absorbed. The bullet
wound in the anterior edge was not clean cut. Near it was a long,
heavy splinter of bone, the cause of the inflammation--something
not suspected in the hurried dressing of the wound in the half
darkness at the river edge. This bone end, but loosely attached,
was broken free, thrust down into the angry and irritated flesh.

For an instant Jamieson studied the injury. The silence of death
was in the room. The tense muscles of the patient might have been
those of a lifeless man. Only the horrid sound of the dripping
blood, falling from the table upon the carpet, broke the silence.

"I had a coon dog once," began Doctor Jamieson cheerfully--"I don't
know whether you remember him or not, Dunwody. Sort of a yellow
dog, with long ears and white eye. Just wait a minute." He
hastened over to the side of the table and bent again over his case
of instruments.

"There's been all kinds of coon dogs in these bottoms and hills, I
suppose, ever since white folks came here, but Dunwody, I'm telling
you the truth, that dog of mine--"

By this time he had fished out from his case a slender probe, which
he bent back and forth as he once more approached the table.

"There's wasn't anything he wouldn't run, from deer to catamount;
and, one day, when we were out back here in the hills--I don't know
but Eleazar here might remember something about that himself. . . .
_Hold on, now, old man_!"

The old doctor's forehead for the first time was beaded. He wanted
silver wire. He would have accepted catgut. He had neither. For
one moment, in agony himself, he looked about; then a look of joy
came to his face. An old fiddle was lying in the window. A
moment, and he had ripped off a string. In two strides he was back
at the dripping table, where lay one marble figure, stood a second
figure also of marble.

"We were just trailing along, not paying much attention to
anything, when all at once that _dog_. . ."

Doctor Jamieson's story of his famous coon dog was never entirely
completed. His voice droned away and ceased now, as he bent once
more over his work.

What he did, so far as he in his taciturn way ever would admit, was
in some way to poke the catgut violin string under the bone, with
the end of the probe, and so to pass a ligature around the broken
bone itself. After that, it was easier to fasten the splinter back
in place where it belonged.

Doctor Jamieson used all his violin string. Then he