is hospitality at the camp, she was not so familiar with. It
therefore came as a distinct surprise when she heard him repeat with
increased warmth in his manner:

"Yes, a special Providence, my dear Dr. Sperry"--nor did the real
cause of the doctor's welcome set her mind at rest.

"This way, doctor," continued Thayor, dragging Sperry with him.
"Blakeman will bring your bag. One of our men is badly hurt; I was
on my way to him when I heard you driving up. He's only a few rods
away--hurry!"

The little man lay on his back on the floor of the lower shanty where
the men had carried him. The chain cinching down a heavy sapling
binding a load of shingles had snapped, and the wiry little
Frenchman--Gaston Le Boeuf--who was standing on top of the load, had
been shot into the air and landed in a ditch with his right
forearm splintered in two. The pain was intense, both bones of the
forearm--the ulnar and radius--being shattered transversely, the ulnar
poking through the flesh in an ugly blue wound.

When Thayor and the doctor reached him, the Clown was holding the
broken arm taut--he had to keep up a steady pull, for with the
slightest release the knotty sinews and muscles would cause the broken
forearm to fly back at right angles. Although this had happened a
dozen times while they were bringing him in, the wiry little man did
not utter a groan. He lay there white, in a cold sweat, the corners of
his black eyes crinkling over his bad luck. He had known what pain was
before. Once on Bog River his skinning knife had slipped while he was
dressing out a deer, and the keen blade had gone through his knotty
calf, severing the nerve; yet he had walked nearly a dozen miles back
to Morrison's.

As Sperry entered, the circle of lumber jacks about the wounded man
widened, then closed again about him, watching the doctor who soon had
the broken arm in an improvised splint.

The man from the city rarely gets very close to a backwoods people
unless he possesses sincerity, democracy, and an inborn love of the
woods--three virtues without which a man may remain always a stranger
in the wilderness.

The New York doctor possessed none of these qualities; moreover, he
was pitifully unadaptable outside of the artificial world in which
he posed. So much so that at first sight of the trapper and the
Clown--two men whom Thayor had pointed out to him as being his most
reliable assistants next to Holcomb--his only thought had been how Sam
Tha