e farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was
to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant
place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved
a life.

What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the
easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance?

Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going
to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather
irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee,
griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious
alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike
forgotten in the march of realities and days.

II

Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in
from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He
sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the
anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on
a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab
courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as
he hobbled up the steps, into the house.

"Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine
miles out," Kennicott observed.

Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was
sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer
into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out
fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on
the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed
layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over
her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in
her lap.

Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the
innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage.
The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble
and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely,
Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of
the amorous poets.

Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted,
"Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!"

The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and
she mourned:

"Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?"

"I guess it'll be----Let's