merciful stupor. “He’ll wake up, fast enough, when I get busy after that bullet,” said the man grimly. “You’ll have to hold him steady, Glen, if you can.”

“I can,” she answered palely. She worked quietly and capably, swiftly and intelligently obedient to a curt word or even a gesture. It was a strange, a grotesque scene, and the memory of it was to stay with her as long as she lived—their splendid, wild young savage, bold and fearless and free against his background of rocky hills and rushing streams and dark forests, free no longer, and no longer wild and splendid, lying limp on the dining[39] table in the hideous room Effie Darrow had hated, now slackly swept and dusted by the yellow slattern Emma-leen.

[39]

The child, working wordlessly with her father, bringing hot water and soft old linen, setting her teeth when he probed into the raw flesh, putting all her young muscle into holding the twisting shoulders down, tried vainly to make a reality of it all. The stark reversal was what made it so crassly unbelievable. One day he had been leaping away into his mountain fastnesses like a young stag, scorning them, and another day he had come crawling down from his heights to their level, scorning them still, no doubt, but begging their bounty. It hurt her conception of him, her pride in him.

The doctor, panting, and glistening with sweat, and sharply impatient with her, suddenly barked: “Well, how clean’d you be, without a bathtub or hot water, huh?” He had followed her gaze to the griminess of hands and feet. “He’s cold water clean, brook clean, at that. How much better’d you be? Huh? Answer me that?” It was amazing how he championed the wild lad from the first hour of their knowledge of him.

“I was thinking that,” said Glen flushing. “He’s tried to be clean, and his clothes——”

“You go get some sheets and blankets and make up a bed here on the couch,” her father snapped.[40] “I’ll get his clothes off and wash him. You throw a nightshirt of mine downstairs.” He had sensed, dimly, that too much intimacy with the inelegancies of the young mountaineer’s toilet would not enhance the golden legend, and she was not called in again until the patient was made ready for his bed.

[40]

The girl made up the couch swiftly and capably and helped to carry him to it. “Bring a hot-water bag, and then heat up some soup,” the doctor directed. “He’ll come to for keeps any minute now, and I 

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