"Don't you be afraid of that, master. He won't wince, nor say a word.
You may do what you like with him. Injuns is a bad lot, but they've got
wonderful pluck over pain."

"This fellow has, at all events," said the Doctor. "Maude, my child, I
think you had better go."

"If you wish it, father, I will," she replied simply; "but I could help
you, and I should not be in the least afraid."

"Good," said the Doctor, laconically, as he lowered the injured arm
after bathing it free from the macerated leaves and bark with which it
had been bound up. Then with the Indian's glittering eyes following
every movement, he took from his leather case of surgical instruments,
all still wonderfully bright and kept in a most perfect state, a
curious-looking pair of forceps with rough handles, and a couple of
short-bladed, very keen knives.

"Hah!" said Joses, with a loud expiration of his breath, "them's like
the pinchers a doctor chap once used to pull out a big aching tooth of
mine, and he nearly pulled my head off as well."

"No; they were different to these, Joses," said the Doctor, quietly, as
he took up a knife. "Feel faint, Bart?"

The lad blushed now. He had been turning pale.

"Well, I did feel a little sick, sir. It was the sight of that knife.
It has all gone now."

"That's right, my boy. Always try and master such feelings as these.
Now I must try and make him understand what I want to do. Give me that
piece of stick, Bart, it will do to imitate the arrow."

Bart handed the piece of wood, which the Doctor shortened, and then,
suiting the action to his words, he spoke to the chief:

"The arrow entered here," he said, pointing to a wound a little above
the Indian's wrist, "and pierced right up through the muscles, to bury
itself in the bone just here."

As he spoke, he pushed the stick up outside the arm along the course
that the arrow had taken, and holding the end about where he considered
the head of the arrow to be.

For answer the Indian gave two sharp nods, and said something in his own
tongue which no one understood.

"Then," continued the Doctor, "you, or somebody else, in trying to
extract the arrow, have broken it off, and it is here in the arm, at
least six inches and the head."

As he spoke, he now broke the stick in two, throwing away part, and
holding the remainder up against the Indian's wounded arm.

Again the chief nodded, and this time he smiled.

"Well, we understand one another so