CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE three remaining men turned to their work of clearing the road, headed by Samson. He had not asked her any questions; he did not even look again her way; but presently he brought her clothes, which he had spread and dried in the sunshine, and told her that by the time she was dressed the litter would be there. This she found to be so.

Coming down the road, on a powerful horse, she saw a bearded, ruddy-faced, stocky, middle-aged man, whose business she easily guessed from the country-doctor’s saddle-bags slung across his horse. The doctor rode up and greeted,--

“Hello, Samson! Man hurt?”

“Don’t know,” answered the foreman.

Then, with a jerk of his thumb toward his guest, he added, “She can tell you.”

The doctor had not seen her. He looked around, gazed at her a moment in astonishment, and then, with a fine courtesy singularly different from the hearty roughness with which he had greeted the man, he raised his hat.

This diversion had kept the attention of the two from the quiet arrival of the men with the litter. When the young woman saw it, she forgot the presence of all save him lying so quiet where the men had placed him on a bed made by Samson from coats. She ran and knelt beside him; she kissed his cheeks; she chafed his hands; she begged him to speak, to live for her sake.

The strong hand of the doctor lifted her from the unconscious man and gently put her aside. A moment’s astonished gaze into the pallid, upturned face brought this burst from the doctor,--

“Adrian Wilder--dying!” He turned anxiously upon the young woman, and demanded, “Where did you find him? What is the matter here?”

“You mistake,” she firmly said. “He is Dr. Malbone.”

“Dr. Malbone!” he exclaimed. “Why, I am Dr. Malbone. This man is my friend, Adrian Wilder!”

His look was half fierce and full of suspicion.

Too surprised to comprehend at once the full meaning of his declaration, she stood staring at the physician in silence. That gentleman, turning from her, dropped on his knees and made a hurried examination of the unconscious man. “I don’t understand this,” he said to himself. He quickly opened Wilder’s shirt. Upon seeing the emaciation there, and exclaiming in amazement and horror, he turned again upon the young woman as he knelt, and demanded,--

“Explain this to me. Be quick, for every moment is precious. I don’t want to make a mistake, and I must know. He has pneumonia; but there is something behind it. Where and when did you find him?”

In a few words she told the salient facts of the story as she believed it,--the running away of the horses, the breaking of her leg, her father’s departure to fetch relief, her care at the stone hut.

“When did this accident happen to you?” the doctor asked.

“Four months ago.”

“And you two have lived alone at his cabin?”

“Yes.”

He glanced her over, and looked more puzzled than ever.

“You are looking hearty,” he said; “how is it that my friend is in this condition?”

“It must have been his care of me and his worry on my account.”

This appeared half to satisfy Dr. Mal-bone.

“Yes,” he said, “not being a doctor, and being extremely susceptible to the pressure of his duty toward you, he may have worn himself out.”

With that he hastily gave the young man a stimulant, and said,--

“Fall to here, men, and help me revive him, else he will be dead before we know it. Chafe his wrists and ankles. Hurry, men, but be gentle. That is good. Slow, there, John; those horny hands of yours are strong and rough. Samson, bring some strong coffee as quickly as God will let you. Rub him under the blankets, men; don’t let him chill. Maybe we can get him out of this pinch. The great thing now is to take him to my house.... Ah, that is good work, lads! His heart is waking up a little. That is good. That is very good.”

Dr. Malbone straightened up, and turned to the young woman, again fastening upon her the strange, severe, suspicious, half-threatening look that she had already learned to dread.

“I fear there is something unexplained here, madam, something concealed. I am not accusing you. My friend is a strange, fine man, and for good reasons he may have withheld something from you. But he would never hide anything from me. Did he give you a letter for any one?”

“He did not.”

“Have you seen him writing?”

“No.”

“Martin, hand me his coat.”

Dr. Malbone searched the pockets, and found a sealed letter addressed to him. He tore it open and read. As he read his astonishment grew. When he had finished, he turned a strange, pitying look upon the young woman.

“He charges me to give you this when I shall have read it.”

He handed her the letter, which she read. It ran thus:

“My dear Friend,--This is written to give Miss Andros some unhappy information that she ought to have at the earliest safe and proper moment, and as a precaution against my breaking down before that moment arrives. To have told her at first might have prevented her recovery. The proper moment to tell her will have arrived when she is in safe hands. I trust that they may be yours, and I know that you will show her every kindness that your generous soul can yield.

“It is this: Her father lost his life in the accident on the grade, by the falling of a tree upon him. His body rests under the earth in the farther end of the cave into which the rear door of my cabin opens. The grave is marked with a board giving his name. Nailed up in a box near the door are his personal effects.

“Give this letter to my afflicted friend. It will convey no hint of the profound sympathy that I feel, nor of what I suffer in thus raising my hand to deal her so cruel a blow.

“I can only crave her forgiveness for deceiving her both as to her father’s death and my being a physician.”

The eager hope, the anxiety, the absorption of her entire self in the stricken man at her feet, fled before the crushing whirlwind of grief that now overwhelmed her. The loss of her father was the loss of the anchor of her life, the loss of the one sure thing upon which her soul rested, in which she knew peace, security, sympathy, and strength. She spoke no word, but gazed far down the canon, a picture of complete desolation. Dr. Malbone stood beside her, looking down thoughtfully into the face of his friend. The men, relieved from their work of bringing back a faint glow of the flickering life on the ground, moved away silently, with the instinctive delicacy of their kind, knowing that they were facing a tragedy that they did not understand.

The letter fell from the young woman’s hand as she still gazed in mute agony down the canon. A slight swaying of her form warned Dr. Malbone that his time for action had arrived.

“A noble life still is left to us,” he quietly said, without looking up, and with a certain unsteadiness in his voice; “and it appeals to us for all that we have to give of help and strength and sympathy.”

It was a timely word. Instantly she dragged herself out of the crushing tumult into which she had been plunged.

“Yes,” she said, radiant with love and towering above the wreck that encompassed her, “the noblest of all lives is still left to us, and it shall have all that lies in us to give.”

“Then,” said Dr. Malbone, “time is very precious. Let us take him to my home at once.”

The sun had set behind the western mountains, but it still tipped the snowy summit of Mount Shasta with a crimson glow.

“Put the horses through,” said Dr. Malbone to the man who drove.

They made good speed up the grade, Dr. Malbone pondering in silence some problem that still sorely troubled him, the young woman sitting on the floor of the wagon and holding the hand of the unconscious man. Presently they arrived at Dr. Malbone’s house, where his plain, homelike wife, a competent mountain woman, quickly had the patient comfortable in bed, while her husband went thoroughly into the treatment. His was a mercurial spirit, the opposite of the gentle soul now seemingly passing away under his hands.

“I can find absolutely nothing,” he finally exclaimed, in despair, “except simple inanition as the probable cause and a complication of this attack, and I know that it is absurd. You must help me, madam. Tell me how you lived.”

Numerous sharp questions were required before he finally came upon the trail of the truth. She had delayed saying that Wilder had not eaten with her, and that toward the last he was niggardly with the food, because she feared that it would sound like a reproach. The moment she mentioned it, Dr. Mal-bone was transfigured. He sprang back from the bedside and confronted her, menacing and formidable, as Wilder had confronted her on that terrible day when she told him the story of her breaking up the attachment between a musician and her friend, and the death of the girl from a broken heart. What had she done or said that should bring this second storm of a man’s fury upon her?

“And you no doubt think,” cried Dr. Malbone, “that you have learned from his letter the true reason for his keeping you out of the cave. In all this broad world is there any human being so besotted with selfishness as not to be able to burrow through its swinishness for the truth? Come and look at this.” He dragged her to the bedside and showed her the body of his patient. “Is there under heaven,” he continued, “a mental or a spiritual eye so blinded with brutal egotism, so drunk with self-interest, as not to read the story that this poor withered frame writes large? Do you not understand that in those acts--over which you no doubt whined and complained in your empty heart--he gave evidence of a sublime sacrifice for you? Look at your own abundant flesh. You never went hungry in the hut. You never asked yourself if he might have food sufficient for two during the long winter. And now you see that he has denied himself for your comfort. He is dying of starvation, because in his splendid unselfishness he wanted you to be comfortable.”

Dr. Malbone paused, but his eyes were still blazing upon her, and his body trembled with the passion that stirred him.

“One affliction has fallen upon you; may you have strength and grace to bear it; but I say this: If ten thousand such afflictions had overtaken you, the suffering from them would not be adequate----”

He suddenly checked himself, and gave his wife hurried instructions for the preparation of some nutriment. While this was preparing, he resorted to such vigorous measures as the urgency of the case demanded. All this quickly brought him under self-control, and he worked with the sure hand of a skilful man battling with all his might in a desperate emergency. The young woman had sunk into a chair, where she sat dazed, weak, ill, and ignored, not daring to offer help, and praying dumbly for the opening of a vast gulf to entomb her.

The patient rallied under the physician’s treatment. Slowly, but with palpable effect, Dr. Malbone dragged him a little way from the brink of death. The doctor’s coat was off, but sweat streamed down his face. His wife--silent, intelligent, and alert--gave him all the help that he required, and neither of them looked toward the suffering woman sitting crushed and miserable in the chair. Thus the time passed until the intense anxiety in the physician’s face began to relax; and at last, with a sigh, he sank wearily into a chair, remarking to his wife,--

“There is nothing more to do for the present. He is rallying. Give him time. The chances are a hundred to one against him.”

He rested his head on the back of his chair and closed his eyes, while his wife went to discharge her duties in another part of the house. Soon he raised his head, and in his old kindly manner said to the young woman,--

“I am sorry for the way in which I talked just now, and I ask you to forgive me. You will understand my outburst and be more inclined to forgive me when I tell you something of my poor friend’s life; for I am certain that he has told you nothing. Has he?”

“No,” she answered, weakly and humbly.

“He has suffered so cruel a wrong in the past that when I see the least approach to imposition upon his noble unselfishness it maddens me. I ought not to have blamed you. You were not conscious of imposing upon him. I believe that he is dying. If so, there will be no harm in my telling you his story. If he lives, I can trust you with it.

“I had known him in San Francisco, but I came to these mountains long before him. It was less than two years ago that he came to me, and you can never realize the shock that his condition gave me. After a while he told me of his trouble as he understood it. It was this: Through giving violin lessons to a young lady of wealth and of great loveliness of character, he became deeply attached to her, and in return she gave him her whole affection. She was willing and anxious to marry him, even though she knew that her parents and friends would disown her if she