g, with both hands
clasped across his eyes, down the ravine that looked at night like some
pit of hell. For along their path a thousand coke-ovens spat forth red
tongues that licked northward with the wind, shot red arrows into the
choking black smoke that surged up the mountainside, and lighted with
fire the bellies of the clouds rolling overhead.

"Whar you takin' me?"

"Hospital." The mountainer stopped suddenly.

"Why, I can't see them ovens!"

"You come on, Jim."

Next morning Jim lay on a cot with a sheet drawn to his chin and a
grayish, yellow bandage covering forehead and eyes down to the tip
of his nose. When the surgeon lifted that bandage the nurse turned
her face aside, and what was under it, or rather what was not under
it, shall not be told. Only out in the operating-room the smooth-faced
young assistant was curiously counting over some round leaden pellets,
and he gave one low whistle when he pushed into a pile a full fourscore.

"He said he was a-lookin' through a keyhole," the sergeant reported,
"an' somebody let him have it with both barrels--but that don't go.
Jim wouldn't be lookin' through no keyhole; he'd bust the door down."

Nor could the sergeant learn more. He had found the man stumbling down
Possum Hollow, and up that hollow the men and women of the mining camp
did not give one another away.

"It might 'a' been any one of a dozen fellers I know," the sergeant said,
for Jim was a feudsman and had his enemies by the score.

The man on the cot said nothing. Once, to be sure, when he was crossing
the border of Etherland, and once only, he muttered: "Yes, she come from
Happy Valley, but she was a cat, no doubt about that. Yes, sir, the old
girl was a cat." But when he was conscious that much even he never would
say again. He simply lay grim, quiet, uncomplaining, and not even the
surgeon, whose step he got quickly to know, could get him to tell who
had done the deed.

On the fourth day he showed some cheer.

"Look here, doc," he said, "when you goin' to take this rag off o' my
eyes? I hain't seen a wink since I come in here."

"Oh, pretty soon," said the surgeon, and the nurse turned away again
with drops in her eyes that would never be for the wounded man's eyes
to shed again.

On the sixth day his pulse was fast and his blood was high--and that night
the nurse knew precisely what meant the look in the surgeon's face when he
motioned her to leave the room. Then he bent to lift the