The Life on the Table

FIRST he heard the clock tick; then a bird on a telephone wire shrilled a glad note at the spring sunshine ; then the clock ticked; then his child in the nursery above laughed happily; then the clock ticked ; then a man with small, square boxes in his hands called from the middle of Independence Avenue, “ Berrwizz ! berr-wizz ! ” then the clock ticked ; then the car at the corner dragged its cable with an ugly, snarling noise ; then the clock ticked —

“ Good God, Henderson ! ” he cried from his rocker to the man in the swivel chair, “ will you stop that clock 1 ” He raised a closely bandaged arm with an impatient jerk that made him wince with pain. His free hand was trembling, and there was a close, fine perspiration on his face ; yet almost instantly he took up the clock’s rhythm half laughingly. " Thump-her-in,” he said, 11 thump - her - in ; no-time-to-lose ; got-to-die-young. Lynn, you’ve been a good wife to me, but if you ever buy another clock that ticks-ticks-ticks I ’ll divorce you sure.” He got up and crossed over to the open window, where a woman was standing. He put his arm over her shoulder and pushed aside the lace curtain, shrank strangely from the sunshine and the woman, and came back to his seat with a little hysterical guip.

“ It’s leaving you,” he said to the woman. He had slouched his huge body down into the chair, and his head lay back heavily. “ That’s the thing that floors me, the only thing. — Oh, hell, I’m lying! It’s the big thing, but ’t is n’t the only thing.” Again he got up, restless as a chained wolf, and came over to her. “ Look at that sunshine; look at the size of this house ; look how thick our carpets are ; look what a beef I am ! It’s got no business to turn out like this. I’m not half through. It ought n’t to be. it shan’t be.” He dropped into the chair at the window, and began to choke in his slow, sobbing breath, and the woman turned her face to him.

“ Risk it, Hard,” she said. “ Why don’t you? You must. Isn’t it a chance ? Risk it.” Her voice rocked like a bounding wire under its weight of doubt and hope. It went crazily from command to question, and she seemed swung far out on it over some abysmal gulf of perplexity. Once she turned toward the man in the swivel chair, with a wild strain on her face ; but he was not looking at her, and she turned back to the window quickly.

Again the other man regained his selfcontrol with one of his crinkled - up chuckles ; he put up his hand and held to the woman’s arm. “ Don’t you get cross with your baby, whatever you do,” he said, looking up at her with a deep and tender adoration. He pressed his hand lovingly into the firm arm and pulled up by her. “ Risk it ? Risk this ? Oh, life, life ! ” he cried, with his head bent down to hers. Then he lifted her strained face and made her look out of the window. “ That town yonder, — see it ? It needs me. I’m predestined to make it a bloomin’ good mayor, one of these days. It 'll miss me. It may do for me to run the risk, but what about the town ? D’ you think Kansas City can afford to risk me ? ” The self - appreciation seemed appropriate rather than uncouth, casual rather than conspicuous. He was so virile, so big and coercive, that it would have been a pity for him not to appreciate himself.

“ If I risk you, if I’m willing to,” began the woman, dropping the curtain between them and the city, — “if I risk you, the town can, and you can risk the town.” Her eyes were keen and dry, and she held him a little away from her, with her hands on his shoulders.

A sort of shining joy came out on the man’s face at her words, and he clung to the suggestion in them hungrily. “ Do you mean that, all of it ? ” he asked. “You old darling, why don’t you speak the language oftener?” The wonder and the humility which must have been his when he first won her were manifest in his face and in his voice. He had got used to everything else, to a good degree of local fame and to fortune, but he had not got used to her. To an on-looker he was half pathetic, toppling as he did with his great weight toward her; and she was half minatory, — it looked so easy for her, in her lithe and pliable youth, to bend aside and fail him.

The man in the swivel chair had thus far kept up a ceaseless tattoo with his thumb nail against his teeth. His teeth were white and hard, and looked like monoliths of linked silences. When finally he stopped his tattoo, it was to throw his arms back and pound on his chest once or twice.

“ I guess you are wondering about now why I dragged you up from Penangton to pass on me, Henderson,” called the man at the window, with some appreciation of the other’s impatience, “ long as I ain’t taking your word for the final word very fast; but I tell you what, old man, you ’ve disappointed me for fair. I thought you’d have good taste enough to agree with me, and let diagnosis go hang. I knew you were n’t sensational, and I expected you to say that the other chaps were on the wrong tack ; but I ’ll be doggoned if you are n’t proving up the bloodthirstiest of the lot. What the dickens you got against me, my friend, — what you got against me ? ” He could talk foolishness with a whimsical assumption of gravity, and his wide, handsome face now mocked Henderson with unsmiling interrogation.

Henderson wondered afterward just what pathological change his own brain presented, after that witless question had cut its way in and out. He felt pretty much as though a thrombus diked up the question’s passage at the base of his brain, and held it there for one convulsive, black second, — “ What you got against me ? ” He had only the repressive training of the dissecting room and the operating theatre to thank for the fact that he could stumble on blindly, thrombus or no thrombus. He began to beat his hands together softly and to talk rapidly, in the way he had when he wished he did n’t have to talk at all: —

“ What I got against you, Shore, is your symptoms. I wish I could unsay what I’ve said, or put a little sweetening in it, but I can’t do it. The last time I talked with you in my own office in Penangton I got afraid that Lahn and Carey had your case down about right, and now I know it. At least I know that lump on your wrist is too near to being a spindle-celled sarcoma for you to fool away any more time on neat little compresses and quiet little rest cures; the thing for you now is a sharp little knife. If you don’t take that thing in time, — and the time’s now, — you might as well shut up that real estate office of yours at once and be done with it. All the real estate you ’ll need will be a bunch six feet long by two wide ” — Henderson stopped abruptly, unable to get the right hold on this line of talk ; the things he usually said to people whose lives were in danger and whom his knife might save were not coming to his mind readily, and were not fitting the situation when they did come. The jokes on which he was accustomed to ride his patients into an easy familiarity with clanger seemed unable to bear the weight of the big man in front of him.

Henderson did not look at the woman, but he got a sensation that she understood, and that she was doing what she could to make it easier on him when she said : “ Hardin, the time’s gone by for talking ; the time’s going by for acting. You must stop this foolishness. The operation itself might be much more serious: you have as good a chance as anybody to rally from it.” She pushed him back into a chair, and stood over him with a strong, maternal protection, for all he was so big and stalwart, and she was so straight and slender. “ He has as good a chance as anybody, has n’t he ? ” She looked at Henderson with the earnest concentration in her eyes that was always in them, like unused, expectant lightning, when she looked squarely at him.

“ In some ways he has,” answered Henderson, and wondered what she thought he meant by that.

She was urging on the man in the chair again, as though she had not heard Henderson : “ Say you will risk the operation, — say you will.”

Her husband buried his face against her, and gave up the fight with an awkward, gigantic helplessness. “ Why need I, when you ’re saying it, boss ? You hear, don’t you, Henderson ? I’m to risk it.” The woman pulled quickly away from him, with an expression of relief that remained perplexed, and the big man rose to his feet. “ But there’s one thing I want your lily-white hand on, Henderson,” he continued banteringly. “ You got to promise that you ’ll do every bit of the work yourself.” Through his banter ran the important, well-fed man’s jealousy about himself. Now that it was coming to the pinch, he plainly did n’t like the idea of being subjected to handling and analysis that would be purely scientific, purely impersonal ; he even had a superstitious feeling that such a dry valuation of life was likely to invoke death. His personality had always meant a great deal to him, and he shrank outspokenly from being viewed as material instead of as Hardin Shore, rich, fate - conquering. “ Life means a heap to me,” he went on insistently, “ and I ain’t putting it into the hands of anybody but the chap I can trust, the chap that knows what and how much I have to live for,” — he held out his hand toward the woman, but she stood quietly back beyond his reach, smiling at him, — “ and I ’m going to put the whole business into your hands, Henderson. I ’m going to be yours to bind or to loose, as you will and can. Understand ? Will you do the work yourself ? ”

Henderson turned nervously from the unreasoning sentiment of patient toward physician which, in its helpless emotionalism, so saddles a man with responsibility. He shook his head vehemently. “ No, no ! ” he said. “ Let Lahn operate. He’s the one. He ’s the very best here. Why, Shore, I ’m only a country surgeon, at most. Let Lahn. I can’t do it — I can’t operate on you — I can’t take your life into my hands — I don’t want to ” —

“ All right, sir,” — the other man held up his afflicted hand by way of unpromising emphasis, — “ all right. You see, don’t you, Lynn ? Shows how much he believes in it. You won’t operate, eh ? All right. One thing for sure, nobody else shall.”

The woman put her hand on Henderson’s arm. “ What do you mean by hesitating now ? ” she asked impetuously. “ What do you mean ? Why, we trust you. You can trust yourself. It’s the only way. You must trust yourself. I ’m not afraid. Hardin is n’t. Should you be ? Why, I’ve had so much trouble to get him even to consider it. He never would have, if it had n’t been for you. He believes in you. Every fibre of chance he has hangs from you.”

Henderson looked down at her grimly. “You know I like responsibility,” he said. “ Pile it on.” Then, with a violent splintering of his thought, he cried wildly: “ I tell you I’m afraid of myself ! His life means too much, to you, to himself, to hundreds of people — to me ” —

“ I can’t help that,” she persisted, as ardent as he. “ You’ve got to go all the way. You can’t refuse, you can’t turn back now ; you dare not.” The same tragic mixture of pleading and command was in her voice again, making her half admonitory angel, half tearful woman, and her face was becoming so tense that her husband came quickly to the rescue with his ready capacity for forging a finish to anything which he had thought worth beginning.

“ Henderson, I may have a spindleshanked sarcoma in my hand, but you’ve got one in your head. ’T is n’t normal for a surgeon to have to be coaxed to operate. Responsibility nothing ! I ’ll take the responsibility. Will you operate ? ”

“ Oh yes, yes,” said Henderson wearily.

“ That’s better. Why, man alive, you’ve made me feel that my old arm can’t put up a real ‘interesting case for. you on the table. Go ’way ; I ’ll get you in a box yet before you ’re through with me.”

He was deliberately talking and laughing himself out of his first hysterical antipathy to the operation into his usual orderly good nature. His big, powerful shoulders had squared back, and the danger he was about to brave was passing from a great potential tragedy — the tragedy of risking life when life means wealth, power, happiness — into the flat, every-day fact that he was going to be operated on, going to take some chloroform, and going to get off the operating table and go about his business again.

“ Now the question is, when ? ” he asked next, with the peremptory manner of a man who is accustomed to run his affairs on schedule time.

The woman looked at Henderson smilingly. “ It’s fine to have him good at last, is n’t it ? ” she said. “ Better not give him time to undergo any sea change. I suppose you want to get back to Penangton, too, just as soon as you can ? ”

Henderson furrowed a long, straight line in the carpet, between himself and the two opposite him, before he answered. “ If you insist upon leaving it to me, I ’ll arrange to get you into Miss Maguire’s Surgical Sanatorium to-morrow, and I ’ll operate the day after, or the day after that. No use to sleep long on the matter. If we are going to enter the lists, the sooner we do it the better.” His pleasure, as he again got hold of that old ability of his to handle himself, to catch step with fate and go marching on, lit up his face like a streak of pallid dawn. During the last two years of his life, ever since he had met the woman before him, he had required and obtained a great deal of himself, had put himself in the way of a good many crises, and had never yet failed himself; but the last time he had lived through a sight of her husband’s affection for her, the last time he had blistered in the warmth of the husband’s friendship for him, he had promised himself that he would keep away from crises in future. Still, here he was, in their house again, at their invitation, their entreaty, and forced to stand there before them with the delicate seales of life and death in his unwilling hand. Henderson’s life as physician and surgeon had not been a quiet or an easy one, and before this he had had occasion to wish that a few respectable trials, “like death,” he would say, might enter into his experience. His trials had been such tiger trials ; their claws had dug so deep into his sensitiveness. It was not a small thing for a man with Henderson’s capacity for suffering to be able to “ handle himself,” and it was no great wonder that he took an unthawed, frosty pleasure in it.

“ So, then, Shore,” he concluded capably, “ the thing for me to do is to corral Lahn and Carey and Mac Whirr, and have them with me to see that you get a fighting chance, and the rest we ’ll have to leave to your lucky star.” He laughed wholesomely now, a surgeon’s confidenceinspiring laugh.

“ Now you ’re talking sense,” said the big man cordially. “ It’s your affair, sir, from this on ; I’m not concerned in it. But see here, I tell you what I am concerned in : I’ve a deal on with a railroad for to-day. I need just one last hour at the office. I can go, can’t I ? ’T won’t hurt if I take the carriage, will it ? ” He seemed willing to turn authority over to his physician, but unable, from long authoritative habit, to do so. He began every sentence as an assertion, and the question only curled in lamely as an afterthought. When Henderson had given him a niggardly consent to do what he was going to do anyhow, Shore turned from his wife to the door. He came back, with his hat in his hand, a moment later, and shook his finger at her. “ You are a nice lot, you two,” he said. “ I hope you are satisfied, but I doubt it. I doubt you ’ll be satisfied till you get that chloroform cap over my nose” — He left off suddenly because of the look on his wife’s face. She put her hand to her mouth in an unavailing effort to push back a short, sharp scream.

“ You, Hardin ! ” she cried ; and when he had come to her and had taken her into his arms, she laughed and trembled, and rubbed her face against his with a clinging, forgiving reproach. “ What do you say things like that for? You must n’t. It is n’t so easy for anybody concerned that you need make it harder.”

Her bosom kept heaving in a broken, helpless way even after he had gone out of the house to his carriage, and Henderson held his eyes away from her while she stood at the window trying to regain her composure, and talked to her lightly of Penangton, the little Missouri town that was now his home, and that had once been hers.

“Oh yes,” he said. “You haven’t been coming down to Penangton often enough lately, and the calacanthus bush in Mrs. Thorley’s yard is ’way ahead of yours. Its buds have popped.”

She swayed abstractedly with the curtain, to which she was holding, and against which her head was pressed. “ I know I have n’t. I suppose Pete forgets to dig around my bushes ? I have n’t been down all spring.”

“ Mmmh ! I guess I know that.” Henderson whistled softly, and went and stood by the other window. " Why have n’t you come down ? ”

“ Oh — I don’t believe I know. Hardin, I guess. I get uneasy if he is out of my sight.” She held her curtain back suddenly, and looked sharply at Henderson. “ What’s the real danger ? ” she asked. “ Other people come through all right. What’s the real danger with Hard ? There’s something special, is n’t there ? What is it ? ”

If there was one thing that Henderson was coming to hate more than another, in his business of being the doctor, it was the constant metamorphosis of him from man into physician that went on under his very nose, and that he was powerless to prevent. People were eternally demanding it of him, and he was eternally meeting the demand, involuntarily, like clockwork. A man had asked her a question, from behind a curtain, a moment before ; a physician pushed the curtain back, as she had pushed hers back, and his answer was as straight and sharp as her question : “ The real trouble with Hard is the big physical hold he has on life. It’s one of those foolish paradoxes that are true. It’s like this : Hard is so everlastingly alive, and there’s so much of him to be alive, that he is bound to feel a physical shock more, and to smash down harder, than a wiry, nervous man would. I’ve got to knock his feet right from under him ; and it’s his feet that Hard stands on rather more than the next man. I guess I ought to tell you frankly that there ’ll be trouble if I can’t put the operation through in a rush. But I will put it through that way. And he ’ll rally.” Henderson stepped back behind his curtain, and drummed on the window. " He’s got to rally.”

The woman moved back behind her curtain, too. The lines of perplexity, confidence, anxiety, and admiration that had been on her face all the morning became more strongly marked. “ It has awful responsibilities, surgery has, has n’t it? ” she said slowly.

“ Yes, awful,” answered the man behind the curtain.

Three men, in white duck aprons, short duck jackets, and close white caps, stood in one corner of a large light room and talked comfortably, calling each other by their untitled surnames with the relief of men who know what it is to have a title eat up individuality. They were men of widely different personalities and unlike appearances : Mac Whirr, the Scot; Lahn, German to the last drop of beer ; and Carey from Kentucky. But for all their dissimilarity, on the face of each was an expression so dominant that the three looked like brothers. It was the eager stress of men who have the same life work, appealing to them in the same degree as important and interesting, who find themselves face to face with an opportunity for the work, and who are glad of the opportunity. The nerves of the three were going steady as time, yet they had somehow charged the room with a current of nervous energy of tremendous voltage. The faces of the three were as shut against emotion as three graves, yet the minds of the three quivered with emotion ; and recollections, influences, brought back from sharp battles with death, were continued from the three in trailing wraiths of hypnosis.

“ Who ’s anæsthetizing, Miss Morse ? ” The Scot turned from his colleagues to a young woman who was dipping a handful of gleaming steel into the enameled tray that formed the top to a spare iron table.

“ Dr. Henderson has young Wear and Mason down there with him, but he’s doing the anaesthetizing himself.” She smiled knowingly at the men ; she appredated as keenly as they did that an operator has no business to tire himself out with the anaesthetic. “ The patient would n’t have it any other way,” she said.

Lahn, who was chief consulting surgeon to most of the Kansas City hospitals, and known far and wide through the Valley states as a very safe man behind the knife, spoke next: “ Ever see Henderson operate, Mac ? No ? Well, he’s ’way ahead of me. Yes, he is. You’ve got a treat ahead of you. What a man with his nerve fools away time over materia medica for beats me. Cleanest, quickest, stubbornest operator you ever saw.”

“ What’s he abidin’ down in that little town for ? ” asked the Scot skeptically.

“ Why is it, Carey, anyhow ? ” Lalm took up the question as though it had long interested him. “ You ’re his friend. Why don’t you get him up here ? I want him for the Hospital. Besides his ability he has these Shores back of him, and if through him we could get Hardin Shore on the Directory, and Mrs. Shore at the head of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, the Hospital would be in luck already. Why won’t he come ? ”

The man from Kentucky looked immutable. “ Search me,” he said. “ I’ve done my best to get him here, but every time he backs down. I take it he has some private reason for not leaving Penangton. Got a girl down there, like as not.”

Another young woman came to the door. She had run through the hall from the elevator, and she was panting a little. “ Dr. Carey, they are having trouble getting him under. Dr. Henderson would like you to step down a minute.”

Carey and the girl went off down the hall with the long, light step of their kind, and presently got off the elevator on a lower floor. As Carey caught the swift, treacherous wave of the anæsthetic he hastened his pace unconsciously, and passed on into a luxurious room, where on a narrow white bed lay what ten minutes before had been a well-coordinated man, but what now might as well have been ox or bull or beef, for all the promise of resurrection in the blotched face. Henderson, at the head of the bed, was bending over the face and pursuing it relentlessly with an inhaler cap. Back and forth thrashed the face, and dogging it, riding it, came the cap in Henderson’s hand.

“ Carey,” said Henderson, without looking up, “ I’ve got to push him to a finish somehow. He’s been bruising his lungs on inspissated air long enough. I can’t get him under, though, as long as he has hold of that hand.” Henderson nodded at the patient’s big hand, which was shut like faith around a woman’s hand.

The woman looked up at Henderson with wan, self - accusing apology. “It was a mistake, was n’t it ? ” she whispered. “ I still can’t get away.”

“ Oh, he would go to sleep with Mrs. Shore’s hand in his,” answered Henderson laconically to the inquiry in the face of his colleague, “ and without meaning to she’s holding him this side of Lethe. See if you can get her hand away, will you ? ”

Henderson’s lashes dropped down over a long, yellow gleam in his eyes when presently the Kentuckian raised up, redfaced and puffing. “ Why, Henderson, I’m dashed if I can untangle him.” Carey stooped again. “ Just alive enough to swing to her. Uh-uh ! I’m afraid, if they ’re to be parted, you ’ll have to do the parting, Henderson. I have n’t the muscle. Peculiar case, eh ? ”

Henderson, straightening up to let Carey take his place, gave a short, harsh laugh. “ Peculiarest case you ever saw, Carey, — for half a hundred reasons. He’s been using that hand as a rudder through the waves of a can of chloroform, more or less. Whew ! He ’s fought me every inch of the way. I’m tired before I begin.” But he mopped his forehead, and without an instant’s delay bent over, and with his supple young fingers uncrinkled the heavy hand from the white, bruised one within it. Twice he straightened out the powerful fingers ; twice they clamped back like jackknives ; and the last time Henderson’s hand and the woman’s hand lay shut together within the strong grasp.

“ Oh ! ” she gasped, under her breath. “ Oh, don’t! It’s pushing a drowning man under water — it’s cruel — he’s so helpless. Oh, don’t do it — he needs me — don’t ” — She had gone to pieces, in the way people have when doctors most need their help ; and Henderson kept straight on, in the way doctors have of getting along without help.

“ Keep quiet, keep quiet,” he growled. “I’ve got him. How, Carey!” He split loose the clump of hands on the bed with one quick upheaval, swept the woman’s hand aside, and pulled her from her chair just as the man on the bed lashed out wildly, floundered back, and, under the compelling, unescapable cap, passed on into a deep, stupendous coma.

“See to Mrs. Shore, Miss Green,” ordered Henderson briskly, “ and, Wear, you and Mason get him to the surgery as fast as you like. We ’ll be there before you will.”

Five minutes later, the operators, those who were to assist and those who were to stand ready to assist, were flipping asepticized water from their hands into loose-meslied towels, and the girl at the tray had settled back, erect and vigilant as a sentry. Lahn and Henderson were tucking their duck sleeves to the elbow, as they filed around to the table, and talking of little things, which is good for the nerves.

“ Awfully good of yon to play second fiddle for me, old man,” Henderson was saying appreciatively.

“ You ought to pay me back for it by coming up here to live, as I want you to. There’s a big business up here for you. Your friends the Shores are here, too. That ought to count for something.”

“ It does,” said Henderson, — “ counts for a heap.” He called abruptly to Carey then : “ I’d rather you’d be at the cap, Carey, if you don’t mind. Just let Dr. Carey in there, Mr. Wear, and you have the salt solution ready, will you ? ” Tiie clear, ringing voice was quickly buoyant with mastery. The ground that he was on he knew so completely ; he was so strong on it; it was so easy for him to cover the whole surgical outlook with half an eye. Before he had put out his hand to the girl at the tray his mind had got away ahead, and was pushing every adverse possibility down within reach of the hand. The girl gave him a knife, and put her hand back over the other instruments. Then, Henderson, surgeon, with his own life a-tingle to the finger tips, took up the life on the table, and cut and lifted and twisted with it through delicate ganglia and fascia, in and out around ligament and artery, — now slicing with knife, now snipping with scissors, now squeezing with catch forceps; met at each need, before he could voice it, by the girl at the tray or the chief across from him. He began to enjoy the work. He was far up on the cool, invulnerable heights of Science ; the man before him was no longer a man, but his case. He was achieving what the chief would call a classical operation, dexterous, clean-handed, watchful, working like a beaver and ordering like a general: “ Look to the ligature there, Mason. Steady that arm all you can, Mac. Pull that muscle back just a trifle, Lahn.”

“ Henderson,” said Carey, with an admirable cool-headedness which he had not acquired in Kentucky, “ I can’t give you much more time.”

Henderson raised up from over the case for just one second. “ Don’t you try to hurry me, Carey,” — the words would have been a threat if they had not been a prayer. “ You hold on to him. There’s a lot of involvement here.” His fingers were back at work again, cutting and peeling ever more rapidly. “ See that, Lahn. I ’ll have to get that out, sure as fate.”

“You’ll have to be a little quicker than fate, then,” said Carey dryly. No man likes to stand at the cap as the gray shadow steals over the face on the table. Without any change of posture on the part of the men, without word or sign, a fight was now on in the stratum of ideation above the unheeding form before them. From being a case the form had become a man again, rehabilitated, reprivileged, by his dire danger, as he hung there on the rotten thread of his pulse. In the twinkling of an eye, his inviolable property right in life, the mighty sacredness of his stertorous breath, had become paramount, overwhelming. It was a moment as acutely personal as though Technique, Skill, Experience, and all the other white handmaidens of Science had become clumsy, wordy unrealities. Each man was formulating his intense private idea ; each man was getting ready to offer it to Henderson, Moloch of the altar there ; and each man would, and must, then stand back by the Code and lift not so much as a deterrent finger in the course Henderson should select for himself, though the danger of that course stiffened a man’s backbone with suspense.

“ Ain’t I right, Lahn ? ” asked Henderson, a little drawn about the mouth, but hard-voiced and steady-handed.

The chief glanced from the case’s arm to the case’s face. “ Theoretically you are, Henderson, but every second’s going against him. Look yonder. Better have a live man with a little mischief sewed up in him than a dead one sweet and clean.”

“ What’s your mind, Mac ? ” White to the lips now, Henderson again held out his hand to the girl at the tray.

The Scot edged over. “ It means you ’ll have all the work to do again if you leave those nuclei in there, which will kill him then instead of now ; but ” — he waited a second to catch his cautious national poise — “ I believe I’d stop on what’s done, Henderson. He’s uncommon slippish.”

“ I don’t like to go against you, gentlemen,” — Henderson closed his fingers around a pair of scissors the girl had put into them, — “ but he’s got to have his full fighting chance.” His teeth clamped off the ends of his words as he bent again to the work, — by that one half second of answer over against the others, by that taking arbitrary possession of the life on the table, by that making himself lord dispenser of life and death !

“ Whatever comes of it, I did all I could for you, you great, barring hulk.” Henderson never knew whether he said those words out loud or only thought them, but presently he heard his voice reassuringly distinct, and neatly punctuated by the pauses needed to obey his instructions : “ Get the salt solution going now, Wear, — he ’ll tone up. . . . See his lips now, Lahn. . ..I’m ready to put those coaptation sutures in, Mac. . . . See his lips now, boys. . . . Get me threaded there, Miss Morse. . . . See his lips now, Lahn — see his lips, Lahn — ah, God ! see ” —

Then came the final word of the chief : “ Guess you did the right thing, after all, Henderson. He ’ll come round. Tired, are n’t you ? Tedious job, all right. Let ’em trot him off to bed now. He’s safe for fifty years to come.”

R. E. Young.