h his own. "How are you feeling, old man?" he asked cheerfully.
"You've had a good sleep-nearly three and a half hours. Is the pain in
the head less?"

"Better, Sawbones, better," Ingolby replied cheerfully. "They've
loosened the tie that binds--begad, it did stretch the nerves. I had
gripes of colic once, but the pain I had in my head was twenty times
worse, till you gave the opiate."

"That's the eyes," said Rockwell. "I had to lift a bit of bone, and the
eyes saw it and felt it, and cried out-shrieked, you might say. They've
got a sensitiveness all their own, have the eyes."

"It's odd there aren't more accidents to them," answered Ingolby--"just
a little ball of iridescent pulp with strings tied to the brain."

"And what hurts the head may destroy the eyes sometimes," Rockwell
answered cautiously. "We know so little of the delicate union between
them, that we can't be sure we can put the eyes right again when,
because of some blow to the head, the ricochet puts the eyes out of
commission."

"That's what's the matter with me, then?" asked Ingolby, feeling the
bandage on his eyes feverishly, and stirring in his bed with a sense of
weariness.

"Yes, the ricochet got them, and has put them out of commission,"
replied Rockwell, carefully dwelling upon each word, and giving a note
of meaning to his tone.

Ingolby raised himself in bed, but Rockwell gently forced him down
again. "Will my eyes have to be kept bandaged long? Shall I have to give
up work for any length of time?" Ingolby asked.

"Longer than you'll like," was the enigmatical reply. "It's the devil's
own business," was the weary answer. "Every minute's valuable to me now.
I ought to be on deck morning, noon, and night. There's all the trouble
between the two towns; there's the strike on hand; there's that business
of the Orange funeral, and more than all a thousand times, there's--" he
paused.

He was going to say, "There's that devil Marchand's designs on my
bridge," but he thought better of it and stopped. It had been his
intention to deal with Marchand directly, to get a settlement of their
differences without resort to the law, to prevent the criminal act
without deepening a feud which might keep the two towns apart for years.
Bad as Marchand was, to prevent his crime was far better than punishing
him for it afterwards. To have Marchand arrested for conspiracy to
commit a crime was a business which would gravely interfere with his
freedom of mot