o business to start down if his rough-lock wasn't
all right," he said. "It ain't like him. Brit's careful about them
things--little men most always are. I don't see how 'n 'ell it worked
loose. It's a damn queer layout all around; and this here doctor gitting
here ahead of you folks, that there is the queerest. What's he say about
Brit? Think he'll pull through?"

The doctor himself, coming up just then, answered the question. Of
course the patient would pull through! What were doctors for? As to his
reason for coming, he referred them to Mr. Vjolmar, whom he thought
could better explain the matter.

The three of them waited,--five of them, since Jim and Sorry had come
up, anxious to hear the doctor's opinion and anything else pertaining to
the affair. Swan was coming slowly from the bunk-house, buttoning his
coat. He seemed to feel that they were waiting for him and to know why.
His manner was diffident, deprecating even.

"We may as well go in out of the mosquitoes," the doctor suggested. "And
I wish you would tell these people what you told me, young man. Don't be
afraid to speak frankly; it is rather amazing but not at all
impossible, as I can testify. In fact," he added dryly, "my presence
here ought to settle any doubt of that. Just tell them, young man, about
your mother."

Swan was the last to enter the kitchen, and he stood leaning against the
closed door, turning his old hat round and round, his eyes going swiftly
from face to face. They were watching him, and Swan blushed a deep red
while he told them about his mother in Boise, and how he could talk to
her with his thoughts. He explained laboriously how the thoughts from
her came like his mother speaking in his head, and that his thoughts
reached her in the same way. He said that since he was a little boy they
could talk together with their thoughts, but people laughed and some
called them crazy, so that now he did not like to have somebody know
that he could do it.

"But Brit Hunter's hurt bad, so a doctor must come quick, or I think he
maybe will die. It takes too long to ride a horse to Echo from this
ranch, so I call on my mother, and I tell my mother a doctor must come
quick to this ranch. So my mother sends a telephone to this doctor in
Shoshone, and he comes. That is all. But I would not like it if
everybody maybe finds it out that I do that, and makes talk about it."

He looked straight at Jim and Sorry, and those two unprepossessing ones
looke