Chapter 13

Meantime, in the back room of the Stopping-Place Dr. Burton was making his preparations for a very critical operation. All his movements were marked by a swift dexterity and an attention to detail that gave Shock the impression that here was a man not only a master of his art, but, for the time being at least, master of himself. He laid out and thoroughly disinfected his instruments, prepared his lint, bandages, sponges, and explained clearly to each of his two assistants the part he was to take. Shock, who had had some slight experience in the surgical operations attendant upon an active football career, was to be the assistant in chief, being expected to take charge of the instruments, and to take part, if necessary, in the actual operation. Ike was instructed to be in readiness with a basin, sponge, and anything else that might be demanded.

"We shall not give you much to do," said the doctor, "but what you have to do must be done promptly and well. Now, then," he continued, lifting his scissors with a flourish which did not fail to impress Carroll, who was seated near by, "we shall proceed."

"Will it hurt, doctor?" groaned Carroll, gazing upon the row of instruments with fascinated eyes.

"Before we are finished it is quite possible the patient may be conscious of nervous disturbance, accompanied by sensations more or less painful."

"Will it hurt, blank you!" replied Carroll, whose hoarse voice showed the intensity of his repressed emotion.

"As I was saying," said the doctor in his calm, even tone, and examining his instruments one by one with affectionate care, "there is every possibility that the nerve centres may be--"

"Oh," groaned Carroll, still fascinated by the instruments that the doctor was handling with such loving touches, "will someone shut up this blank, blatherin' fool? He'd drive a man crazy, so he wud!"

"Mr. Carroll, we must be calm. We must be entirely calm," observed the doctor. "Now," continuing his monologue, "we shall remove the hair from the field of operation. Cleanliness in an operation of this kind is of prime importance. Recent scientific investigations show that the chief danger in operations is from septic poisoning. Yes, every precaution must be taken. Then we shall bathe with this weak solution of carbolic--three percent will be quite sufficient, quite sufficient--the injured parts and the surrounding area, and then we shall examine the extent of the wound. If the dura mater be penetrated, and the arachnoid cavity be opened, then there will be in all probability a very considerable extravasation of blood, and by this time, doubtless, serious inflammation of all the surrounding tissues. The aperture being very small and the depression somewhat extensive, it will be necessary to remove--to saw out, in short--a portion of the skull," lifting up a fierce-looking instrument.

Carroll groaned.

"Let me out!" he whispered hoarsely, rising and feeling his way with outstretched hand to the door. "I can't stand this bloody divil!"

Ike opened the door, while Shock sprang to support the groping man.

"Lave me be!" he said fiercely, with a curse, and pushing Shock back he stumbled out.

"Ah," said the doctor, with evident satisfaction, "there are various methods of removing obstructions, as I have said. We shall now no longer delay." And he proceeded to clip away the golden curls from about the wound. "These," he said, holding them up in his fingers and looking at them admiringly, "we had better preserve. These beautiful locks may be priceless to the mother, priceless indeed. Poor, bonnie laddie! Now we shall prepare, we shall aseptically prepare, the whole field of operation. A sponge that's it. That will do. Now, let us examine the extent of the injury," feeling with dextrous fingers about the edge of the slight wound, and over all the depressed surface.

"Ah! as I feared. The internal table is widely comminuted, and there is possibly injury to the dura mater. We must excise a small portion of the bone. The scalpel, please." Then, after laying back with a few swift, dexterous movements the scalp from about the wounded parts: "The saw. Yes, the saw. The removal of a section," he continued, in his gentle monotone, beginning to saw, "will allow examination of the internal table. A sponge, please. Thank you. And if the dura mater--" Here the stillness of the room was broken by a sound from Ike. The doctor glanced at him.

"This is a very simple part of the operation," he explained, "a very simple part, indeed, and attended with absolutely no pain. A sponge, please. Thank you. Now the forceps. Yes."

He snipped off a section of the bone. Ike winced "Ah, as I feared. There is considerable comminution and extravasation. Yes, and owing to the long delay, and doubtless to the wet applications which the uninitiated invariably apply, pus. Now, the carbolic solution," to Ike, who was standing with white face and set teeth.

"You are doing remarkably well," said the doctor encouragingly to him, "remarkably well. To a novice this at times presents a shocking aspect. Now we shall attack this depression. The elevator, please. No, the elevator, Mr. Macgregor. There it lies. Yes. Now gently, gently. Just hold that in position," offering Shock the end of the instrument which he was using as a lever to raise the depressed portion of the skull. "The other scalpel, please. Now, a slight pressure. Gently, gently. We must be extremely careful of the edges. No, that will not do. Then we must have recourse to the trephine."

He lifted the instrument as he spoke, and gazed at it with every mark of affection.

"This is one of the most beautiful of all the instruments of modern surgery. A lovely instrument, a lovely instrument, indeed. Let us secure our firm surface. That seems satisfactory," beginning to bore.

This was too much for Ike. He hastily set down the basin and sponge on a chair, then straightened up in a vain effort to regain mastery of himself.

"Ah," said the doctor. "Poor Ike! The spirit is willing, but the sympathetic nerve is evidently seriously disturbed, thereby affecting the vasomotor, and will likely produce complete syncope. Lay him down on his back immediately."

"No," said Ike, "I aint no good. I'm going out."

"Now," said the doctor calmly, when Shock and he had been left alone, "I hope there will be no more interruption. We must proceed with the trephining. Ah, beautiful, beautiful!" his quick moving, deft fingers keeping pace with his monologue.

"There now," after a few minutes' work with the trephine, "the depression is lifted. We shall soon be finished."

With supple, firm fingers he sewed the scalp, dressed the wound, and was done.

"Thank God!" said Shock, with a long breath. "Will he live?"

"It is a question now of strength and vitality. If the inflammation is not too widely extended the child may recover. Young life is very tenacious."

The doctor washed his hands, wiped his instruments, put them carefully away in their case, and sat down.

"Doctor," said Shock, "that is a great work. Even to a layman that operation seems wonderful."

Under the stimulus of his professional work the doctor's face, which but two days before had been soft and flabby, seemed to have taken on a firmer, harder appearance, and his whole manner, which had been shuffling and slovenly, had become alert and self-reliant.

"A man who can do that, doctor, can do great things."

A shadow fell on his face. The look of keen intelligence became clouded. His very frame lost its erect poise, and seemed to fall together. His professional air of jaunty cheerfulness forsook him. He huddled himself down into his chair, put his face in his hands, and shuddered.

"My dear sir," he said, lifting up his face, "it is quite useless, quite hopeless."

"No," said Shock eagerly, "do not say that. Surely the Almighty God--"

The doctor put up his hand.

"I know all you would say. How often have I heard it! The fault is not with the Almighty, but with myself. I am still honest with myself, and yet--" Here he paused for some moments. "I have tried--and I have failed. I am a wreck. I have prayed--prayed with tears and groans. I have done my best. But I am beyond help."

For a full minute Shock stood, gazing sadly at the noble head, the face so marred, the huddling form. He knew something of the agony of remorse, humiliation, fear, and despair that the man was suffering.

"Dr. Burton," said Shock, with the air of a man who has formed a purpose, "you are not telling the truth, sir."

The doctor looked up with a flash of indignation in his eyes.

"You are misrepresenting facts in two important particulars. You have just said that you have done your best, and that you are beyond all help. The simple truth is you have neither done your best, nor are you beyond help."

"Beyond help!" cried the doctor, starting up and beginning to pace the floor, casting aside his usual gentle manner. "You use plain speech, sir, but your evident sincerity forbids resentment. If you knew my history you would agree with me that I state the simple truth when I declare that I am beyond help. You see before you, sir, the sometime President of the Faculty of Guy's, London, a man with a reputation second to none in the Metropolis. But neither reputation, nor fortune, nor friends could avail to save me from this curse. I came to this country in desperation. It was a prohibition country. Cursed be those who perpetrated that fraud upon the British public! If London be bad, this country, with its isolation, its monotony of life, and this damnable permit system, is a thousand times worse. God pity the fool who leaves England in the hope of recovering his manhood and freedom here. I came to this God-forsaken, homeless country with some hope of recovery in my heart. That hope has long since vanished. I am now beyond all help."

"No," said Shock in a quiet, firm voice, "you have told me nothing to prove that you are beyond help. In fact," he continued almost brusquely, "no man of sense and honesty has a right to say that. Yes," he continued, in answer to the doctor's astonished look, "salvation, as it is called, is a matter of common sense and honesty."

"I thought you clergymen preached salvation to be a matter of faith."

"Faith, yes. That is the same thing. Common sense, I call it. A man is a fool to think he is beyond help while he has life. A little common sense and honesty is all you want. Now, let us find Carroll. But, doctor, let my last word to you be this--do not ever say or think what you have said to me to-day, It simply is not true. And I repeat, the man who can do that sort of thing," pointing to the child lying on the bed, "can do a great deal more. Good things are waiting you."

"Oh, Lord God Almighty!" said the doctor, throwing up his hands in the intensity of his emotion. "You almost make me think there is some hope."

"Don't be a fool, doctor," said Shock in a matter of fact voice. "You are going to recover your manhood and your reputation. I know it. But as I said before, remember I expect common sense and honesty."

"Common sense and honesty," said the doctor as if to himself. "No religion."

"There you are," said Shock. "I did not say that. I did say common sense and honesty. But now, do go and find poor Carroll. He will be in agony."

"Oh, a little of it won't hurt him. He is rather an undeveloped specimen," said the doctor, resuming his professional tone.

In a few minutes he returned with Carroll, whose face was contorted with his efforts to seem calm.

"Tell me," he said to Shock. "Will the lad live?"

"The operation is entirely successful, thanks to the skill of Dr. Burton there."

"Will he live?" said Carroll to the doctor in a husky tone.

"Well, he has a chance--a chance now which before he had not; and if he does, you owe it to Mr. Macgregor there."

"And if he doesn't, I shall owe that to him," hissed Carroll through his clenched teeth.

For this Shock had no reply.

"I shall go for Mrs. Carroll and the children now," he said quietly, and passed out of the room.

"Carroll," said the doctor with stern deliberation, "I have always known you to be a bully, but never before that you were a brute. This man saved your child's life at very considerable danger to his own. And a second time--if the child recovers he has saved his life, for had the operation not been performed today your child would have died, and you would have been arrested for manslaughter."

"Doctor," said Carroll, turning upon him, and standing nervous and shaking, "it is that man or me. The country won't hold us both."

"Then, Carroll, let me tell you, you had better move out, for that man won't move till he wants to. Why, bless my soul, man, he could grind you up in his hands. And as for nerve--well, I have seen some in my professional career, but never such as his. My advice to you is, do not trifle with him."

"Blank his sowl! I'll be even wid him," said Carroll, pouring out a stream of oaths.

"Dad." The weak voice seemed to pierce through Carroll's curses like a shaft of light through a dark room.

Carroll dropped on his knees by the bedside in a rush of tears.

"Ah, Patsy, my Patsy! Is it your own voice I'm hearin'?"

"Dad, darlin', ye didn't mane it, did ye, dad?"

"What, Patsy?"

"To hit me."

"Ah, may God forgive me! but it's meself would sooner die than strike ye."

The little lad drew a deep breath of content.

"And the big man," he said. "He put out his hand over me. Ye didn't hurt him, dad, did ye?"

"No, no, Patsy, darlin'," said the big Irishman, burying his face in the pillow. "Speak to your dad again wid your lovely voice."

"Now, Carroll," said the doctor in a stern whisper. "That is enough. Not a word more. Do you want to kill your child?"

Carroll at once with a tremendous effort grew still, stroking the white hand he held in his, and kissing the golden curls that streamed across the pillow, whispering over and over, "Patsy, darlin'!" till the doctor, hardened as he was to scenes like this, was forced to steal out from the room and leave them together.

XIV

THE OLD PROSPECTOR'S AWAKING

For six weeks the Old Prospector lay fretting his life away in his shack, not so ill as to be in danger. The pneumonia had almost disappeared and the rheumatism had subsided, but yet such grave symptoms remained as made the doctor forbid his setting forth upon his annual quest of the Lost River. In these days his chief comfort was Shock, whose old habit of sharing his experiences in imagination with those who could not share them in reality, relieved for the Old Prospector many a monotonous hour.

But Shock's days, and most of his nights, even, were spent upon the trail rounding up "strays and mavericks," as Ike said, searching out the lonely bachelor shacks, and lonelier homes where women dwelt whose husbands' days were spent on the range, and whose nearest neighbour might be eight or ten miles away, bringing a touch of the outer world, and leaving a gleam of the light that he carried in his own sunny, honest face.

And so Shock soon came to know more of the far back settlers than did even the oldest timer; and, what was better, he began to establish among them some sort of social life. It was Shock, for instance, that discovered old Mrs. Hamilton and her two sons, and drove her after much persuasion eight miles over "The Rise," past which she had not set her foot for the nine long, sad years that had dragged out their lonely length since her husband left her alone with her two boys of seven and nine, to visit Mrs. Macnamara, the delicate wife of the rollicking Irish rancher, who, seldom out of the saddle himself, had never been able to understand the heart-hunger that only became less as her own life ran low. It was her little family growing up about her, at once draining her vitality but, thank God, nourishing in her heart hope and courage, that preserved for her faith and reason. It was a great day for the Macnamaras when their big fiend drove over their next neighbour, Mrs. Hamilton, to make her first call.

Another result of Shock's work became apparent in the gradual development of Loon Lake, or "The Lake," as it was most frequently named, into a centre of social life. In the first place a school had been established, in which Marion had been installed as teacher, and once the children came to the village it was easier for the parents to find their way thither.

Every week, too, The Kid and Ike found occasions to visit The Lake and call for Shock, who made his home, for the most part, with the Old Prospector. Every week, too, the doctor would appear to pay a visit to his patients; but, indeed, in some way or other the doctor was being constantly employed on cases discovered by Shock. The Macnamara's baby with the club-foot, Scrub Kettle's girl with the spinal trouble; Lawrence Delamere, the handsome young English lad up in "The Pass," whose leg, injured in a mine accident, never would heal till the doctor had scraped the bone--these and many others owed their soundness to Shock's prospecting powers and to the doctor's skill. And so many a mile they drove together to their mutual good. For, while the doctor prosecuted with delight and diligence his healing art, all unconsciously he himself was regaining something of his freedom and manhood.

"Digs 'em up, don't he?" said Ike one Sunday, when the second flat of Jim Ross's store was filled with men and women who, though they had lived in the country for from two to twenty years, were still for the most part strangers to each other. "Digs 'em up like the boys dig the badgers. Got to come out of their holes when he gits after 'em."

"Dat's so," said Perault, who had become an ardent follower of Shock's. "Dat's so. All same lak ole boss."

"Prospector, eh?" said Ike.

"Oui. Prospector, sure enough, by gar!" replied Perault, with the emphasis of a man who has stumbled upon a great find; and the name came at once to be recognised as so eminently suitable that from that time forth it stuck, and all the more that before many weeks there was none to dispute the title with him.

All this time the Old Prospector fretted and wasted with an inward fever that baffled the doctor's skill, and but for the visits of his friends and their constant assurances that next week would see him fit, the old man would have succumbed.

"It's my opinion," said Ike, who with The Kid had made a habit of dropping in for a visit to the sick man, and then would dispose themselves outside for a smoke, listening the while to the flow of song and story wherewith his daughter would beguile the old man from his weariness; "it's my opinion that it aint either that rheumatism nor that there pewmonia,"--Ike had once glanced at the doctor's label which distinguished the pneumonia medicine from that prescribed for rheumatism,--"it aint either the rheumatism nor that there pewmonia," he repeated, "that's a-killin' him."

"What then do you think it is, Ike?" said the doctor, to whom Ike had been confiding this opinion.

"It's frettin'; frettin' after the trail and the Lost River. For thirteen years he's chased that river, and he'll die a-chasin' it."

"Well, he'll certainly die if he starts after it in his present condition."

"Maybe so, doctor. I wouldn't interdict any opinion of yours. But I reckon he'd die a mighty sight easier."

"Well, Ike, my boy," said the doctor in his gentle voice, "perhaps you are right, perhaps you're right. The suggestion is worth considering."

And the result seemed to justify Ike's opinion, for from the day that the doctor fixed the time for the Old Prospector's departure the fever abated, his philosophic calm returned, he became daily stronger and daily more cheerful and courageous, and though he was troubled still with a cough he departed one bright day, with Perault, in high spirits.

"I shall remember you all," he cried, waving his hand gaily in farewell. "Doctor, I shall build you a hospital where your skill will have opportunity and scope. Mr. Macgregor, your heart will be delighted with that church-manse-school building of yours." This was Shock's pet scheme for the present. "To all of you suitable rewards. This time I see success. Farewell."

After he had turned away he reined back his pony and addressed Shock again.

"Mr. Macgregor," he said, with almost solemn earnestness, "I give my daughter into your charge. I am sure you will watch over her. She will be comfortable with Josie, and she will be safe under your care."

His spirit of enthusiastic confidence caught all the crowd standing by, so that they gave him a hearty cheer in farewell.

"Did not say what he would give us, eh, Carroll?" said Crawley, who with Carroll stood at the back of the crowd.

"Blanked old fool!" growled Carroll.

"And yet he has a marvellous instinct for mines," said Crawley, "and this time he has got something more than usual in his head, I believe. He has been particularly secretive. I could not get anything out of him. Guess he means to euchre us out of our share of anything big, partner."

"Curse him for an owld thief!" said Carroll. "I'll have it out av his hide, so I will, if he tries that."

"Then, Carroll, you'll have to do it when his big friend is not round."

Carroll's answer was a perfect flood of profanity, copious enough to include not only the Old Prospector, Shock, all the relatives living and dead, but Crawley, who stood listening with a sarcastic grin on his evil face.

"Well, well," at last said Crawley soothingly, "your time will come. And, partner, you may depend on me when it comes. I owe him something, too, and I would rather pay it than get a mine."

The days that followed the Old Prospector's departure were lonely enough for his daughter. Her father's illness had brought to them both the inestimable boon of mutual acquaintance and affection. It was the girl's first experience of having near her one to whom she could freely give the long-hoarded treasures of her love; and now that he was gone she could only wonder how she could have lived so long without him. It was well for her that she had her school, which she transferred now to her father's house, for though Shock occupied the inner room he was very little at home.

In addition to the school there was Patsy, who, never very strong, had not regained even his puny strength since the operation. Every fine day Marion would take the little lad for a glorious canter up the trail that ran along The Lake, but the day was never complete to Patsy unless it included a visit to the Jumping Rock, and there a tale, and at least one song. In these rides Stanton, as often as he visited the village, would join, and then it was the Swallow that the little cripple would ride, holding his reins in cowboy style high in one hand, and swaying with careless security in the saddle, and all the more because of the strong arm about him.

These were happy days to Patsy, happy to young Stanton, happier than she knew to Marion, and all the happier by contrast to the dark, sad days that followed.

About three weeks after the Old Prospector's departure a half-breed, on a cayuse wet and leg-weary, appeared at the Loon Lake Stopping Place, asking for the preacher.

"Blanked if I know!" growled Carroll. "Off on some fool hunt or other."

"Ask Ike there," said Crawley, who was sitting on the stoop. "You belong to his flock, don't you, Ike? Elder, aint you?"

"His flock?" echoed Ike. "Wouldn't mind if I did. I'd be sure of my company, which I can't always be almost anywhere else. Want the preacher, eh?" turning to the half-breed.

"Letter from de old man."

"What old man? Let me see it," said Crawley quickly. "Ah! 'Rev. Mr. Macgregor, or one of his friends.' Guess this is from the Old Prospector, eh?"

The half-breed nodded.

"Where is he?"

"Way up in mountain," he said, waving his hand toward the hills.