crippled man is better than a whole and dead
one."

Linday flamed in wrath. "You get out! Out of this cabin with you till
you can come back and say that I make him live. Pull--by God, man,
you've got to pull with me with all your soul. Your brother's travelling
a hairline razor-edge. Do you understand? A thought can topple him off.
Now get out, and come back sweet and wholesome, convinced beyond all
absoluteness that he will live and be what he was before you and he
played the fool together. Get out, I say."

The brother, with clenched hands and threatening eyes, looked to Madge
for counsel.

"Go, go, please," she begged. "He is right. I know he is right."

Another time, when Strang's condition seemed more promising, the brother
said:

"Doc, you're a wonder, and all this time I've forgotten to ask your
name."

"None of your damn business. Don't bother me. Get out."

The mangled right arm ceased from its healing, burst open again in a
frightful wound.

"Necrosis," said Linday.

"That does settle it," groaned the brother.

"Shut up!" Linday snarled. "Get out! Take Daw with you. Take Bill, too.
Get rabbits--alive--healthy ones. Trap them. Trap everywhere."

"How many?" the brother asked.

"Forty of them--four thousand--forty thousand--all you can get. You'll
help me, Mrs. Strang. I'm going to dig into that arm and size up the
damage. Get out, you fellows. You for the rabbits."

And he dug in, swiftly, unerringly, scraping away disintegrating bone,
ascertaining the extent of the active decay.

"It never would have happened," he told Madge, "if he hadn't had so many
other things needing vitality first. Even he didn't have vitality
enough to go around. I was watching it, but I had to wait and chance it.
That piece must go. He could manage without it, but rabbit-bone will
make it what it was."

From the hundreds of rabbits brought in, he weeded out, rejected,
selected, tested, selected and tested again, until he made his final
choice. He used the last of his chloroform and achieved the
bone-graft--living bone to living bone, living man and living rabbit
immovable and indissolubly bandaged and bound together, their mutual
processes uniting and reconstructing a perfect arm.

And through the whole trying period, especially as Strang mended,
occurred passages of talk between Linday and Madge. Nor was he kind, nor
she rebellious.

"It's a nuisance," he told her. "But the law is the law, and you'll need
a di