had less than an hour’s rest after his last drenching excursion.

Glen, following to the head of the stairs, with dutiful daughterly concern for his putting on dry things, saw him draw the bolt, making truculent inquiry as to who was there.

Then the fury of the gale wrenched the door from his grasp and flung it wide with a crashing bang, and—as if precipitated by the mad energy of the storm—Luke Manders pitched over the threshold and stretched his length on the shabby linoleum of the entrance hall.

[37]

CHAPTER IV Granny Mander’s curse is potent: the hawk comes down to feed in the barnyard.

“BY gad, Glen,” the doctor shouted, “it’s our boy! And he’s hurt!” He dropped to his knees and gently turned Luke Manders over so that he rested upon his back. “Gimme some light!”

Glen, who had been forcing the door shut in the face of the storm, ran to pull the light from the tiny bead which served at night to its full force. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed, looking down at the inert figure, sensing that her dismal fiction was visualized in fact before her, “he’s dead!”

“Dead, nothing!” her father snapped. “Go get my bag!” He was beginning to unfasten the sodden rain and blood-soaked clothing. “But he’s hurt, all right; hurt bad. ’S’matter with you? Don’t stand there gawping at me! Get my bag!” He scowled up at her horror-stricken face and swore under his breath as she stumbled away. This was the way the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie would have acted: was the girl, for all his toughening processes, more her mother’s daughter than his?

[38]She redeemed herself in the raw hour which followed. Her father saw, presently, that there had been nothing craven in her shrinking. It had been pure grief for the end of their golden legend, their golden lad.

[38]

“Ought to get him on the table,” the doctor fretted, “but—” he regarded the gaunt length of the young mountaineer.

“I can help you carry him, Dad!” the girl interrupted eagerly. “You take the hurt part of him and I’ll carry his feet! Wait—I’ll fix the table!” She flew to spread a folded blanket and a sheet over the glistening golden oak.

The removal was accomplished with comparative ease, the boy coming only to partial consciousness and relapsing instantly into 

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