nothing. Why should I? I am not at the man's service. He pilfered me."
She was about to speak, when a knock came on the door.
"Get out!" he shouted.
"If you want any assistance--"
"Get out! Get a bucket of water! Set it down outside!"
"You are going to...?" she began tremulously.
"Wash up."
She recoiled from the brutality, and her lips tightened.
"Listen, Grant," she said steadily. "I shall tell his brother. I know
the Strang breed. If you can forget old sake, so can I. If you don't do
something, he'll kill you. Why, even Tom Daw would if I asked."
"You should know me better than to threaten," he reproved gravely, then
added, with a sneer: "Besides, I don't see how killing me will help your
Rex Strang."
She gave a low gasp, closed her lips tightly, and watched his quick eyes
take note of the trembling that had beset her.
"It's not hysteria, Grant," she cried hastily and anxiously, with
clicking teeth. "You never saw me with hysteria. I've never had it. I
don't know what it is, but I'll control it. I am merely beside myself.
It's partly anger--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 _finis_ and be
content. And then, no matter how, there came into her hands an elixir.
Anointed on his eyes, the sight would surely and fully return."
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 anæsthetic, 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 anæsthetic 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 living bone, living man and living rabbit
immovable and indissolubly bandaged and bound together, their mutual
processes uniting and reconstructing a perfect arm.
And through the whole trying period, especially as Strang mended,
occurred passages of talk between Linday and Madge. Nor was he kind, nor
she rebellious.
"It's a nuisance," he told her. "But the law is the law, and you'll need
a divorce before we can marry again. What do you say? Shall we go to
Lake Geneva?"
"As you will," she said.
And he, another time: "What the deuce did you see in him anyway? I know
he had money. But you and I were managing to get along with some sort
of comfort. My practice was averaging around forty thousand a year
then--I went over the books afterward. Palaces and steam yachts were
about all that was denied you."
"Perhaps you've explained it," she answered. "Perhaps you were too
interested in your practice. Maybe you forgot me."
"Humph," he sneered. "And may not your Rex be too interested in panthers
and short sticks?"
He continually girded her to explain what he chose to call her
infatuation for the other man.
"There is no explanation," she replied. And, finally, she retorted, "No
one can explain love, I least of all. I only knew love, the divine and
irrefragable fact, that is all. There was once, at Fort Vancouver, a
baron of the Hudson Bay Company who chided the resident Church of
England parson. The dominie had written home to England complaining that
the Company folk, from the head factor down, were addicted to Indian
wives. 'Why didn't you explain the extenuating circumstances?' demanded
the baron. Replied the dominie: 'A cow's tail grows downward. I do not
attempt to explain why the cow's tail grows downward. I merely cite the
fact.'"
"Damn clever women!" cried Linday, his eyes flashing his irritation.
"What brought you, of all places, into the Klondike?" she asked once.
"Too much money. No wife to spend it. Wanted a rest. Possibly overwork.
I tried Colorado, but their telegrams followed me, and some of them did
themselves. I went on to Seattle. Same thing. Ransom ran his wife out to
me in a special train. There was no escaping it. Operation successful.
Local newspapers got wind of it. You can imagine the rest. I had to
hide, so I ran away to Klondike. And--well, Tom Daw found me playing
whist in a cabin down on the Yukon."
Came the day when Strang's bed was carried out of doors and into the
sunshine.
"Let me tell him now," she said to Linday.
"No; wait," he answered.
Later, Strang was able to sit up on the edge of the bed, able to walk
his first giddy steps, supported on either side.
"Let me tell him now," she said.
"No. I'm making a complete job of this. I want no set-backs. There's a
slight hitch still in that left arm. It's a little thing, but I am going
to remake him as God made him. Tomorrow I've planned to get into that
arm and take out the kink. It will mean a couple of days on his back.
I'm sorry there's no more chloroform. He'll just have to bite his teeth
on a spike and hang on. He can do it. He's got grit for a dozen men."
Summer came on. The snow disappeared, save on the far peaks of the
Rockies to the east. The days lengthened till there was no darkness, the
sun dipping at midnight, due north, for a few minutes beneath the
horizon. Linday never let up on Strang. He studied his walk, his body
movements, stripped him again and again and for the thousandth time made
him flex all his muscles. Massage was given him without end, until
Linday declared that Tom Daw, Bill, and the brother were properly
qualified for Turkish bath and osteopathic hospital attendants. But
Linday was not yet satisfied. He put Strang through his whole repertoire
of physical feats, searching him the while for hidden weaknesses. He put
him on his back again for a week, opened up his leg, played a deft trick
or two with the smaller veins, scraped a spot of bone no larger than a
coffee grain till naught but a surface of healthy pink remained to be
sewed over with the living flesh.
"Let me tell him," Madge begged.
"Not yet," was the answer. "You will tell him only when I am ready."