t it _must_ have been dad. And then, a little way down the
hill, something went wrong."

Frank seemed trying to reconstruct the accident from Lorraine's
description. "He'd no 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 com