1 files changed, 5033 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/2725-0.txt b/2725-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7ebb455
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2725-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5033 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 2725 ***
+
+
+
+
+RED PEPPER BURNS
+
+By Grace S. Richmond
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I. IN WHICH HE VOWS A VOW
+
+II. IN WHICH HE CREATES A CIRCUS
+
+III. IN WHICH HE ASSUMES A RESPONSIBILITY
+
+IV. IN WHICH HE MAKES A CONCESSION
+
+V. IN WHICH HE IS ROUGH ON A FRIEND
+
+VI. IN WHICH HE PRESCRIBES FOR HIMSELF
+
+VII. IN WHICH HE CONTINUES TO SAW WOOD
+
+VIII. IN WHICH HE IS UNREASONABLY PREOCCUPIED
+
+IX. IN WHICH HE SUFFERS A DEFEAT
+
+X. IN WHICH HE PROVES HIMSELF A HOST
+
+XI. IN WHICH HE GETS EVEN WITH HIMSELF
+
+XII. IN WHICH HE HAS HIS OWN WAY
+
+XIII. IN WHICH HE MAKES NO EVENING CALL
+
+XIV. IN WHICH HE DEFIES SUPERSTITION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. IN WHICH HE VOWS A VOW
+
+
+“There comes the Green Imp.”
+
+“How can you tell?”
+
+“Don't you hear? Red's coming in on five cylinders for all he can get
+out of 'em. Anybody else would stop and fix up. He's in too much of a
+hurry--as usual.”
+
+The Green Imp tore past the porch where Burns's neighbours waved arms of
+greeting which he failed to see, for he did not turn his head. The car
+went round the curve of the driveway at perilous speed, and only the
+fact that from road to old red barn was a good twenty rods made it
+seem possible that the Green Imp could come to a standstill in time to
+prevent its banging into the rear wall of the barn.
+
+Two minutes later Burns ran by the Chesters' porch on his way to his
+own. Chester hailed him.
+
+“What's your everlasting hurry, Red? Come up and sit down and cool off.”
+
+“Not now,” called back a voice curtly, out of the June twilight. The big
+figure ran on and disappeared into the small house, the door slamming
+shut behind it.
+
+“Red's in a temper. Tell by the sound of his voice.
+
+“Is he ever in anything except a temper?” inquired a guest of the
+Chesters. Arthur Chester turned on her.
+
+“Show's you don't know him much, Pauline. He's the owner of the fiercest
+good disposition ever heard of. He's the pepperest proposition of an
+angel this earth has ever seen. He's a red-headed, sharp-tongued brute
+of a saint--”
+
+“Why, Arthur Chester!”
+
+“He's a pot of mustard that's clear balm--if you don't mind getting
+stung when it's applied.”
+
+“Well, of all the--”
+
+“I'm going over to get something for this abominable headache--and,
+incidentally, to find out what's the row. He's probably lost a
+patient--it always goes to his brain like that. When he abuses his
+beloved engine that way it's because some other machinery has stopped
+somewhere.”
+
+“If he's lost a patient you'd better let him alone, dear,” advised his
+wife, Winifred.
+
+“No--he needs to get his mind off it, on me. I can fix up a few symptoms
+for him.”
+
+“He'll see through you,” called Mrs. Chester softly, after him.
+
+“No doubt of that. But it may divert him, just the same.”
+
+Chester made his way across the lawn and in at the side door which led
+to the dimly lighted village offices of Redfield Pepper Burns, physician
+and surgeon. Not that the gilt-lettered sign on the glass of the office
+door read that way. “R. P. Burns, M.D.” was the brief inscription above
+the table of “office hours,” and the owner of the name invariably so
+curtailed it. But among his friends the full name had inevitably been
+turned into the nickname, for the big, red-haired, quick-tempered,
+warm-hearted fellow was “Red Pepper Burns” as irresistibly to them as he
+had been, a decade earlier, to his classmates in college.
+
+As Chester went in at the door a figure arose slowly from its
+position--flung full length, face downward, on a couch in the shadowy
+inner office and came into view.
+
+“Toothache? Dentist down the street,” said a blurred voice
+unsympathetically.
+
+Chester laughed. “Oh, come, Red,” said he. “Give me some of that
+headache dope. I'm all out.”
+
+“Glad to hear it. You don't get any more from me.”
+
+“Why not? I've got a sure-enough headache--I didn't come over to quiz
+you. The blamed thing whizzes like a buzz saw.”
+
+“Can't help it. Go soak it.”
+
+Chester advanced. “I'll get the powders myself, then. I know the
+bottle.”
+
+A substantial barrier interposed. “No, you don't. You've taken up six
+ounces of that stuff in seven days. You quit to-night.”
+
+“Look here, Red, what's the use of taking it out on me like that, if you
+are mad at something? If your head--”
+
+“I wish it did ache--like ten thousand furies. It might take some of the
+pressure off somewhere else,” growled R. P. Burns. He shut the door of
+the inner office hard behind him.
+
+“I thought so,” declared Arthur Chester, suddenly forgetting about his
+headache in his anxiety to know the explanation of the five cylinders.
+It was a small suburban town in which they lived, and if something had
+gone wrong it was a matter of common interest. “Can you tell me about
+it?” he asked--a little diffidently, for none knew better than he that
+things could not always be told, and that no lips were locked tighter
+than Red Pepper's when the secret was not his to tell.
+
+“Engine's on the blink. Got to go out and fix it,” was the unpromising
+reply. Burns picked up a sparkplug from the office desk as he spoke.
+
+“Had your dinner?”
+
+“Don't want it.”
+
+“Shall I go out with you?”
+
+The answer was an unintelligible grunt. As Chester was about to follow
+his friend out--for there could be no doubt that Red Pepper Burns was
+his friend in spite of this somewhat surly, though by no means unusual,
+treatment--another door opened tentatively, and a head was cautiously
+inserted.
+
+“Your dinner's ready, Doctor Burns,” said a doubtful voice.
+
+Burns turned. “Leave a pitcher of milk on the table for me, Cynthia,”
+ he said in a gentler voice than Chester had yet heard from him tonight,
+crisp though it was. “Nothing else.”
+
+Chester, catching a glimpse of a brightly lighted dining-room and
+a table lavishly spread, undertook to remonstrate. He had seen the
+housekeeper's disappointed face, also. But Burns cut him short.
+
+“Come along--if you must,” said he, and stalked out into the night.
+
+For an hour, in the light from one of the Green Imp's lamps, Chester sat
+on an overturned box and watched Burns work. He worked savagely, as if
+applying surgical measures to a mood as well as to a machine. He worked
+like a skilled mechanic as well; every turn of a nut, every polish of
+a thread meaning definite means to an end. The night was hot and he had
+thrown off coat and collar and rolled his sleeves high, so a brawny arm
+gleamed in the bright lamplight, and the open shirt exposed a powerful
+neck. Chester, who was of slighter build and not as tall as he would
+have liked to be, watched enviously.
+
+“Whatever goes wrong with your affairs, Red,” he observed suddenly,
+breaking a long interval during which the engine had been made to throb
+and whirl like the “ten thousand furies” to whom its engineer had lately
+made allusion, “you have the tremendous asset of a magnificent body to
+fall back on for comfort.”
+
+With a movement of the hand Burns stopped his engine, now running
+quietly, and stood up straight. He threw out one bare arm, grimy
+and oily with his labours. “Two hours ago,” said he in a voice now
+controlled and solemn, “if by cutting off that right arm at the shoulder
+I could have saved a human life I'd have done it.”
+
+“And now,” retorted Chester quickly, “now, two hours after--would you
+cut it off now?”
+
+Red Pepper looked at him. The arm dropped. “No,” said he, “I wouldn't.
+Not for a dozen lives like that. I'm not heroic, after all--only hot and
+cold by jumps, like a thermometer. But I ache all over, just the same.
+She runs like a bird now. Jump in--we'll take a spin and try her out on
+the road. I may need her before midnight.”
+
+Nothing loth, for he knew the Green Imp and her driver and had had many
+a swift run on a moonlight night before in the same company, Chester
+took the slim roadster's other seat, watching the long green hood point
+the way down the driveway, past the porch where the women, in white
+gowns showing coolly in the light from the arc lamp at the corner of the
+street, called a goodbye.
+
+“Back--some time,” replied Chester's voice, rising above the low purr
+of the engine with a note of satisfaction in it. The figure beside him,
+still in open, white shirt, with bare arms and uncovered, thick thatch
+of red hair, did not turn its head.
+
+“Arthur's never so happy as when he's out with Red in the Green Imp,”
+ Winifred said to her guest as the roadster shot away under the elms
+which drooped beneath the arc light.
+
+“Doctor Burns is certainly the oddest man I ever saw,” replied the
+guest, swinging idly in the hammock and watching the car out of sight
+down the long vista of the village street. “He hasn't given me one real
+good look yet. I suppose if I were a patient he would favour me with an
+all-seeing gaze out of those Irish-Scotch barbarian eyes of his, but as
+it is”--her voice was slightly petulant--“I believe I shall have to do
+as Arthur has: make up some symptoms and go over to his office.”
+
+“If you do you'll get precisely the same treatment I presume Arthur
+had.” Mrs. Chester laughed as she spoke. “I doubt very much whether he
+comes back with any headache medicine.”
+
+“But he got a moonlight ride in that beauty of a car,” the guest
+declared enviously. “That treatment would suit me wonderfully well,
+whatever was the matter.”
+
+“Would you have gone with him in his shirt-sleeves? He's plainly in a
+shirt-sleeve mood to-night.”
+
+“I think a drive in the moonlight with a 'brute of a saint' in
+shirt-sleeves, with arms like those, might be interesting,” mused the
+guest, indicating invisible patterns on the porch with the toe of a
+white slipper.
+
+“He would probably talk cars and engines every mile in the most
+matter-of-fact way,” Winifred Chester assured her. “No woman yet has
+ever been able, as far as this town knows, to strike a spark of romance
+out of Red Pepper Burns.”
+
+“Yet he has red hair,” murmured the guest to herself, and continued to
+look thoughtfully down the street along which the Green Imp had shot out
+toward the open country beyond.
+
+Out in that open country, miles away, the car running with that
+exquisite precision of rotating cylinder explosions which is music to
+the trained ear of the mechanic at the wheel, the two men sat silent.
+The pace of the Green Imp was one to cut off speech, for the road wets
+straight and empty, stretching like a white ribbon under the stars,
+with now and then a band of midnight shade crossing it where arching
+tree-tops met the course which invites an open throttle and the intent
+eye which goes with it.
+
+Suddenly the car struck aside from the straightaway and with open
+cut-out roared up a steep hill by means of which a narrow road led
+off toward a part of the country not often selected by motorists for
+pleasure spins. Chester recognized that his companion had a purpose
+beyond that of “trying out” his engine, unless, indeed, the tough and
+rocky grade were a test. But Burns was still silent, and the other man
+applied himself to holding on. A mile up the road the car came to an
+abrupt standstill before a tiny house.
+
+“Going to make a call, after all?” was on Chester's lips, but the sight
+of something, showing white beside the door in the lamplight which
+streamed out upon a small, decrepit porch, drove back the words.
+
+Burns left a silent engine and strode up the straggling path with the
+light tread of the heavy man whose muscles are under his control. He
+walked in at the open door without knocking, and Chester caught the
+sharp sound of a woman's voice at a tension, saying: “Oh, Doctor!”
+
+It seemed to him an hour, though by his watch it was but nine minutes,
+that he sat watching the little flimsy streamer of white flutter to and
+fro in the lamplight, his heart beating heavily, as a father's will at
+sight of the sign of some other man's loss.
+
+At the end of those interminable nine minutes Burns was back again in
+the car. He turned the Green Imp about as quietly as if she were a
+cat stealing out of the yard, and sent her down the rocky road at her
+slowest speed. At the bottom of the hill he broke the long silence.
+
+“Couldn't have slept an hour if I hadn't come back,” he said in a low
+tone. “Back and apologized for being a brute. It's eased me up a bit I
+think it's eased her, too, poor soul.”
+
+“Then it wasn't losing the case,” Chester began doubtfully. He was never
+sure just when it was safe to ask Red Pepper questions, but he thought
+it seemed safer than usual now.
+
+“No, it wasn't losing the case, though that was bad enough. It was
+losing my infernal hair-trigger of a temper that's been cutting in like
+a knife. I had the boy where he ought to get well if they followed my
+precautions a thousand times repeated. This morning his heart was a
+whole lot stronger; it only needed time. Tonight his mother let him sit
+up--in spite of all I'd threatened her with if she did. He went out like
+a snuffed candle. When I saw it I was so angry with her I”--he thrust
+up one hand and ran it through his thick locks with a gesture of
+savagery--“I let loose on her--poor soul with her heart already broken.
+He was the only boy--of course,--I ought to have been shot on the spot.”
+
+He sent the car flying down the road. Chester could think of nothing
+to say. He could imagine the sort of apology Red had given the boy's
+mother--one to make her forgive and adore him. No doubt it had “eased
+her.” It must have been a hard thing for R. P. Burns, M.D., to do.
+Suddenly recalling this he said so, and added a word of admiration.
+Burns turned on him.
+
+“Boy,” he said, “I'm the toughest case on my list. I'm a chronic
+patient. Just as I think I have myself in hand I suffer a relapse.
+I break out in a new place. Of all men who need self-control, it's
+a surgeon needs it most. Sometimes, I'm in too much of a temper to
+operate--just because a nurse has failed to provide the right sutures.
+Every red hair on my head stands up like a porcupine's quills--my
+hand isn't steady--I can't trust my own judgment till I've cooled down.
+There's only one hope for me--”
+
+He broke off abruptly, and the Green Imp accelerated her pace as they
+came to the long, straight road home. Until they reached the turn under
+the elms which led to the town, he left the sentence unfinished, while
+Chester waited. Chester felt it would be worth waiting for--that which
+Red Pepper might say next. When it came it surprised him--it even gave
+him a strange thrill coming from Red Pepper.
+
+“I've put my case into the only competent hands,” said Burns slowly and
+quite simply. “I've promised my Maker I'll never insult His name again.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. IN WHICH HE CREATES A CIRCUS
+
+
+“Doctor Burns--”
+
+“Yes, Miss Mathewson.”
+
+“The long-distance telephone, please.”
+
+Burns excused himself to the last patient of the evening series, and
+shut himself in with the long-distance. When he came out he was looking
+at his watch. From its face he turned to that of his office nurse--the
+one hardly less businesslike in expression than the other.
+
+“Miss Mathewson, my aunt telephones that my father and mother are both
+sick, each anxious to distraction about the other, she about them both,
+and under the weather herself. If you and I can catch the ten-fifteen
+to-night we can be there by two, and by leaving there at four we can be
+back here in time for the morning's operations. If they need you I'll
+leave you there for a day or two--by your leave. We'll take the Green
+Imp into the city--the ten-fifteen doesn't stop here. Then it'll be at
+the hospital when we want it in the morning. You've twenty minutes to
+get ready.”
+
+“Very well, Doctor Burns.”
+
+The office bell rang. Burns fled toward the inner office. Miss Mathewson
+discovered the guest of the Chesters on the doorstep--all in white, with
+a face which usually stimulated interest wherever it was seen.
+
+“May I see Doctor Burns just a minute--for Mr. Chester?” The caller
+took her cue cleverly from Miss Mathewson's face, which at the moment
+expressed schedules and engagements thick as blackberries in August.
+Burns, just closing the inner door, caught Chester's name. He pulled
+off his white office coat, slid into his gray tweed one, and opened the
+door.
+
+“What can I do for Mr. Chester--in three minutes?” he inquired, coming
+forward. Miss Mathewson, aware of the shortness of time, vanished.
+
+“Give me something for his headache, please,” replied the young person
+in white promptly. Schedules and engagements were in R. P. Burns's eyes
+also; they looked at her without appearing to see her at all. To this
+she was not accustomed and it displeased her.
+
+“Was it too severe for him to come himself?”
+
+“Much too severe. He has gone to bed with it.”
+
+“Mrs. Chester closely attending him?”
+
+“Certainly--or I shouldn't be here.” The eyes of the Chesters' guest
+sparkled. Something about the cool tone of this question displeased her
+still more.
+
+“Tell him to get up and go out and walk a mile, breathing deep all the
+way.”
+
+“No medicine?”
+
+“Not a grain. He ought to know better than to ask.”
+
+“He does, I think. He suggested that possibly if I asked--But I see for
+myself how that wouldn't make the slightest difference.”
+
+“I'm glad your perceptions are so acute,” replied Burns gravely.
+
+“Are the three minutes up?” asked the caller.
+
+He looked at his watch. “I think not quite. Is there anything of
+importance to fill the one remaining?”
+
+“Nothing whatever--except to mention your fee.” The guest receded
+gracefully from the door.
+
+“If the patient will follow directions I'll ask no fee. If he doesn't
+I'll exact one when I see him again. Forgive my haste, Miss--Halstead?”
+
+“Hempstead,” corrected the caller crisply. “Don't mention it,
+Doctor--Brown. Good night.”
+
+The Chesters' guest lingered on the porch before going in to report the
+failure of her mission. She was still lingering there when the
+Green Imp, carrying no open-shirted mechanic, but a properly clothed
+professional gentleman and a severely dressed professional lady, whirled
+away down the drive.
+
+“He really was going somewhere in a hurry, then,” admitted the guest.
+“In which case I can't be quite so offended. I wonder if that nurse
+enjoys her trips with him--when his mouth doesn't happen to be shut like
+a steel trap.”
+
+If she could have seen the pair on the train which presently bore them
+flying away across the state, she would hardly have envied either of
+them. Between abstraction on the one side and reserve an the other, they
+exchanged less conversation than two strangers might have done. When
+Miss Mathewson's eyes drooped with weariness her companion made her as
+comfortable as he could and bade her rest. His own eyes were untouched
+by slumber: he stared straight before him or out into the night, seeing
+nothing but a white farmhouse far ahead, where his anxious thoughts were
+waiting for his body to catch up.
+
+“Are they much sick, Zeke?”
+
+“Wal, I dunno hardly, Red.--You goin' to drive? They're pretty lively,
+them blacks. Ain't used to comin' to the station at two o'clock in the
+mornin'. Your ma's been worryin' about your pa for a consid'able spell,
+and now that she's took down so severe herself he's gone to pieces some.
+Miss Ellen'll be glad to see you.”
+
+The blacks covered the mile from the station as they had never covered
+it before, and Burns was in the house five minutes before they had
+expected him.
+
+“Mother, here's your big boy.--Dad, here I am--here's Red. Bless your
+hearts--you wanted me, didn't you?”
+
+They could hardly tell him how they had wanted him, but he saw it in
+their faces.
+
+“I've got to take the four o'clock back--worse luck!--for some
+operations I can't postpone. But between now and then I'm going to look
+you over and set you straight, and I'll be back again in two days if you
+need me. Now for it. Mother first. Come here, Aunt Ellen, and tell me
+all about her.”
+
+R. P. Burns, M.D., had never been quicker nor more thorough at
+examination of a pair of patients than with these. He went straight at
+them both, each in the presence of the other, Miss Mathewson capably
+assisting. With his most professional air he asked his questions,
+applied his trained senses to the searching tests made of special
+organs, and gave directions for future treatment. Then he sat back and
+looked at them.
+
+“Do I appear worried about her, Dad?”
+
+“Why, you don't seem to, Red.”
+
+“Miss Mathewson, should you gather from my appearance that I am consumed
+with anxiety?”
+
+“I think you seem very much relieved, Doctor Burns.”
+
+“Mother, as you look at Dad over on the couch there, does he strike you
+as appearing like a frightfully sick man?”
+
+Mrs. Burns smiled faintly in the direction of the couch, but her eyes
+came immediately back to her son's. “He seems a good deal better since
+you came, Redfield.”
+
+“There's not a thing the matter with either of you except what can be
+fixed up in a week. You've got scared to death about each other, and
+that's pulled you both down. What you need more than anything else is to
+go to a circus--and, by George!--Since I didn't observe any tents in the
+darkness as we drove along, you shall have one come to you. Look here!
+Did you know I'd kept up my old athletic stunts these nine years since I
+left college?”
+
+He pulled off his coat, waistcoat, collar, shoes, rolled his
+shirt-sleeves as high as they would go, and turned a series of
+handsprings across the wide room. Then he stood on his head; he balanced
+chairs on his chin; he seized his father's hickory stick and went
+through a set of military evolutions. Then he put on his shoes, eyeing
+his patients with satisfaction. His mother had lifted her head to watch
+him, and Miss Mathewson had tucked an extra pillow under it. His father
+had drawn himself up to a half-sitting posture and was regarding his son
+with pride.
+
+“I never thought so well of those doings before,” he was saying. “If
+they've kept you as supple as a willow, in spite of your weight, I
+should say you'd better keep 'em up.”
+
+“You bet I will!--See here, Aunt Ellen--you used to play the 'Irish
+Washerwoman: Mind playing it now? Miss Mathewson and I are going to do a
+cakewalk.”
+
+He glanced, laughing, at his office nurse. She was staring at him
+wide-eyed. He threw back his head, showing a splendid array of white
+teeth as he roared at her expression.
+
+“Forget 'Doctor Burns,' please,” said he, in answer to the expression.
+“He's discharged this case as not serious enough for him, and left it
+to Red Pepper to administer a few gentle stimulants on the quack order.
+Come! You can do a cake walk! Forget you're a graduate of any training
+school but the vaudeville show!”
+
+He caught her hand. Flushing so that her plain face became almost
+pretty, she yielded--for the hand was insistent. Miss Ellen leaned
+bewildered against the door which led to the sitting-room where the old
+piano stood. Her nephew looked at her again, with the eyes which
+the Chesters' guest had somewhat incoherently described as
+“Irish-Scotch-barbarian.” He said, “Please, Aunt Ellen, there's a good
+fellow,” at which Mr. Burns, Senior, chuckled under his breath; for
+anything less like that of a “good fellow” was never seen than Sister
+Ellen's prim little personality. Miss Ellen went protestingly to the
+piano. Was it right, her manner said, to be performing in this idiotic
+manner at this unholy hour of three o'clock in the morning--in a
+sick-room?
+
+It mattered little whether Miss Mathewson could or could not dance the
+“Irish Washerwoman,” or any other antic dance improvised to that live
+air; she had only to yield herself to Red Pepper Burns's hands and
+steps, and let him disport himself around her. A most startlingly
+hilarious performance was immediately and effectively produced. At the
+height of it, a door across the sitting-room, which commanded a strip
+of the bedroom beyond, opened cautiously and Zeke Crandall's eye glued
+itself to the aperture, an eye astonished beyond belief.
+
+“If that there Red ain't a-cuttin' up jest exactly as he used to when
+he was a boy--and his pa and ma sick a-bed! If 'twas anybody but Red I'd
+say he was crazy.”
+
+Then he caught the sound of a laugh from lips he had not heard laugh
+like that for a year--a chuckling, delighted laugh, only slightly
+asthmatic and wholly unrestrained. He began to laugh himself.
+
+“If folks round here could see Red Burns now they'd never believe the
+stories about his gettin' to be such a darned successful man at his
+business,” he reflected. “Of all the goin's on! Look at him now! An'
+that nurse! An' Miss Ellen a-playin' for 'em! Oh, my eye!”
+
+Songs followed--college songs, popular airs, opera bits--all delivered
+in' a resounding barytone and accompanied by thumping chords improvised
+by the performer. Out through the open windows they floated, and one
+astonished villages driving by to take the early train caught the
+exultant strains:
+
+  “Oh, see dat watermillion a-smilin' fro' de fence,
+    How I wish dat watermillion it was mine.
+   Oh, de white folks must be foolish,
+   Dey need a heap of sense,
+    Or dey'd nebber leave it dar upon de vine!
+    Oh, de ham-bone am sweet,
+    An' de bacon am good,
+    An' de 'possum fat am berry, berry fine;
+   But gib me, yes, gib me,
+   Oh, how I wish you would,
+    Dat watermillion growin' on de vine!”
+
+Before they knew it the early morning light was creeping in at the
+small-paned windows. Burns consulted his watch.
+
+“If you'll give us a cup of coffee, Aunt Ellen, we'll be off in fifteen
+minutes. Miss Mathewson”--his glance mirthfully surveyed her--“Aunt Ellen
+will take you upstairs and give you a chance to put that magnificent
+brown hair into a condition where it will not shock the natives at the
+station. As for mine--”
+
+When Aunt Ellen and Miss Mathewson, each in her own way feeling as if
+she had passed through an extraordinary experience likely never to
+occur again, had hurried away, Burns applied himself to a process of
+reconstruction. When every rebellious red hair had been reduced to its
+usual order and his thick locks lay with the little wave in them as his
+mother had begun to brush them years ago; when collar and cravat rose
+sedately above the gray tweed coat, and a fresh, fine handkerchief had
+replaced the dingy one which had been through every manner of exercise
+in the “circus,” Burns drew up a chair and faced his patients with the
+keen, professional gaze which told him whether or not his night's work
+had been good therapeutics.
+
+“When I've gone you're to have breakfast, and I think you'll both
+eat it,” he said, smiling at them, his eyes bright with affection and
+contentment. “Then you're to compose yourselves for sleep, and I think
+you'll both sleep. To-morrow Dad's to be out on the porch--all June
+is out there, and the roses are in full bloom. Day after to-morrow
+Mother'll be there, too, in the hammock. As soon as these cases I
+operate on this morning are out of danger I'll be down again for a whole
+day. I'll keep the time clear.”
+
+“I'm afraid,” said his father, looking suddenly anxious for a new cause,
+“your being up all night won't make your hand any steadier for those
+operations, Red.”
+
+“On the contrary, as a matter of fact, Dad, it'll be a lot steadier just
+because of my being up all night, assuring myself that there's nothing
+serious the matter with you and Mother, except the need of a bit of
+jollying by your boy--which you've certainly had right off the reel, eh?
+Aunt Ellen thinks yet I've probably killed you. Are you the worse for
+it, Mother? Give it to me straight, now!”
+
+He bent over her, his fingers on her delicate wrist. She smiled up into
+his eyes. “Redfield!” she murmured. “As if I could ever be the worse for
+having you come home!”
+
+He dropped on his knees beside the bed, looking at her with the eyes of
+the boy she had borne. “Bless me, Mother,” he said unsteadily, all the
+fun gone out of his face. “I--need it--to keep decent.”
+
+The last three words were under his breath, but she heard the others and
+laid her hand on the red head with a tremulous soft word or two which
+he could barely catch.
+
+In a minute he had risen, his cheek flushed high, and was gripping
+his father's hand. “You, too, Dad,” he begged. “I'm only Red this
+morning--going back into the world.”
+
+His father's hand and voice shook as he administered the little
+ceremony, used only once before in his son's life--when at fourteen he
+first went away to school. Few grown men would have asked for it again,
+he felt that. Coming from Red he was sure the request meant more than
+they could know.
+
+Then the professional gentleman whom the world knew--the world which was
+not acquainted with Red Pepper Burns--and the professional lady who was
+his assistant went decorously away into the early June morning. Zeke was
+grinning to himself as he saw them step aboard the train.
+
+“Looks mighty fine in them clipper-built city clothes, Red does,” he
+reflected. “If that there young woman chose to give him away, now but I
+kind of guess she won't--under the circumstances!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. IN WHICH HE ASSUMES A RESPONSIBILITY
+
+
+“Red, the new car is here. Come and look her over.”
+
+It was Burns's neighbour on the other side, James Macauley, Junior. R.
+P. Burns laid down his saw, with which in the late June twilight he had
+been doing vigorous work at a small woodpile behind the house. He stood
+up straight, throwing back his shoulders to take the kink out of them.
+
+“All right,” said he. “I think I'm fit for general society again. I
+wasn't when I tackled this job. Nothing like fifteen minutes of woodpile
+for taking the temper out of the saw--and the man.”
+
+Macauley, a stout, good-humoured fellow of thirty-five, laughed. “That
+temper of yours, Red has it been on the rampage again?”
+
+“It has. Don't talk about it or it'll lift to confounded red head
+again--it's only scotched for the present. New car's here, eh?”
+
+“Yes, and the pretty widow's here, too--my wife's sister, Ellen Lessing.
+We've a great plan for tomorrow, Red. I can't venture to drive this
+elephant of a car yet, but the women are wild for a trip in her. She
+holds seven. Martha wants you to drive us and the Chesters to-morrow a
+hundred and fifty miles--seventy-five to F ---- and back. Will you do
+it? You're not so horribly busy just now, and Mrs. Lessing and Pauline
+Hempstead together ought to make it worth while for you.”
+
+This feature of the invitation did not appear to appeal to Burns, but
+the sight of the touring car, brave and shining in russet and brass,
+plainly did.
+
+“Not that I'd care to drive such a whale for myself, but I shouldn't
+mind a run for the fun of trying her out. You say she's been driven
+enough to warm up her engines? Suppose we take her out and let me get
+the feel of her mouth before to-morrow?”
+
+“Come on.” And they were off.
+
+“For a whale she's a bird,” was Burns's paradoxical verdict two hours
+later. The “trying out” had merged into a smooth run of forty-five miles
+at not anything like the full pace of which the motor was capable. “Best
+not to overheat her at first. Run your first three hundred miles with
+consideration for her vital organs--she'll have her wind by that time.”
+
+Next morning four women, long-coated, tissue-veiled, watched the brown
+beauty roll invitingly up to Macauley's porch steps.
+
+As she crossed the lawn with Winifred, Pauline Hempstead, the guest
+of the Chesters, was studying not only the car, but the undeniably
+attractive gray-clad figure of the lately-arrived younger sister of Mrs.
+Macauley. “Will Red P. look at her any more than he does at me?” she
+murmured in Winifred Chester's ear.
+
+“I doubt it, my dear. But he'll be foolish if he doesn't, won't he?”
+
+“I don't care for widows myself.”
+
+“I presume not.” Winifred laughed comprehendingly.
+
+“How old is she?”
+
+“Twenty-eight, I believe--though she doesn't look it.”
+
+“Doesn't look it! She looks a lot more.”
+
+Winifred laughed still, quietly. Although Pauline undoubtedly had
+the advantage of Ellen in years, her fair-haired, blue-eyed, somewhat
+sumptuous beauty was not of so youthful a type as the darker colouring
+and slenderer outlines of Martha's sister.
+
+The man at the wheel of the brown car lifted his leather cap as the
+women came out, but he left all the bestowal of them to the other
+men. Miss Hempstead asked to be allowed to sit beside the driver, but
+Macauley vowed that on the first long run of his new machine he himself
+should occupy that post of honour and interest.
+
+“Coming back, then,” insisted the girl, and Macauley agreed reluctantly.
+Burns made no comment, but applied himself to his task--not only
+then, but also for every minute of the seventy-five miles to their
+destination.
+
+“He might as well be a hired chauffeur,” complained Miss Hempstead when,
+during a stop of ten minutes on account of a switching freight train,
+she had leaned forward and attempted in vain to carry on a conversation
+with Burns. “That abstracted mood of his--is there any breaking into
+it?”
+
+“Fall out and break your collar-bone. He'll be all attention,” advised
+Chester.
+
+“Thank you. I'm almost tempted to. Why don't you drive awhile, Mr.
+Macauley, and give him a rest?”
+
+“And let him sit here in the middle with you? He couldn't be pried loose
+from that wheel now. Besides, I haven't driven this car yet, and she's
+too different in her steering from my old one. I shouldn't like to try
+with this crowd behind me.”
+
+They reached the distant city; drew up at the steps of the most
+attractive hotel; went in to lunch. That is to say, all did this except
+R. P. Burns. He remained in the garage in the rear where he had taken
+the car, busying himself with some details of mechanism whose working
+did not quite suit him. In spite of summons and appeals he continued to
+work until the rest had finished; then he bolted in to wash off dust
+and engine grease, ate his lunch in ten minutes--Macauley sitting by and
+expostulating--and bolted out again.
+
+“We're going to walk about a bit,” Chester announced, invading the
+garage. “The girls insist that you come. Where are your eyes, man? If
+Pauline bores you--I admit that she's a trifle persistent, but she's
+jolly good company, I think--try Mrs. Lessing. She's delightful, and not
+the pursuing style at all--she's learned better. She hasn't shown the
+slightest interest in you all morning. That ought to attract you.”
+
+“I'm going to try a bit of adjustment on this timer now that Mac's
+out of the way. Go along, and don't bother me.” Burns was in his
+shirt-sleeves again and spoke gruffly. His cap was off, and thick locks
+lay damply against his moist brow; in his eyes sparkled enthusiasm but
+not for women.
+
+“You certainly are a hopeless case,” and Chester went back to his party.
+
+“We might as well not have a bachelor along,” mourned Pauline. “Four
+women--with only two old married men to look after them--it's a shame.”
+
+“But we're both of us much handsomer than Red Pepper Burns,” asserted
+James Macauley, Junior. “And I've hardly spoken a word to my wife since
+I started--that sort of thing ought to content you.”
+
+“It doesn't. And neither of you is half as good-looking as Doctor Burns.
+He has the most interesting profile I ever saw--and I ought to know--I
+seldom catch sight of his full face.”
+
+“I shouldn't suppose an interesting profile, whatever that is, would
+offset a shock of fire-red hair. Now, both Chester's hair and mine--”
+
+“His hair isn't fire-red. It's a--rather strong--auburn.”
+
+Macauley shouted and the rest laughed with him.
+
+“Rather strong! I should say it was. I've been worried about having
+him sit near the gasoline tank, it brings his hair so close to a high
+combustible. But it has one advantage: if we don't get home before dark
+we shan't need to light up. Red's torch of a head will do the trick; we
+can come in by the refulgence from that.”
+
+“I shall be sitting in its light going back, anyhow,” Miss Hempstead
+exulted.
+
+“Much good it will do you,” prophesied Chester.
+
+It did Pauline so much good as that she was able to obtain many looks
+at the profile she admired, for she saw it clean-cut against the passing
+landscape for the sixty miles of daylight out of the seventy-five miles
+home, while she sat beside its owner and tried many times to draw him
+into talk. His taciturnity on this particular day was a thing beyond any
+experience with it she had yet had. She had heard Burns talk, and talk
+well, on many different subjects, the while he sat upon the Chesters'
+porch of a summer evening, the three of them about him, and he had
+seemed to enjoy talking. He certainly could not be wholly occupied with
+the machine, for at no time did he let the engine out for what it could
+do, but contented himself with a steady, moderate pace very different
+from the sort of furious speed in which he and the Green Imp were
+accustomed to indulge when occasion offered. Altogether he presented to
+the girl a problem which she could not solve and was never further from
+solving than during the seventy-five miles she sat beside him on the run
+home.
+
+“You're all to come in and have an ice-cool, salad-y supper with us,”
+ Mrs. Macauley declared as the car turned in at the home driveway. “Hot
+coffee, too, if you want it--or even beefsteak if you prefer. But I
+thought since it was so hot--”
+
+“I'll take the beefsteak,” announced Burns over his shoulder, “if I find
+nothing urgent for, me to do. If there's a call--”
+
+“If there is, make it, and you shall have the beefsteak when you get
+back,” Martha promised him. Mrs. Macauley was of the sort of young
+married woman who delights to make her friends comfortable--and none
+better than Red Pepper, who was her husband's most valued friend, as he
+was that of his neighbour on the other side, Arthur Chester.
+
+To everybody's regret the call was waiting, and as the party went in
+to supper they waved their hands at the Green Imp flying away down the
+road. It was not till long after the “ice-cool, salad-y supper” was
+ended and the women, freshly clad, were sitting on the porch again, the
+men smoking on the steps below them, that tine Green Imp came back.
+
+Ten minutes later a large figure crossed the lawn at a pace which
+suggested both reluctance and fatigue.
+
+“If it hadn't been for that beefsteak--” Burns began.
+
+“You wouldn't have come,” finished Macauley. “Oh, we know that! Go in
+and get it, Red, and perhaps afterward the charms of human society will
+have their inning.”
+
+Whether or not the beefsteak made the difference, a change had taken
+place when R. P. Burns at length returned to the comforts of the porch.
+He threw himself upon a crimson cushion on the upper step, precisely at
+the feet, as it chanced, of Ellen Lessing. As he leaned comfortably back
+against the porch pillar he looked directly up into her face, his eyes
+meeting hers with an odd, searching expression as if he now saw her for
+the first time. Pauline, gazing enviously across, saw the black eyes
+meet the hazel ones in the dim light, and noted that a curiously long
+look was exchanged--the sort of look which denotes that two people
+are observing each other closely, without attempt at producing an
+impression, only at discovering what is there.
+
+But when Burns began to talk he appeared to address the midsummer night
+air, staring off into it and speaking rather low, so that they all
+leaned forward to listen. For, at last, he seemed to have something
+other than motor cars upon his mind.
+
+“He's a mighty taking little chap,” he said musingly. “Curly black hair,
+eyes like coals--with a fringe around 'em like a hedge. Cheeks none too
+round--but milk and eggs and good red steaks will take care of that. A
+body like a cherubs--when it's filled out a bit.”
+
+“What in the name of gibberish are you giving as, Red?” inquired
+Macauley.
+
+“Name's Bob,” went on Red Pepper. “By all the odd chances! That's what
+decided me. 'Bobby Burns'--it was the last straw!”
+
+“Is he crazy?” asked Chester of the company. They seemed undecided. They
+were listening closely.
+
+“Clothes--one pair of patched breeches--remember 'Little Breeches,'
+Ches?--one faded flannel shirt--mended till there wasn't much left to
+mend. A straw hat with a fringe around it--uneven fringe. Inside--a
+heartache as big as a little fellow could carry and stagger under it.
+Think of having the heartache--at five and for your grandmother!”
+
+“Why for his grandmother?” asked Winifred Chester.
+
+“Because there wasn't anybody else to have it for. Rest all gone,
+grandmother the one who attended the breeches and patched the shirt, and
+went without food herself lest the boy's cheeks get thinner yet. That
+was what fixed her at last--she hadn't enough vitality to pull her
+through.”
+
+“So that was the matter with you to-day,” hazarded Chester. “Worried
+about your patient all day and found you'd lost her when you got back?”
+
+Burns turned upon him with a characteristic flash. “You go join the
+ranks of the snap-shots. They sometimes miss fire. No, I didn't. I'd
+lost her before I went or I wouldn't have gone, not for you or any other
+box-party. It was the kiddie that was on my mind--as I'd seen him last.”
+
+“Where is he now?” asked Martha Macauley urgently. She was the mother of
+two small sons, and Burns's sketch had interested her.
+
+He looked up at her. “Want to see him?”
+
+“Of course I do. Did you take him to somebody in town? Are you going to
+send him to the asylum in the city?”
+
+“Do you want to see him?”. Burns inquired of Winifred Chester. He rose.
+
+“Red! What do you mean? Have you got a child here?”
+
+“Come along, all of you, if you like. He won't wake up. He's sleeping
+like a top--can't help it, with all that bread and milk inside of him.
+Part cream it was, too. I saw Cynthia chucking it in. He'd got her, good
+and plenty, in the first five minutes. Bless her susceptible heart! Come
+on.”
+
+“Talk of susceptible hearts,” jeered Macauley as he followed. “There's
+the softest one in the county.”
+
+“Nobody would ever guess it,” murmured Pauline Hempstead.
+
+They tiptoed into the house, across the offices into the big, square
+room which was Burns's own. He switched on a hooded reading-light beside
+the bed and turned it so that its rays fell on the small occupant.
+
+He lay in spread-eagle, small-child fashion, arms and legs thrown wide,
+the black, curly head disdaining the pillow, one fist clutching a
+man's riding-crop. In sleep the little face was an exquisite one; the
+onlookers might guess what it would be awake.
+
+Burns pointed at the crop, smiling. “That was the nearest approach to
+a plaything I could muster to-night. To-morrow the shops will help me
+out.”
+
+“I'll send over plenty in the morning, Red,” whispered Martha Macauley.
+Her eyes were suspiciously shiny.
+
+“Did you bring him home just now?” questioned Winifred.
+
+Burns nodded. “I hadn't meant to get him to-night, if I did at all. My
+call took me within half a mile. I went over and saw him again. That
+settled it.”
+
+The small sleeper stirred, sighed. Burns turned off the light in a
+twinkling. “He's not used to electricity point blank,” he chuckled.
+
+Going down the steps a hand touched his arm. He looked into Ellen
+Lessing's upturned face and discovered anew that it was a face to hold
+the attention of a man. But there was no coquetry in it. Instead, he
+saw a stirred look in eyes which struck him suddenly as singularly like
+those of the child he had just shown her, “black, with a fringe around
+'em.”
+
+“Doctor Burns,” she said, “will you give me the very great pleasure of
+dressing the boy? I know how to do it.”
+
+“Of course, if you want to,” he responded gladly. “I hoped you ladies
+would look after that.”
+
+“Let me do it alone,” she urged. “They have their children: it would
+only be a task to them. To me--I can't tell you what a delight it would
+be.”
+
+“I'll take you and Bob to the city in the morning if you'll go.”
+
+“It will be a happy morning for Bob and me, then,” she answered, and he
+saw it in her face that it would be. But he felt that it was because
+of the boy; not for any other reason. It occurred to him that it might
+possibly be a happy morning for the driver of the Green Imp, also.
+
+“So Ellen's going to dress the brat.” Macauley was strolling over
+the lawn with Chester and Burns, as, having out-sat the women on the
+Macauley porch, the men were turning bedward, reluctant to leave the
+cool star-shine of the July night. “It's easy to see why she wants to do
+that. Her three-year-old boy would have been just about this Bob's age
+by now. Tough luck, wasn't it?--when he was all she had left since Jack
+got out of the game?”
+
+Burns stared at him. “Oh, that's why? I didn't know about her boy, or
+I'd forgotten it if I was ever told. She will enjoy fitting Bob out, if
+I can keep her from putting him into white clothes to make him resemble
+an angel instead of a small boy with an eye for dirt.”
+
+“You'll find Ellen's no fool,” Macauley assured him warmly. “But if she
+takes an interest in the boy it'll be the best thing that could happen
+to him. She has a lot of money. She may get a notion to adopt him.”
+
+But upon this Red Pepper Burns spoke with decision. “Confound you, the
+kiddie belongs to me. Didn't I tell you his name is now Robert Burns?
+She may dress him if she likes. She can't have him, not by a long shot.
+He's mine!”
+
+“Oh, well, it might be arranged,” murmured Macauley, but not quite low
+enough. In a flash he was laid flat on his back on the lawn, a menacing
+figure standing over him.
+
+“None of that!” growled the man with the temper. “Not now or any other
+time.” Then he laughed and let his victim up. “Alcohol will take out
+grass stains, Jim,” he advised. “Tell Martha that.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. IN WHICH HE MAKES A CONCESSION
+
+
+
+Red Pepper Burns opened his eyes. What on earth was that? A small voice
+piping at him from within close range? But how could that be?
+
+Something bumped against him. He turned his head on his pillow. A small
+figure at his side had raised itself upon its elbow; big black eyes in a
+pale little face were staring at him in affright. Burns roused himself,
+suddenly very wide awake indeed.
+
+“It's all right, little man,” said he, pulling the child gently into the
+warmth of his encircling arm. “You came home with me last night. Don't
+you remember? You're going to make me a visit. And this morning after
+breakfast we're going to drive to town and buy a train of cars--red,
+shiny cars and an engine with a bell on it. What do you think of that?”
+
+It did not take long to change Bob's fright into the happiest
+anticipations. Red Pepper Burns was at his best with children; he had
+what their mothers called “a way with them.”
+
+A knock at the door and Cynthia's voice calling, “Here's some things for
+the little boy, Doctor,” put an end to a full half-hour of delightful
+comradeship, during which the sheets of the bed had became a tent and
+the two were soldiers resting after a day's march. Burns rose and took
+in the parcel. Martha Macauley had sent it. Her boy Harold was the
+nearest in size to Bob of any of the children of his neighbours, and the
+parcel held everything needed from undershirt to scarlet Windsor scarf
+to tie under the rolling collar of the blue blouse.
+
+“A bath first, Bob,” and his new guardian initiated him into the
+exciting experience of a splash in a big white tub, in water decidedly
+warmer than it would be a week hence when he should have become used
+to the invigorating cool plunge. Then Burns, glowing from contact with
+water as cold as it could be got from the tap, clad in bathrobe and
+slippers, attempted to solve the mysteries of Bob's toilet. Roars
+of laughter interspersed with high pipings of glee presently brought
+Cynthia to the door.
+
+“Can't I help you, Doctor Burns?” she called anxiously.
+
+“Not a bit of it, Cynthia: much obliged. I'm having the time of my
+life. Stand still, son; let's try it this way round!” came back to the
+housekeeper's ears.
+
+“I ain't never wore so many things before,” Bob declared doubtfully, as a
+small white waist with, dangling elastic stocking-supporters was finally
+discovered to go best buttoned in the back.
+
+“I know. But you'll see how fine it is to have your stockings held up
+for you. Hi! Here are some sandals, Bob! Barefoot sandals, only we'll
+wear them over stockings to-day, since we're going shopping. Now for
+these blue garments I wonder how they go. Shapeless-looking things, they
+look to me. I suppose they'll resolve into baggy knickers and the sort
+of long shirt with a belt to it the youngsters of your age all wear.
+Here we go. Does this top part button behind, Bob, like the waist? No,
+I think not.... It sure looks odd, whichever way we don it, but that
+may be because it's pretty big. Harold's several sizes bigger than you,
+though he can't be much older. Give me six months and I'll have you
+filling out any other five-year-olds clothes.”
+
+“My hands--they're all gone,” remarked the child, holding out his arms.
+The blue sleeves did, indeed, cover them to the finger-tips. Laughing,
+Burns rolled the cloth back, making an awkward bunch at the wrist, but
+allowing the small hands freedom.
+
+“When Mrs. Lessing trains her eye on you she'll want to make time
+getting to the shops,” Burns observed, struggling with the scarlet scarf
+and finally tying it like a four-in-hand. “But you're clean, Bob, and
+hungry, I hope. Now I want a great big hug to pay me for dressing you.”
+
+He held out his arms, and his new charge sprang into them, pressing arms
+like sticks around the strong neck of the man who seemed to him already
+the best friend he had in the world--as he was.
+
+At eleven o'clock, a round of calls made, the Green Imp came for Bob
+and Mrs. Lessing. They met him, hand in hand, the little figure in its
+voluminous misfit clothes looking quaint, enough beside the perfect
+outlines of his companion's attire. But both faces were very happy.
+
+“How many dollars do you suppose Ellen has, stowed away in that handsome
+purse of hers, ready to spend on the child?” Martha Macauley queried
+of Winifred Chester as they watched the Green Imp out of sight from the
+Macauley porch.
+
+Mrs. Chester shook her head. “I've no idea. She'll want to get him
+everything a child could have. But Red won't let her.”
+
+“He won't know. He'll drop them at a store and go off to the hospital.
+The things will come home by special delivery, and the next thing he
+sees will be Bob in silk socks and white linen.”
+
+“I don't believe it. He'll go shopping with them. He's wild over the
+boy, and he doesn't care a straw what people might think who saw the
+three together. He'll tyrannize over Ellen--and she'll let him, for the
+pleasure of being ruled by a man once more!”
+
+It was a shrewd prophecy and goes to show that women really understand
+each other pretty well--women of the same sort. For Red Pepper Burns did
+go shopping with the pair from start to finish. It was an experience he
+did not see any occasion for missing.
+
+“You won't mind my coming, too?” was all the permission he asked, and
+Mrs. Lessing answered simply: “Surely not, if you care to. We shall want
+your judgment.”
+
+She had not conducted them to a department store, but to the small shop
+of a decidedly exclusive children's outfitter. Burns knew nothing about
+the presumably greater cost of buying a wardrobe in a place like this,
+but he soon scented danger. He scrutinized certain glass showcases
+containing wax lay figures of pink-cheeked youngsters attired as for the
+stage, and boomed his first caution into his companion's ear.
+
+“That's not the sort of puppet we want to make out of Bob, eh?” he
+suggested.
+
+She turned, smiling. “Not unless you intend to keep him in a glass case,
+Doctor Burns.”
+
+“No long-trousered imitation of a sailor-boy, either, please,” said he,
+pointing, disfavour in his eye, at the presentment of a curly-headed
+infant of five in a Jack-tar outfit of white flannel topped by an
+expensive straw hat.
+
+“I see you're not going to trust me,” murmured Mrs. Lessing, as a
+slim-waisted, trailing-black-gowned saleswoman approached.
+
+“I'll trust you, but I intend to keep my eye on you,” admitted
+Burns frankly. He observed with interest the wonderful figure of the
+saleswoman. Quite possibly that lady thought he was admiring her, for
+nothing in his face could have told her that he was mapping out in his
+surgeon's mind her physical anatomy, and speculating as to where in
+the name of Hygeia she could have disposed of her digestive organs in a
+circumference the diminutive size of that!
+
+Underwear first. Mrs. Lessing went straight at the foundations of Bob's
+make up, and began to look over boxes of little gossamer shirts and tiny
+union suits of a fabric so delicately fine that Burns handled a fold of
+it suspiciously.
+
+“Silk?” he questioned.
+
+She shook her head, the corners of her mouth curving. “Only a thread
+now and then. Mostly lisle--for very hot weather. These others have some
+wool in them, for cooler days. Those nearest you are quite warm, though
+very light in weight. For really cold weather--”
+
+“You're not planning to watch the thermometer and keep him changing
+underwear accordingly?”
+
+“Not at all, Doctor Burns. But four weights for the year aren't too
+many, are they?”
+
+“Are you buying for a year ahead?”
+
+“Please let me. I shall not be here when he needs to change.”
+
+Their eyes met. Something in hers made him desist from argument.
+
+Stockings came next. Mrs. Lessing bought substantial tan ones in
+quantity, long and well reenforced. Then she took up socks of russet
+and of white. “Shall you object to his wearing these a good, deal?” she
+asked Burns. He took up one small sample, running his fingers into it.
+“I should think he might put his toes through one of those in an hour
+or two,” he suggested. “His legs are pretty thin. Do you think pipe-stem
+legs in short socks, to say nothing of bruises and scratches, really
+attractive?”
+
+“You want him to go barefooted a good deal of the time, don't you?”
+
+“Sure. But legs in socks are neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring,
+to my thinking.”
+
+In spite of the smile on his lips, he looked obstinate and she
+deliberated, drawing a white sock unmistakably fine and expensive over
+her gray-gloved hand. Plainly she wanted to see Bob in socks and strap
+slippers, of the sort her boy would have worn. As she studied the sock
+Burns studied her profile. “Get him a pair, for your own satisfaction,”
+ he conceded.
+
+He did not hear the order she gave, but the saleswoman was pleasantly
+smiling as she checked it.
+
+The next thing that happened, Bob was being measured. Then he was trying
+on Russian blouse suits that fitted, practical little garments of blue
+galatea, of tan-coloured linen crash, even of brown holland. Burns
+looked on approvingly. The clothes turned Bob into a gentleman's son, no
+doubt of that, but it was the sort of gentleman's son who can have the
+very best of romping, good times.
+
+Something diverted Bums's attention for a little, and when he turned
+back to Bob a bright scarlet reefer had been pulled on over his blouse,
+and a wide sailor hat with a scarlet ribbon crowned his black curls. The
+result was engagingly picturesque. But the critic frowned.
+
+“I'm afraid that won't do, Mrs. Lessing,” he objected decidedly.
+
+“You don't like the colour? Not with his hair and eyes?”
+
+“It won't hurt his hair, but it will his eyes. The sun on that red will
+torture him.”
+
+“Will it? I shouldn't have thought of it. So many children wear them.”
+
+“And shortly come to spectacles. Try it yourself for half an hour.”
+
+She drew off the reefer. Bob objected. “I like the red jacky, Dotter
+Burns,” he said. It was his first comment. Hitherto he had been in a
+dazed state, submitting wonderingly to this strange experience.
+
+Another small coat of tan-coloured cloth with a gorgeous red-and-brown
+emblem on the sleeve consoled him:
+
+“I think we are through,” said Mrs. Lessing Burns looked at her.
+
+“No white clothes?” he asked.
+
+“Did you want him to have some?”
+
+“No. But I thought you would.”
+
+“I have ordered three suits to be made for him,” she admitted, flushing
+a little. “They will be very plain and will launder beautifully. He will
+wear them only on special occasions. Do you mind?”
+
+“Well, not on those conditions,” he agreed reluctantly.
+
+They went to a shoe shop, and Bob became the richer for leather sandals,
+canvas shoes, and various other footwear, some of it undeniably fine.
+Burns took one little black slipper into his hand.
+
+“I wonder what Bob's grandmother would say to that,” he observed in a
+whisper.
+
+Ellen Lessing regarded its mate. Her lashes hid her eyes, but her lip
+quivered and he saw it. The salesman was busy with Bob. Burns laid his
+hand for an instant on hers. She looked up, and a smile struggled with
+the tears.
+
+A toy shop came last. Here Bob was in an ecstasy. His companions walked
+up and down the aisles, following his eager steps. Mrs. Lessing would
+have filled his arms, but she found the way obstructed.
+
+“He may have the train of cars,” Burns consented. “But they must be cars
+he'll have to pull about for himself. No, not the trotting horse, nor
+the trolley on the track, nor any other of the mechanical stuff. I'll
+get him that dandy little tool-chest and that box of building blocks,
+but that's enough.”
+
+“The mechanical toys are of the best, sir,” suggested the salesman.
+“They won't break except with pretty rough handling.”
+
+“That's bad,” Burns asserted. “The quicker they broke, the less
+objection I'd have to 'em. It's a wonder the modern child has a trace
+of resource or inventiveness left in him. Teach him to construct, not to
+destroy, then you've done something for him.”
+
+“Isn't he rather young for tools?” Mrs. Lessing was turning over a small
+saw in her hands, feeling its sharp teeth with a premonitory finger.
+
+“There are gauze and bandages in the office.” He laughed at her
+expression as she laid down the saw.
+
+“You won't object to that box of tin soldiers?” she asked.
+
+“Decidedly. You don't want to spoil him at the start. For a boy who
+never had a toy in his life he's acquired enough now to turn his head.
+Come away, Mrs. Lessing--flee temptation. Come, Bobby boy.” And Burns
+led the way.
+
+Bob, astride of a marvellous rocking-horse taller than himself, was like
+to weep. Mrs. Lessing went to him. He whispered something in her ear.
+She came back to Burns.
+
+“Doctor Burns,” said she, “every boy has a rocking-horse. He's just
+the age to enjoy it. Surely it won't hazard his inventiveness: it will
+develop it. He'll ride all over the country, as you do in the Green
+Imp.”
+
+“What's the price?”
+
+“It's not costly and it's a very good one.”
+
+Burns inquired the price again; this time he asked the salesman. Then he
+spoke low:
+
+“Fifteen dollars seems 'not costly' to you, I suppose. Think of Bob
+yesterday, with not a toy to his name.”
+
+“That's why I want to give him one to-day.”
+
+“He'll be just as happy riding a stick--as soon as he forgets this.”
+
+“He won't forget it. Look at his eyes.”
+
+“You're looking at his eyes all the time. That's what undoes you.”
+
+He had to look away from her eyes then himself, or he felt quite
+suddenly that he, too, would have been undone. He had resisted the
+entreaty in women's eyes many times, but not always, despite the
+reputation he held for indifference.
+
+“Doctor Burns, won't you give me this one pleasure? You've really been
+quite firm all the morning.”
+
+She was smiling, but he had himself in hand again and he was blunt
+with her. “Bob's a bachelor's child now,” he said. “He must be trained
+according to bachelors' ideas. Come, you know it's out of reason to give
+the youngster any more to-day. Be sensible.”
+
+They followed him out of the store, Bob's hand held fast in hers.
+Somehow, they both looked very young as they stood outside the shop
+window, gazing back at the marvellous display within. He felt as if he
+were being rather cruel to them both. This was absurd, of course, when
+one considered the box of blocks, the train of cars and the toolkit. The
+child had enough playthings already to send him out of his head. Burns
+drove away rapidly to get out of range of other windows which seemed
+filled with rocking-horses to-day.
+
+He looked down at Bob.
+
+“Happy, little chap?” he asked.
+
+Bob nodded. His arms clasped the red train but he was not looking at it.
+
+“Like the cars?”
+
+Bob nodded. His wide sailor hat obscured his face. Burns could see only
+the tip of the small nose.
+
+“You'll have a splendid time with those blocks, won't you?”
+
+Again the nod, but no reply.
+
+“The hammer's pretty nice, too, isn't it?”
+
+Once more the dumb answer. But the silence seemed odd, for Bob had long
+since lost his fear 'of these companions.
+
+“Look up here, Bob.”
+
+Reluctantly the child obeyed. Burns caught one fleeting glimpse of wet
+black lashes. One big tear was slowly stealing down the pale little
+cheek.
+
+“What's the matter, old man?”
+
+No reply.
+
+Burns looked at Ellen Lessing behind Bob's back. She did not meet his
+glance. She was looking at the boy. It struck him that her profile made
+the most enchanting outline he had ever seen. He tried to steel his
+heart against them both. He knew his theory was right; he now had the
+chance to put it into practice.
+
+The Green Imp turned a corner to the right. They were not yet out of the
+city, and at the next block the car turned another corner, also to the
+right. At the end of another block the Imp, swerved once more--to
+the right. This brought them back to the wide street which led to the
+shopping district they had lately left. With silent passengers the Imp
+threaded its way to the toy shop. In front of it Burns stopped the car.
+He got out and went in and came out, the big rocking-horse in the arms
+of the salesman who followed him.
+
+He looked up at their faces. Bob's was one wide-eyed countenance of
+incredulous joy. The other's--if he had seen there satisfaction at
+having brought a man to terms he felt he should have despised her; but
+that was not what he saw.
+
+There was, by planning carefully, just room to wedge the rocking-horse
+in at Mrs. Lessing's feet without encroaching on the steering-gear. As
+they drove off, Bob was bending over and gently, stroking the animal's
+splendid black mane, with little chuckles and gurgles of joy. Once more
+Burns looked at Ellen Lessing behind Bob's back.
+
+“You're happy now, aren't you?” he asked in tone of assurance. “Then,
+confound it, I must own I'm paid for letting my wise bachelor notions go
+hang, just for this time!”
+
+“Thank you,” she answered very gently. “And I'm paid for trying to be
+reasonable.”
+
+He laughed, suddenly content. Between them, the little lad who had never
+owned a toy in his life, stowing the red train carefully away between
+has feet, gave himself wholly to the rocking-horse.
+
+
+“Well, Ellen,” was Martha Macauley's greeting to her sister, “did you
+have as interesting a time dressing the child as you expected?”
+
+“I had a charming time,” replied Mrs. Lessing. She shook the dust out of
+her long gray veils smiling at her memory of the morning.
+
+“Did R. P. prove docile?”
+
+“'Docile' doesn't seem to me just the word.”
+
+“I used it in an attempt at fine irony,” explained Mrs. Macauley.
+
+“Well, was he tractable, then?”
+
+“He was very polite and kind and jolly--until the real business of
+shopping began. Then he became suspicious--and a trifle autocratic.” She
+recalled his look as he told her that he would trust her, but that he
+meant to keep an eye upon her.
+
+“Didn't you get your own way about anything?” demanded her sister, with
+eager curiosity.
+
+Ellen looked at her. Martha noted that the soft black eyes were glowing,
+and that she had not seen Ellen appear more alive and interested since
+the days before trouble came to her. “Do you imagine we fought a battle
+over our shopping?” she asked, her lips curving with merriment.
+
+“But you don't tell me. I'm anxious to know whether we shall see the boy
+dressed according to Red's ideas or yours.”
+
+“We agreed beautifully on nearly all points of his dressing. Where we
+differed, we--compromised.”
+
+“Red never compromises with anybody, so I suppose it was done by your
+giving in?”
+
+“He never compromises? You do him injustice. He can compromise
+royally--by the same method of 'giving in.'”
+
+“I simply can't believe it,” murmured Martha, shaking her head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. IN WHICH HE IS ROUGH ON A FRIEND
+
+
+“RED.”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Are you through with that rabble? Can you 'tend to a friend?”
+
+Redfield Pepper Burns wheeled around in his revolving chair and glanced
+sharply at Arthur Chester. What he saw made him follow the moment's
+inspection with a direct question.
+
+“Sit down. What have you been doing?”
+
+Chester sat down. His face was white. He held up one shaking hand. “Red,
+what's the matter with me?”
+
+Burns continued to study the man before him. He made no move to examine
+into his condition, just looked steadily into the other's face with a
+gaze before which his patient presently shifted uneasily.
+
+“Well, of all the ways to treat a fellow!” He tried to laugh. “Is that
+the way you do with the rest of the bunch that come to you every day? Or
+are you trying to hypnotize me?”
+
+“Look me in the eye, Ches. What have you been doing?”
+
+“Working like a fiend in that infernal office. If there's any hotter
+place--”
+
+“There'll be a hotter one for you right on this earth, if you keep on
+the way you're going.”
+
+He rose suddenly, and approaching Chester closely, looked intently into
+the uplifted eyes. He sat down again. “Own up!” he commanded bluntly.
+
+“Red,” begged Chester, “quit this sort of thing. Go at me in the usual
+way. I--I think I'm a bit nervous tonight. I can't stand your gun-fire.”
+
+“All right. When did you begin?”
+
+“Five weeks ago when you were away. I didn't mean to get into it, Red,
+on my word I didn't, after all you've warned me. But it was so beastly
+hot--and there was a lot of extra work at the office. My head got to
+going it night and day. I--say”--he leaned suddenly forward, has head
+on his hands--“I can tell you better if you give me some kind of a
+bracer--I feel--so--deadly.”
+
+Burns got up and prepared something in a glass something not
+particularly palatable, but when it had taken action, which it promptly
+did, Chester's white face had acquired a tinge of colour and he could go
+on.
+
+“I stopped in Gardner's office one day when my head was worse than
+usual. Had to meet a man in ten minutes--important deal on for the
+house--had to be at my best. Told Gardner so. He fixed me.”
+
+“He did--blame him--fixed you for a dope-fiend. I've told you a hundred
+times you had precisely the kind of temperament that must avoid that
+sort of thing like the gallows.” Burns hit the desk with his fist as he
+spoke, with a thump of impatience.
+
+“It seems to set me up for a while--I can do anything. Then afterward--”
+
+“You're getting the afterward all right. How much do you take?”
+
+Chester mentioned the amount of the drug, stating reluctantly that for
+the last two days he had been obliged slightly to increase it in order
+to get the full effect.
+
+“Of course you have--that's the insidiousness of the devil's stuff. How
+soon does it get into action?”
+
+“Oh, right away--almost instantly.”
+
+“What! Is your imagination strong enough to--See here, Ches”--Burns
+leaned forward “you're taking the stuff by mouth, of course?”
+
+Chester's eyes went down. “Why--I tried it that way--but it was so
+slow.”
+
+Burns ejaculated something under his breath; the quick colour, always
+ready to flare under his clear skin, leaped out.
+
+“Gardner gave you a hypo, I suppose?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“So you went and bought a syringe and taught yourself the trick. Suppose
+you give me a look at it.”
+
+Like a shamed schoolboy Chester unwillingly drew forth the small case
+from his pocket. Burns received it. He opened it and took out the tiny
+instrument. “It looks like a very good one,” he observed with a sort
+of deadly quietness, and with one motion of his big fingers snapped the
+glass barrel in two.
+
+At this Chester took fire. “That's going a little too far!” he burst out
+in wrath.
+
+“Is it? Thought it was you who had gone too far. It's up to me to bring
+you back--while I can. Getting this little fiend out of the way is the
+first step. Keep cool, Ches--and I'll try to do the same, though it
+makes my blood boil to think how little you've cared for my lectures to
+you on this very thing.”
+
+“I have cared. But I had no idea.”
+
+“Well, you have one now. It's taken you five weeks to acquire enough of
+a habit to give you some trouble to drop it. You're that sort and
+that's the way it works, anyhow. I wonder you came to me to-night. Found
+yourself out of the stuff and didn't like to try to get it here where
+folks know you?”
+
+“If you want to put everything in the most disagreeable way you
+can--yes,” admitted Chester testily.
+
+“That's precisely what I want to do. Put it in such a disagreeable way
+that your backbone'll stiffen up a bit and give us something to start
+with. If I make you mad all the better--so long as you don't go back
+to fools like Gardner, who never hesitate to give a fellow like you a
+sample of what that drug'll do for 'em:”
+
+“What are you going to do? I shan't sleep to-night, and I've got to be
+in the office to-morrow morning.”
+
+“When's your vacation due?”
+
+“Not till week after next.”
+
+“Arrange to take it now.”
+
+“I can't. Stillinger's off on his, Monday morning.”
+
+“Could you have yours now if he waited?”
+
+“Yes, but I wouldn't ask him.”
+
+“I would.” Burns took down the receiver of his desk telephone.
+
+“Red, stop--I don't want--”
+
+Burns paid no attention to him. In five minutes he had the city
+connection and his man. He stated the case: Chester was in urgent need
+of taking his vacation without delay, but was not willing to ask the
+favour of his office associate. He, Burns, his friend's physician, did
+not scruple to ask it if it would not interfere too seriously with Mr.
+Stillinger's plans. No diplomat could re quest a favour more courteously
+than R. P. Burns, M.D. The reply was the one to be expected of
+Stillinger, bachelor and amiable fellow, who was fond of Chester and
+hoped it was nothing serious. Tell him to go ahead with his vacation,
+Stillinger said, and not to worry over office affairs.
+
+“Now!” Burns wheeled round from the telephone. “Will you put yourself in
+my hands?”
+
+“Do you honestly think I'm such an abandoned case--already,” began
+Chester unhappily, “that you have to--”
+
+“Listen to me, Ches. I don't think you're an abandoned case--that's
+nonsense--after five weeks. But I do think you're well started on a road
+that it's ruin to travel. You began it way back last winter by taking
+that headache stuff in double the dose I gave you, without consulting
+me, every time you felt a trifle below par. That's why I took it
+away from you. You felt the loss of it, and you were an easy mark for
+Gardner's dope. You've grown so dependent on that already that you're
+going to have a fight to get along without it. You can't fight and do
+office work, so I'm going to make the most of my chance during this
+fortnight's vacation--if you'll give me leave. If you won't--I think
+I'll knock you down and get you where I want you that way.”
+
+He smiled--a smile with so much spirit and affection in it that
+Chester's eyes filled, to his own astonishment, for up to this point he
+had been both hurt and angry. After a moment he said, with his eyes on
+the floor, but in a different tone from any he had yet used: “Go ahead,
+Red. I'll try to prove I have some stuff in me yet.”
+
+“Of course you have.” Burns's hand was on his friend's shoulder. “That's
+what I'm counting on. Prove it by following directions to the letter.
+And begin by coming with me for a trip into the country. I have to see a
+case before I go to bed, and the air will do your head good.”
+
+It was the first of many similar trips. Arthur Chester may fairly have
+been said to spend the succeeding fortnight in the company of the Green
+Imp and its driver. From morning till night, and often in the night
+itself when he found it impossible to sleep, he was living in the open
+air by means of this device. Of walking, also, he did an increasing
+amount as his strength grew under the regimen Burns insisted upon. But
+for the first week, in spite of all the help his physician could give
+him, he found himself indeed involved in a fierce struggle--a struggle
+with shaken and unmanageable nerves; with a desperate craving for the
+soothing, uplifting effect of the drug to which he was forced to admit
+he had become perilously accustomed; with a black depression of spirit
+which was worse than anything else he had to combat.
+
+It was at the worst of one of these periods of darkness that, alone with
+his patient upon a hilltop where the two had climbed, leaving the
+Green Imp at a point where the road had become impossible, Burns said
+suddenly:
+
+“Ches, I believe, with all my care to give you the treatment I thought
+you needed, I've failed to point out the most potent remedy of all.”
+
+Chester shook his head. “You've done everything, Red. All the trouble's
+with me. I'm so pitiably weak--so much weaker than I ever dreamed I
+could be. I can't seem to care whether I get out of this or not. All I
+want is to lie down and go to sleep--and never wake up.”
+
+The last words came under his breath, but Burns heard them. He showed no
+sign of being startled, though this mood was a gloomier one than he had
+yet seen his patient succumb to. Instead, he went on talking in a tone
+of confidence:
+
+“I ought to have known enough to apply this remedy, because it's one
+I've tried myself. If you could know, since the night you heard me
+make a certain vow, what a time I've had with myself to keep it, you'd
+understand that I know what it means to try to break up a habit.
+Mine's the habit of years. With my temper and some of my associations,
+intemperate profanity's been the easiest thing in the world to fall
+into. When things went wrong, out would come the oaths like water out
+of a spring--though that's a false comparison: like the filth out of a
+sewer, I'd better say.”
+
+“We all swear more or less,” acknowledged Chester, his head in his
+hands.
+
+“Not as I did--and you know it. I've been responsible for many a boy's
+taking it up, though I didn't realize it. Because I was athletic and in
+for sports with them, they thought I was the whole thing. They laughed
+when I got mad and ripped out a lot of language: they copied it. But
+I never heard myself as others hear me till that night I let go at the
+mother who'd ignorantly murdered her boy by disobeying orders. On the
+way home that night I woke up--came to myself--I don't know how. The
+stars were unusually bright, and I looked up at them and thought of that
+child's soul going back to its Maker.... and then thought of my curses
+following it and coming to His ear.”
+
+A silence fell. When Burns broke it, it was in a voice deep with
+feeling.
+
+“The next words I sent up to that ear were in a different shape. I
+think it was the first real prayer I'd ever said since the little parrot
+prayers my mother taught me. That was the first: it hasn't been the
+last. I don't suppose I say much that would sound like the preacher's
+language, but Ches, what I do believe is that--I get what I ask for.
+That's--help to fight my temptations. And profanity isn't the only one
+nor the toughest one to down.”
+
+Chester looked up. For a moment he forgot himself and his wretchedness.
+“It's hard to believe it's you, Red--talking like this.”
+
+“I know it must be hard, but it ought to be the more convincing on that
+account. I belong to a profession of materialists, and all at once it's
+grown to seem to me the strangest thing in life that a man who studies
+the anatomy of this body of ours should be a materialist. To watch its
+workings and then doubt the God who made it is sheet wilful blindness.
+But, Ches--I've got my eyes open at last. The God who made me is up
+there, and He knows and cares how I go on with the job. As for answering
+my appeals for help when I get hard pressed--the biggest sign I have of
+that is a human one. Since Bobby Burns came to sleep in that little bed
+next mine, it's been a whole lot easier to get on.”
+
+A deep sigh was Chester's reply to this. He had a small boy and girl of
+his own. For their sakes and Winifred's he knew he must fight this fight
+out and win. But as for getting tangible help from the Creator of a body
+handicapped by nerves like his! He began to say this, but Burns broke in
+upon him with the answer he would least have expected at a moment like
+this--a great, ringing laugh, the sound of which brought the slow blood
+to Chester's white face.
+
+“If you consider wrecked nerves like mine a laughing matter--” he broke
+out.
+
+But Burns, his laugh over, was sober again and his voice was earnest.
+“Arthur Chester, don't make Him responsible for your 'wrecked nerves.'
+They weren't wrecked when you were furnished with them. You've done the
+wrecking yourself by breaking pretty nearly every law that governs the
+workings of the human machine. You're paying the penalty. But you're
+going to get the upper hand. From now on, in spite of your office life,
+you're going to get good red blood in your veins--and your brains. The
+worst is over now--the second week will be easier. But what I'm trying
+to tell you is that you'll get that upper hand a lot quicker if”--his
+cheek grew hot with this strange, unaccustomed effort at putting things
+he had never spoken of before into words--“if you'll just reach up and
+take hold of that 'Upper Hand' that, according to my new belief and
+experience, is ready to reach down to you. It's stronger than yours:
+you'll feel the upward pull.”
+
+He broke off and got to his feet. The two had been sitting on a fallen
+log, looking off over the hills toward a distant river winding its blue
+length through fields of living green.
+
+“I wasn't exactly cut out for a preacher, Ches,” he added after a
+minute. “I hope my talk doesn't sound to you like 'cant.' I'm a pretty
+poor specimen of a chap to be setting up my own example for anybody to
+follow.”
+
+“I don't think you've been setting up your own example,” Chester
+replied. He pulled himself up limply from the log, yet out of his face
+had gone the black look which had been there when he came up the hill.
+“And what you've said doesn't sound like 'cant' to me, Red. It sounds
+more like 'can.'”
+
+Red Pepper Burns held out his hand. His big; warm fingers closed hard
+over the thin; cold ones which met them. Then the two men, without more
+words, went away down the hill. From this hour Arthur Chester afterward
+dated the beginning of the end of the fight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH HE PRESCRIBES FOR HIMSELF
+
+
+“Red,” observed James Macauley, junior, “this place of yours looks like
+a drunkard's home.”
+
+He glanced around him as he spoke. The criticism certainly found
+justification in every corner. No more neglected office could have been
+discovered belonging to any practitioner within an area of many miles.
+
+“I suppose it does,” rejoined Burns from the depths of a big, dusty
+leather chair where he sat stretched in an attitude expressing extreme
+fatigue. “But I don't care a hang.”
+
+Macauley looked at him. His eyes were closed. His arms lay upon the
+chair arms, relaxed and limp. For the first time his friend observed
+what might have been noted by a critical eye on any day during the last
+fortnight. The lines on the ordinarily strong, health-tinted face were
+deeper than he had ever seen them; the cheeks were thinner; there were
+even shadows under the thick eyelashes which outlined the lids of the
+closed eyes.
+
+“Look here, old man,” Macauley cried, sudden conviction seizing him,
+“you're working altogether too hard. This miserable city epidemic has
+done you out. I've thought all the time you were trying to cover too
+much ground.”
+
+“Ground's had to be covered,” replied the other briefly, without opening
+his eyes.
+
+“Have the other fellows worked as hard as you?”
+
+“Harder.”
+
+“I don't believe it. They're all city men. You've done all this city
+work and looked after your own patients here, too, to say nothing of
+living in both places at once. With your housekeeper gone home to her
+sick folks, and Miss Mathewson off on one of your cases--no wonder this
+place looks the way it does.”
+
+“It doesn't matter. Cut it out about the place. I'm going back in ten
+minutes.”
+
+“You are! Not going to get to bed?”
+
+“Don't know. I might snatch a nap now if you'd quit talking.”
+
+Macauley closed his mouth. Presently he got up and stole out of the
+room. He was back again in a trice, a flask in one hand, a soda siphon
+in the other, and a small glass balanced on his thumb. When Burns, at
+the sound of a clock ticking somewhere, rubbed his eyes with his fists
+striking in and reluctantly opened them, Macauley spoke briskly:
+
+“See here--I'm going to give you a bracer. I know your confounded
+notions, but they don't cut any figure when you need something to pull
+you together the way you do to-night.”
+
+He started to measure out the amber liquid into the glass, but Burns put
+up a hand.
+
+“Much obliged, but I don't want any.”
+
+“You idiot--don't you know when to make an exception to your rule? I
+admit you've won out over the other fellows just by keeping a steady
+hand, but you're dead as a dog for rest to-night and you need a stiff
+one, if I'm any judge.”
+
+“You're not--for me.” Burns sat up. “O Heavens, man, if I were going to
+break my rule at all it wouldn't be for a drink of anything. It would be
+for a stab in the arm with something that beats your stuff all out for
+stimulating the fatigue out of a fellow and making him feel like working
+till he drops.”
+
+“Why don't you have it then?” asked Macauley curiously. “I should think
+if ever a used-up chap were justified in--”
+
+“Don't give me that talk if you're my friend. It's hard enough to hold
+out without resorting to that game. I don't need you to advise it. I've
+seen enough of that sort of suicide. Buller and Fields are both down and
+out, and they began to brace early in the epidemic. Van Horn's a wreck,
+though he keeps going; and I tell you, I've more respect for that man
+than I ever had before. He's a poseur and a toadier, no doubt of that,
+and I've always despised him for it, but he has real ability and
+he's worked like a fiend through this muss, and not all for his rich
+patients, either. But he's weakening fast, and it's drug stimulation
+that's done it. No, sir: not for mine. But I'll make myself a cup of
+coffee, for I've got to keep awake, and I shall sleep in my tracks if I
+don't.”
+
+He got up and stumbled out into his deserted kitchen. Macauley followed,
+helping as best he knew how, and watched his friend gulp down two
+cupfulls of a muddy liquid with feeling of admiration such as a small
+act of large significance may sometimes stir in one who apprehends.
+
+Two days later Burns, starting toward home in the Imp at a late hour in
+the morning, passed a figure on a corner of a city street waiting for
+the outward-bound trolley. He slowed down beside it.
+
+“May I take you home?” he asked, cap in hand, and interest showing in
+eyes which a moment before had been heavy with fatigue.
+
+Ellen Lessing looked up. “I shall be very glad,” she answered, as she
+met his outstretched hand and let it draw her upward to the vacant
+seat. “The car is always so full at this hour, and I was longing for the
+feeling of the wind against my face.”
+
+“It's cool for late August, and you'll get a breeze on the road home
+that will refresh you. You haven't touched water or milk in this
+plague-stricken district, I hope?”
+
+“No, indeed. Martha warned me a dozen times before I left. How are
+things? Any better?”
+
+“No new cases in twenty-four hours, and the old ones well in hand. I'm
+getting home earlier to-day than I've done for a month, and hope to have
+a few hours off duty. I was planning what to do with them as I came upon
+you.”
+
+“I should think you could do nothing better with them than to go
+home and sleep,” she advised, looking up at his face with a critical,
+friendly survey of the signs of weariness written plainly there. “You
+are worn out, and that means something when one says it of so strong a
+man as you.”
+
+“I could sleep a week, but I'm not sure that a few hours would more
+than aggravate my need. Besides, I shouldn't be at home an hour before
+I should be called out again. No, my plans were forming themselves
+differently, and now that I've met you they're taking definite shape. I
+want--well--suppose I don't tell you! Would you trust me to take you off
+on a rest-seeking expedition without explaining what I mean to do?”
+
+“On a 'rest-seeking expedition'?” she repeated. “Doctor Burns, are you
+sure you hadn't better go on that alone? Suppose I chatter all the way?”
+
+He smiled. “You're not a chatterer. And I don't want to go alone. I
+haven't had a chance for an hour with you for a month, I think. This is
+the only way I can get it. Will you go?”
+
+“You provoke my curiosity. Yes, I think I'll go. I've been shopping
+all the morning and I deserve a reward of rest, if you're sure you know
+where to find it.”
+
+He turned the Imp abruptly aside from the boulevard leading out of town
+down which they had been speeding. He made a detour of certain side
+streets which brought him up before a small side establishment bearing a
+sign which set forth an alluring invitation to motoring parties in need
+of food. He disappeared therein, and was absent for the space of a full
+twenty minutes. When he returned he was followed by a waiter with a
+hamper to whose bestowal in the back of the car he looked carefully.
+
+As they sped away again, Burns turned to his companion, a smile of
+anticipation on his face, to meet a glance of some apprehension.
+
+“You're not repenting your rash trust of me already, are you?” he
+demanded.
+
+“I'm remembering that Martha has four guests at luncheon to-day, and
+expects me to be there!”
+
+“Is that all? Don't let that worry you. We'll simply have a breakdown
+somewhere on the road conveniently near to a spot I know, where I
+can broil the beefsteak I have in that hamper, and make the coffee.
+'Unavoidable detention' will be your apology.”
+
+“'Irresistible temptation' will be my confession,” she admitted. “I'm
+not good at subterfuge and I'm so hungry that the mere mention of
+beefsteak out-of-doors--”
+
+“If it weighs against the plates and salads of a woman's luncheon I
+shall have a great respect for you. Come on, let's run away! You from
+social duties, I from professional ones. I'll agree to stand out Martha
+in your defense. Unless, of course, the opportunity to wear a pretty
+frock and throw all the other women in the shade--”
+
+She laughed. “That's precisely what Martha wants me to do!”
+
+“Then fail her and let the other women win. It's too late to repent,
+anyhow, for here's where we turn off.”
+
+The Imp itself seemed to be running away, so swiftly and silently
+it covered the new road leading off into the hills. Presently it was
+climbing them.
+
+“I want to get where no call-boy monotonously repeating 'Doc-tor
+Bur-rns, Doc-tor Bur-rns', can get hold of me,” the Imp's driver
+explained. “I suppose you're not dressed--nor shod--for a rough walk of
+a quarter of a mile where the car can't go?”
+
+“I'll sacrifice skirts and soles,” she promised. “Isn't the air out here
+glorious? I thought I was tired when I left the city: now I could climb
+that hill and enjoy it.”
+
+“That's precisely what we'll do, then. There's a view from the top worth
+the scramble, but I wasn't sure you'd be game for it. Perhaps I'll know
+you better at the end of this afternoon than I do now. Is there a jolly,
+athletic girl hidden away under that demure manner of yours I've seen so
+far, I wonder?”
+
+“Lead the way up that hill and you'll find out,” she answered with a
+challenging flash of her dark eyes.
+
+He lodged the Imp among a clump of pines, got out the hamper and turned
+to his companion. She had pulled off her gloves, removed hat and veil
+and folded her long, gray coat away in the car. This left her dressed in
+the trim gray skirt of walking length and the gray silk blouse she had
+worn for shopping. Burns looked at her with approval.
+
+“Transformed by magic from a fashionable lady in street attire to a
+girl ready for the woods,” was his comment. “I'm glad you leave off the
+hat--I'll match you by doffing the cap. Now aren't we a pair? Are you in
+for a rush up that first slope? Jove, I'm not half so tired as I was an
+hour ago, already!”
+
+He caught her hand in his, his other arm through the hamper handle, and
+ran with her up the slope. At the edge of the steeper climb to come they
+stopped, breathing fast. “This isn't the way to begin, of course,”
+ he admitted as they both regained their breath, laughing at their
+own enthusiasm, “but I couldn't resist that dash--a sort of dash for
+freedom. Now we'll take it more easily.”
+
+They worked their way up and up among the rocks, he always in advance,
+reaching down a muscular right arm to help her at the steeper places,
+and once giving her a knee to step on when progress could be made only
+up the straight face of a big boulder. It was undoubtedly a stiff climb
+for a woman, but she showed no signs of flinching, and though her cheeks
+glowed richly and her wavy black locks were a trifle loosened from their
+usual order when at last she set foot upon the plateau at the top, she
+showed only the temporary fatigue to be expected after such unusual
+exertion.
+
+“That makes the blood course through one's arteries in a way worth
+while,” was his comment as he regarded with satisfaction the splendid
+colour in her checks and the sparkle in her eyes. “Talk about rest!
+That's the way to get it! Burn up the products of fatigue, replace them
+with fresh cells full of oxygen, and you get rejuvenation. Look at that
+stretch of country before us! Isn't that worth the climb?”
+
+“It's glorious! I've often looked at this height as our car drove by
+on the road over there, and wanted to climb it. But Martha and Jim are
+always for reeling off miles, and so, I thought, were you. I imagined
+there was nobody but myself to care for this.”
+
+“And I thought you liked the porch and the pretty clothes you wear there
+better than anything I could show you in the open,” he owned with a
+laugh. “Not that I haven't enjoyed that porch and the sight of the
+clothes--they don't seem to be just like Martha's and Winifred's
+somehow, though I can't tell why! I've wanted to ask you off for a trip
+like this, but never was sure you'd enjoy it. I'm glad I've found out. I
+feel as if I'd wasted the summer.”
+
+He fell to gathering wood for his fire, and when she had regained her
+breath she helped him in spite of his remonstrance. “Let me have all the
+fun, too,” she begged. “I haven't had a chance like this for four years.
+I used to camp in flannels all summer long, in the roughest sort of
+style, and loved it dearly. I could stand the tension of a long social
+winter twice as well as the other women on account of it.”
+
+He understood, knowing that her husband had occupied a prominent
+official position which called upon him to maintain a corresponding
+place in the society of the city in which they had lived. Although he
+knew her to be still under thirty, he realized that on account of her
+early marriage she had had much experience in the world of affairs. It
+was this aspect of her he had always borne in mind as he had seen her
+before. Now he was beginning to recognize another side of her character
+and tastes, a side which interested him even more than the other had
+done.
+
+Like a pair of children they collected their firewood, racing together
+to the base of operations with armfuls of dry sticks. When there was
+a big pile she surprised him by asking to be allowed to make the fire
+herself.
+
+“I'll prove to you I'm a woodsman,” she asserted, and when she had
+performed her task after the most approved fashion of the skilled
+camper, he acknowledged that she had made good her boast. As the smoke
+cleared away in the direction which left the view unobscured and the
+spot he had selected for the lunching-place free from smoke, he grinned
+approvingly.
+
+“I've no doubt you could grill the steak and brew the coffee with equal
+skill,” he admitted, “but I'm not going to let you. That's my job. I
+want to prove my prowess. Sit down on that log, please, and oversee me.”
+
+She watched with hungry interest while he also gave evidence of his
+craft. It could hardly be the first time that a hamper had been packed
+for him at the place in the city, for nothing he needed had been left
+out, even to a big bottle of spring water with which to make the coffee.
+When his work was nearly complete she spread a square of white linen
+upon a flat rock and set forth the other contents of the hamper--olives
+and bread and butter, crisp celery-hearts, and cream cheese and a tin
+of biscuits. She heated the plates and cups before the fire, and as he
+withdrew his steak from the coals she set a smoking hot platter before
+him and offered him the materials for seasoning.
+
+“You're a crack camper for sure,” he declared. “Ah-h--does that steak
+look fit for the gods, or not? How's the coffee? Clear?”
+
+“Perfect. And the steak looks as if it would melt in one's mouth. Oh,
+isn't this fun? How glad I am I'm here and not at that luncheon!” She
+consulted a tiny watch. “It's two o'clock--they're sitting down,” she
+exulted. “Martha has waited half an hour for me and given me up, and
+she's perfectly furious. I'm wicked enough to feel that that fact is
+going to make this meal taste all the better!”
+
+“Stolen steak and bread and butter eaten in secret have an extra
+relish--no doubt of that. Here--this juicy bit is for you to begin on.
+Set your teeth into it, partner! How's that for food, I ask of you?”
+
+Sitting on the ground opposite each other with the flat rock between,
+they consumed this Arcadian banquet, eating with the zest born of
+exertion and the open air, the sunshine and the comradeship.
+
+“Nothing has tasted quite so good to me in a year,” said she when the
+steak had vanished, dipping a white celery-heart in salt and biting the
+end off with teeth still whiter.
+
+“Nothing ever tasted so good to me,” said he, leaning on his elbow and
+spreading a crisp biscuit with a layer of cheese. “I always think that
+of each meal I eat in a place like this, but this one seems to have a
+special flavour. I wonder if it can be the company?”
+
+He smiled across at her, the sunshine among the pine needles of the tree
+above him throwing flecks of bright copper among the thick locks of his
+hair.
+
+“I think the company is usually an important part of all such outings,”
+ she admitted frankly. “I never took one before in the society of a
+wornout doctor who began to look like a boy again before he had finished
+his coffee. I really shouldn't know you were the same person who invited
+me to go on this expedition.”
+
+“There's nothing like it for renewing one, body and mind. Actual
+physical repose isn't often the best cure for weariness: it's change of
+thought and occupation, particularly if the open air is a part of the
+cure. I've forgotten I have a care in the world: all I can think of
+is--may I say it?--yourself! I can't get over the wonder of seeing you
+turn from what Bob calls his 'pretty lady' into the girl I see before
+me--a girl who looks about nineteen, with a capacity for good sport in
+the open air I never dreamed of.”
+
+“The open air would renew everybody's youth, I think, if everybody would
+go to living out-of-doors. We're through, aren't we? There isn't a crumb
+left! Now please go off and let me clear up and pack away. That's always
+the woman's part. Couldn't you lie down on that inviting carpet of
+needles over there under the big pine and get a bit of sleep?”
+
+“Sleep--when I can talk to you?”
+
+She nodded. “Yes, indeed. I'm not going to talk just now, anyhow, so you
+might as well make the best of it. Throw yourself down with your hands
+under your head, and look up at those beautiful boughs. Please!”
+
+Rather reluctantly he obeyed, and she could see that, weary as he
+undoubtedly still was in spite of the refreshing meal, he really did not
+want to lose any of her society. Lying at full length on his side,
+his head propped on his hand, talking in the lazy tone of after-dinner
+content which had descended upon him, he continued to watch her as she
+repacked the hamper. It was not until she deliberately forsook him that
+he gave up to her wishes. But when, having been out of his sight for ten
+minutes, she peered cautiously through the bushes behind which she had
+screened herself, she saw what she had hoped for. His whole weary frame
+was stretched upon the pine-needle carpet, the lines of his face were
+relaxed, and his eyes fast shut.
+
+The sun was far down the hills when he awoke. He lay blinking at the
+low-sweeping boughs above him for a little without realizing where he
+was; then, as the midsummer stillness which surrounded him took hold of
+his senses, he turned his head to recall to himself the conditions under
+which he had been sleeping. Only the hamper under a tree close by
+gave evidence that he was here by his own volition. He stared about,
+remembering that he had had a companion. He got somewhat stiffly to his
+feet, discovering as he did so that he had lain for a long time without
+stirring from the position in which slumber had overtaken him.
+
+“Mrs. Lessing!” he called.
+
+From some distance away came back a blithe answer: “Here, Doctor
+Burns!”
+
+He started in the direction of the voice and presently came upon her
+sitting on a big granite boulder, busy with a lapful of pine cones
+out of which she seemed to be constructing something. She looked up,
+smiling.
+
+“Why in the world did you let me sleep all the afternoon?” he reproached
+her.
+
+“I should have wakened you in ten minutes more. Have I made you late
+for your work? I understood that you could afford a few hours for rest.
+You've only slept three.”
+
+“Three! Good heavens! When I might have been spending them with you!”
+
+He looked so chagrined that her smile changed into outright laughter.
+“You are very flattering. But I've been taking much more satisfaction in
+your repose than I could possibly have done in your society, no matter
+how brilliant you might have been.”
+
+“That's not flattering, but I admit it has its practical side. Those
+three hours' sleep in the open air have put me on my feet again. Just
+the same, I want to eat my cake and have it, too! Promise me three
+consecutive hours of your company when I'm awake, or I shan't get
+over regretting what I've missed. Will you do this again with me some
+September day when I can make the time?”
+
+“I promise with pleasure. I've had a charming afternoon all by myself
+and wandered all over the hillside, dreaming midsummer day-dreams. We
+must go, mustn't we?” She stood up, her hands full of her work.
+
+“Tell me some of them, won't you, while we climb down to the car?” he
+begged.
+
+“My happiest one,” she said as they descended, “is the making of a
+country home for little crippled children. I think I've found the
+spot--the old Fairmount place--it's not more than five miles from here.
+If I can only buy it at a reasonable figure--”
+
+“Mrs. Lessing!” he broke in. “So that's the sort of thing that makes
+your day-dreams! No wonder--well!--”
+
+“Why should you be surprised? Isn't that a delightful dream? If I can
+only make it come true--”
+
+“You can. Do you want a visiting surgeon?”
+
+“Of course I do. Will you--”
+
+“Why, Mrs. Lessing,” said he, stopping short just below her on the steep
+path and looking up into her face with eyes of eager pleasure, “that's
+been one of my dreams so long I can't remember when I began to think
+about it. But I haven't been able to finance it yet, nor to find time
+to get anybody else to do it. If you'll provide the place I'll do
+everything I can to make it a success. There are no less than four
+children this minute I'm longing to get into such a home. We'll go
+into partnership if you'll take me. I--why--you see, I can't even talk
+straight about it! And you--I thought you were a society woman!”
+
+“I am a society woman, I suppose,” she answered laughing, “though our
+ideas might differ as to what that term stands for. But why should that
+prevent my caring for this lovely plan?”
+
+“Evidently it doesn't. How many sides have you anyhow? I've found out
+two new ones to-day. Girl--and patron saint--”
+
+“Ah, don't make fun of me. I'm no girl and very far from any kind of
+saint. Please help me down this four-foot drop as if I were a very, very
+old lady, for my head is dizzy with joy that I've found somebody to care
+for my schemes.”
+
+He leaped down and held up his arms. “Come, grandma!” he invited, his
+face full of mischief and enthusiasm and happiness.
+
+“I think I'll play girl, after all,” she refused gaily and, accepting
+one hand only, swung herself lightly down to his side.
+
+“And it's 'bracers' the fellows think they need to put the heart back
+into them!” jeered Red Pepper Burns to himself. “Let them try the open
+country and a comrade like this--if there is another anywhere on earth!
+But they can't have her!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. IN WHICH HE CONTINUES TO SAW WOOD
+
+“Here you are at last, Red, you sinner, and I'm the loser. Ches and
+I've had a bet on since we saw the Green Imp tear off just as the first
+guests were coming. I vowed it was a fake call and you'd never get back
+till the musicians were green-flannelling their instruments.”
+
+“I knew he wouldn't do us a cut-away trick like that,” declared Arthur
+Chester with an affectionate, white-gloved hand on Burns's black-clad
+arm. “Not that I'd have blamed you on a night like this. What people
+want to give dances for in August, with the thermometer at the top of
+the tree, I don't know.”
+
+“Go along in, old man, and see the ladies. Take out Pauline. Mrs.
+Lessing isn't dancing. Make a sitting-out engagement with the lovely
+widow, then bolt out here. That's my advice,” urged Macauley.
+
+“Much obliged, I will. Wouldn't have come if Winifred hadn't cornered
+me.”
+
+“She's doing her duty by Pauline, and she considers her duty isn't done
+till she's secured the men Pauline wants. But I say--when you get a look
+at Ellen you'll forget the rivulets coursing down your neck. It's the
+first time she's worn anything not suggestive of past experiences. It's
+only white tonight, but--” Macauley's pause was eloquent.
+
+Burns pushed on into the house, through whose open doors and windows
+came sounds of revelry. A stringed orchestra was playing somewhere out
+of sight, and to its music the late arrival, holding his head well up
+that he might keep his collar intact until the latest possible moment,
+set his course toward his hostess.
+
+Outside, in the bower which had been made of the porch, Chester,
+disgracefully shuffling off the duties of host and lounging with
+Macauley and two or three other of the young married men, reported
+through the flower-hung window the progress of the victim led to the
+sacrifice.
+
+“He's shouldered his way to Win--he's shaking hands and trying not to
+look hot. Hi! Pauline's sighted him already. She's making for him like
+the arrow to the target.”
+
+“Or the bullet for the hippopotamus,” suggested Macauley under his
+breath in Chester's ear. He, too, began to reconnoiter.
+
+“He's asking her if she saved the first one for him, and she's telling
+him she did till the last minute. Her card is full now, but he shall
+have the last half of this next one. Doesn't he look overjoyed?” Chester
+chuckled wickedly.
+
+“Where's Ellen? Why isn't she on deck now just as Red comes?” Macauley
+began to fume. “She's behaved nobly all the evening so far--she might
+have a rational being how for a partner as her reward. But I presume
+she's sitting out somewhere with that chump of a Wardlaw--he follows her
+like a shadow and she's too kindhearted to shake him. She's--”
+
+A voice speaking softly from the lawn below the porch interrupted him.
+“Is Doctor Burns here?” it asked.
+
+Chester went over to the rail. “He's only just come, you know, Miss
+Mathewson. You don't have to call him out this minute, do you?”
+
+“I'm sorry, Mr. Chester, but I'm afraid I must. The call is very
+urgent.”
+
+“Tell 'em to get somebody else.”
+
+“Doctor Burns wouldn't like it--they're special friends of his.”
+
+“Oh, well--I suppose he'll see the bright side of getting out of that
+Turkish bath in there, but I must say I wish I didn't have to pull
+through this whole affair without his support,” grumbled Chester as he
+went in to find Burns, now disappeared into the inner rooms where the
+music came from.
+
+Red Pepper came out looking the name more than usual, for three rounds
+of the floor had brought, as it seemed to him, every drop of blood
+to his face, and his hair clung damply to his brow. He held a brief
+colloquy with his office nurse.
+
+“No way out; I'll have to go, Ches,” said he with ill-concealed joy.
+
+“But you'll hustle? You'll make one more try of it?” begged Chester.
+“This thing won't break up early: not with Pauline pushing it. You'll be
+back in time to be taken out and fed?”
+
+“Try to,” and Burns disappeared off the end of the porch.
+
+“Lucky dog,” gloomed Macauley. “The call's five miles out on the road
+to the city. I'd like to be in the Green Imp for the spin Red'll make of
+it. By George! I--”
+
+He broke off suddenly, gave a hasty look around and bolted off the end
+of the porch into the semidarkness of the lawn. He ran across behind the
+houses to his own back porch, procured a dustcoat from within and dashed
+back, regardless of the bodily heat he was generating. As the Green Imp
+backed out of the barn Macauley swung himself into the unoccupied seat.
+
+Burns, also in dust-coat pulled on over his evening clothes, grinned
+cheerfully. “Deserter?” he queried.
+
+“You'll be back within the hour, won't you?”
+
+“Less than that, probably. The Imp's running like a bird to-night--show
+you her paces when we get out. Hi, there! Who's that chasing us? Well,
+of all the--you, too, Ches?”
+
+Panting, Chester flung himself upon the running-board just as the car
+turned out of the yard. “Had a hunt for my coat--nearly lost you!” he
+gasped.
+
+Burns stopped the car. “See here, sonny,” he expostulated. “You happen
+to be host, you know. I might be detained out there, though I don't
+expect it.”
+
+“I'll take the trolley back if you are,” replied Chester, settling
+himself. “I can't stand it to see you fellows cut away out of the
+pow-wow and not go, too. I'll take my chances.”
+
+“So be it!” and, laughing, with a glance back at the gaily lighted
+house, Burns sent the car on her course. “You two are always bragging up
+the married life,” he remarked as the Green Imp gathered speed, “but
+it strikes me you're pretty eager to get away from the glories of your
+wives' entertaining.”
+
+“It's one curious thing,” admitted Macauley thoughtfully, “that no
+matter how harmonious a couple may be they're bound to differ on what
+does and does not constitute entertainment.”
+
+“Of course, a girl like Pauline always wants to dance, no matter how
+torrid the night,” explained Chester. “Win and I have to consider our
+guest's wish. But you can bet Pauline isn't getting her wish--not with
+R. P. Burns running around the country all the evening and only making
+five-minute stops at her side.”
+
+By the speed with which the Green Imp swallowed the ground it looked as
+if Burns might make several such trips and still interpolate a number
+of “five-minute stops” before the affair at the Chester house should
+be over. Before his passengers were well aware of the distance they
+had covered he pulled up in front of a small cottage. They settled
+themselves comfortably to await a fifteen-minute stay, but in five he
+was out again. Both dust coat and clawhammer were off--his sleeves were
+rolled to the elbow.
+
+“I'm in for it, boys,” he said. “Can't get away under two hours at the
+shortest. Sorry. But they didn't let me know what they wanted me for,
+and I'm caught. You'll have to drive home. Call up Johnny Caruthers and
+let him bring back the Imp and Miss Mathewson. I can't be spared long
+enough to go myself, so take her this note to tell her what to bring.
+Get busy, now.”
+
+He handed Macauley a hasty scrawl on a prescription blank, and smiled at
+the discomfited faces of his two friends showing plainly in the lights
+which streamed from the house.
+
+“You look blamed pleased over your job,” growled Macauley.
+
+“I like the job all right,” admitted Burns; “particularly when
+contrasted with--”
+
+“You wouldn't say it if you'd caught one glimpse of Mrs. L.” called
+back Chester, as the Imp responded somewhat erratically to Macauley's
+unaccustomed touch. But all the answer they got was, an emphatic “Don't
+change gears as if you were running a thrashing machine, Mac.”
+
+It was two hours and a half later that Burns came out of the small
+cottage again, wiping a damp face, his white shirt-front a pathetic
+ruin, his hastily reassumed white waistcoat and tie decidedly the worse
+for having been carelessly handled. But his face, when he turned it
+toward the stars as he crossed the tiny patch of a flower-bordered yard,
+was a contented one.
+
+“It pays up all the arrears when you can leave a chunk of happiness
+behind you as big as that one,” he said to himself. Johnny Caruthers had
+gone home by trolley long ago, and Miss Mathewson was to remain for
+the night and return with the doctor when he came for his morning
+after-visit. Burns sent the Green Imp off at a moderate pace, musing as
+he drove through the now moderated and refreshing air of two o'clock in
+the morning.
+
+“Party must be about over by now; think it'll adjourn without seeing
+any more of Red Pepper and his misused dress clothes,” he reflected.
+“I suppose those dancing puppets think they've had a good time, but
+it isn't in it with mine. Bless the little woman: she's happy over her
+first boy! He's a winner, too. As for Tom, I could have tipped him
+over with a nod of the head when he was thanking me for leaving the
+merry-go-round to stand by. It must feel pretty good to be the father of
+a promising specimen like that. Must beat the adopting business several
+leagues. And that's not saying that Bobby Burns isn't the best thing
+that ever happened to R. P.”
+
+Philosophizing thus, he presently sent the Green Imp at her quietest
+pace in at the home driveway. The Chester house was still brilliantly
+illumined; his own dark except for the dim light in the office and--he
+discovered it as he rounded the turn--a sort of half-radiance coming
+from the windows of his own room, where Bob slept in the small bed
+beside his own. Burns gazed anxiously at this, for it showed that
+somebody had turned on the hooded electric. He was accustomed to leave
+the door open into his private office; in which a light was always
+burning, and with this Bob had hitherto been satisfied.
+
+“He must have waked up and called for Cynthia,” he decided. Housing the
+Imp, he quietly crossed the lawn to the window, avoiding any sound of
+footsteps on the gravelled paths. Both windows, screened by wire and
+awnings, were wide open; he could see with ease into the room, for the
+house was an old one and stood low. Climbing wistaria vines wreathed
+the windows, and sheltered by these he found himself secure from
+observation.
+
+For after the first look he became exceedingly anxious not to be
+discovered. He had come home in the stirred and gentle mood often
+brought upon him by his part in such a scene as the one he had lately
+left behind him. In the first wave of joy swept by a birth into a home,
+whether humble or exalted, the man who has been of service in the hour
+of trial is often caught and lifted into a sympathetic pleasure which
+lasts for some time after he has gone on to less satisfying work. Burns
+had often jeered gently at himself for being, as he considered, more
+than ordinarily susceptible to a sort of odd tenderness of feeling under
+such conditions, and as he stared in at the scene before him he was
+uneasily conscious that he could not have come upon it at a more
+vulnerable moment.
+
+Bobby Burns was sitting straight up in bed, his cheeks flushed, his
+eyelids reddened as if with prolonged crying, but his small face radiant
+with happiness as he regarded his companion, his plump little fist
+thrust tight into the hand which held his. In a chair close beside him
+sat a figure in silvery white; bare, beautifully-moulded arms, from
+which the gloves had been pulled and flung aside upon the bed, gleaming
+in the glow from the hooded light.
+
+Black head was close to black head, her black lashes and his disclosed
+dark eyes curiously alike in the distracting glance of them; even the
+colouring of the faces was similar, for both showed the warm and peachy
+hues laid there by the summer sun.
+
+“They might easily be mother and son,” was the thought forced upon the
+spectator. His own cheek suddenly burned, in the shadow of the wistaria
+vines.
+
+He listened abstractedly to the conclusion of the story: it must have
+been a charming tale, for the boy's cry of regret when it ended was
+eloquent. But the eavesdropper heard with full appreciation the richness
+of the low voice and could not wonder at Bob's delight in it. He watched
+with absorbed eyes the embrace exchanged between the two and, forgetting
+to be cautious, allowed his shifted foot to crunch the gravel under the
+window.
+
+Quicker than thought the light went out. Burns made for the office door,
+consumed with eagerness to catch her before she could get away. But
+when he set foot upon the threshold of his room only the little figure,
+pulling itself again erect in the bed, met his eyes in the dim light
+issuing from the office, and otherwise the room was empty.
+
+“Nobody heard me cryin' but her,” explained Bob to his questioning
+guardian. “Cynthia was all goned away and I heard the fiddles and they
+made me cry. She comed in and told me stories. I love her. But she
+wented awful quick out that way.” He pointed toward a French window
+opening like a door upon the lawn. “I wish she didn't go so quick. She
+looked awful pretty, all white and shiny. She loves me, I think, don't
+you?”
+
+“Of course, old man. That's your particular good luck--eh? Now lie down
+and go to sleep and tell me all about it in the morning.”
+
+“Aren't you going back to the party?” queried Bob anxiously.
+
+“Hardly.” Burns glanced humorously down at his attire. “But I'm not
+going to bed just yet, so shut your eyes. I'll not be far away.”
+
+The child obeyed. Exchanging the claw-hammer for his office coat, Burns
+went out by way of the French window to the rear of the house.
+
+An hour afterward Arthur Chester, putting out lights, discovered from a
+back window a familiar figure at a familiar occupation. But at this hour
+of the night the sight struck him as so extraordinary that, curiosity
+afire, he hurriedly let himself out of the side door he had just locked,
+and crossed the lawn.
+
+“In the name of all lunatics, Red, why sawing wood? It can't be ill
+temper at missing the show?”
+
+In the August moonlight the figure straightened itself and laid down the
+saw. “Go to bed, and don't bother your addle pate about your neighbours.
+Can't a man cut up a few sticks without your coming to investigate?”
+
+“Saw a few more. You haven't got the full dose necessary yet,” advised
+Chester, his hands in his pockets. “Want me to sit up with you till you
+work it all off?”
+
+“It's beginning to look as if it wouldn't work off,” muttered R. P.
+Burns.
+
+“Must be a worse attack than usual. How long have you been at it?”
+
+“Don't know.”
+
+“Sawed that whole heap at the side there?”
+
+“Suppose so.”
+
+“Lost a patient?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Blow out a tire?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Bad news of any sort?”
+
+“No. Go to bed.”
+
+“I feel I oughtn't to leave you,” persisted Chester. “Don't you think it
+might ease your mind to tell me about it?”
+
+Burns came at him with the saw, and Chester fled. Burns went back to
+his woodpile, marshalled the sawed sticks into orderly ranks, then stood
+still once more and once more looked up at the stars.
+
+“If an hour of that on a night like this won't take the nonsense out of
+me,” he solemnly explained to a bright particular planet now low in the
+heavens, “I must be past help. But I'll be--drawn and quartered if I'll
+give in. Haven't I had knockouts enough to be able to keep my head this
+time? Red Pepper Burns, 'Remember the Maine' Now, go to bed yourself!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. IN WHICH HE IS UNREASONABLY PREOCCUPIED
+
+
+“Red Pepper Burns, put down that stuff and come over. It's nine o'clock,
+and Pauline goes tomorrow, as you very well know. And not only Paul, but
+Mrs. Lessing. Paul's persuaded her to start when she does, though she
+wasn't expecting to go for three days longer.”
+
+R. P. Burns looked up abstractedly. “Can't come now. I'm busy,” he
+replied, and immediately became reabsorbed in the big book he was
+studying.
+
+Chester gazed at him amazedly. He sat at the desk in the inner office,
+surrounded by books, medical magazines, foreign reviews in both French
+and German, as Chester discovered on approaching more closely, by loose
+anatomical plates, by sheets of paper covered with rough sketches of
+something it looked more like a snake in convulsions than anything else.
+Evidently Burns was deep in some sort of professional research.
+
+It was not that the sight was an unaccustomed one. There could be no
+question that R. P. Burns, M.D., was a close student; this was not the
+first nor the fortieth time that his friend had thus discovered him.
+The view to be had from the point where Chester stood, of the small
+laboratory opening from this office, was also a familiar one. He could
+see steam arising from the sterilizer: he knew surgical instruments were
+boiling merrily away there. A table was littered with objects suggesting
+careful examination: a fine microscope in position; a centrifuge, Bunsen
+burners, test-tubes; elsewhere other apparatus of a description to make
+the uninitiated actively sympathetic with the presumable coming victim.
+
+The point of the situation to Chester was that astonishing fact that
+Burns could hear unmoved of the immediate departure of Ellen Lessing.
+He made up his mind that this scientific enthusiast could not have
+assimilated the dreadful news; he would try again.
+
+“Red! Do you hear? She's going to-morrow--tomorrow!”
+
+“Let her go. Don't bother me.”
+
+“I don't mean Pauline. Ellen's going, too.”
+
+Burns put up one sinewy hand and thrust it through his hair, which
+already stood on end. His collar was off and he wore a laboratory apron:
+his appearance was not prepossessing. He pulled a piece of paper toward
+him and began to make rapid lines. It was the snake again, in worse
+convulsions than before. Evidently he had not heard. Chester approached
+the desk.
+
+“Red!” he shouted. “The patient isn't on the table yet: he won't die
+if you listen to me one minute. I want you to take this thing in. Mrs.
+Lessing--”
+
+Knocking the sketch to one side and precipitating three books and a mass
+of papers to the floor, Red stood up. He towered above his shrinking
+fiend, wrath in his eye. His lips moved. If it had been three months
+earlier Chester would have expected to hear language of a lurid
+description. As it was, the first syllable or two did slip out, but
+no more followed. Only speech--good, vigorous Saxon, not to be
+misunderstood.
+
+“Will you try to get it into your brain that I don't care a hang who
+goes or where, so long as I figure out a way to do this trick? The other
+fellows all say it can't be done. Not one of 'em'll do it, not even Van
+Horn. I say it can, and I'm going to do it to-morrow morning at nine
+o'clock, if I can work out a tool to do it with and make it. And I can
+do that if idiots like you will get out and keep out.”
+
+He sat down and was instantly lost again in his effort at invention.
+Chester looked at him in silence for a minute more, then he walked
+quietly out. Offended? Not he. He had not listened to invective from
+that Celtic tongue for eight years not to know that high tension over a
+coming critical operation almost invariably meant brilliant success.
+But even he had never seen Red Pepper keyed up quite so taut as this. It
+must be a tremendous risk he meant to take. Success to him--the queer,
+fine old boy!
+
+“He may be over later when he gets that confounded snake of an
+instrument figured out.” Chester offered this to the group upon his
+porch as consolation.
+
+“And if he doesn't get it figured out before we break up, he won't
+be over,” prophesied Macauley. “Ten to one he forgets to come and say
+good-bye before he starts for the hospital in the morning.”
+
+“I'm going to be standing beside the driveway when he goes,” vowed
+Pauline. “And if he doesn't notice me I'll climb on the car.”
+
+“Ellen, don't go to-morrow,” whispered Martha Macauley to her sister.
+“Don't let it end this way. When he comes to, you'll be gone, and that's
+such a pity just now.”
+
+“But I think I would rather be gone, dear.” Ellen Lessing whispered
+back.
+
+“Oh, why? When Red's excited over a big success he's simply off his
+head--there's no knowing what he won't do.”
+
+“I prefer him when he has his head. Don't urge, Martha. I've promised to
+go in the morning with Pauline, and nothing could make me change.”
+
+“It's a shame for him to be so absorbed. Who wants a man who can forget
+the existence of a woman like that?”
+
+“Who wants one who can't? A sorry surgeon he'd be--his hand would shake.
+Don't talk about it any more, dear. I'm going to enjoy this evening with
+you all. And I hope--oh, how I hope--that operation will be a success!”
+
+If it were not to be a success it would not be the fault of the man who
+worked till one o'clock--two o'clock--three o'clock it the morning to
+perfect the strangely convoluted tool which was to help “do the trick”
+ if it could be done. Part of the work was done in the laboratory, part
+in the machine shop which occupied a corner of the old red barn, where
+the Green Imp lent her lamps as aids to the task in hand. At four, the
+instrument finished, sterilized, and put away as if it were worth its
+weight in gold--which it might easily have been if it were to prove
+fitted to the peculiar need--Burns went to bed. At six he was up again,
+had a cold plunge and a hearty breakfast, and at seven was sending the
+Imp out of the gateway, his office nurse beside him. If Mrs. Lessing
+hoped the operation would be a success, Miss Mathewson hoped and feared
+and longed with all her soul. Beneath the uniform and behind the quiet,
+plain face of the young woman who had been R. P. Burns's professional
+assistant for eight years, lived a person than whom none cared more how
+things went with him. But nobody knew that least of all Burns himself.
+He only knew that he could not get on without her; that never a suture
+that she had prepared made trouble for him after an operation: and that
+none other of the hundred nice details upon which the astounding results
+of modern surgery depend was likely to go wrong if it were she who was
+responsible.
+
+At five o'clock that afternoon the Green Imp came back. Arthur Chester
+had just returned from the office and had thrown himself into a hammock
+on the porch, for the September weather was like that of June. Catching
+the throbbing purr of the Imp as the car swung in at the driveway
+Chester jumped up. Burns flung out a triumphant arm; Miss Mathewson was
+smiling.
+
+“By George, the old boy's won out!” Chester said to himself, and hurried
+down to meet the Imp. “All over but the shouting, Red?” he questioned
+eagerly.
+
+“All over.” Burns's face was aflame.
+
+“Pull up and tell me about it.”
+
+The car came to a standstill. “Nothing to tell. The curve I got on that
+bit of steel did the work, around the corner and inside out. The fellows
+said it wouldn't; stood around and croaked for an hour beforehand. Lord!
+I'd have died myself before I'd have failed after that.”
+
+“Should have thought they'd have unsettled your nerve,” declared
+Chester, looking as if he would like personally to pitch into the entire
+medical profession.
+
+“Didn't. Just made me mad. I can do anything when I'm mad--if I can
+keep my mouth shut.” Burns laughed rather shamefacedly. “That's the one
+advantage of a temper. I say, Ches, don't you want to go with me? There
+are probably half a dozen calls waiting at the office. I'll run and
+see.”
+
+He jumped out, seized his surgical handbags and hurried away. Miss
+Mathewson descended more deliberately, Chester plying her with eager
+questions as he assisted her. “How was it? Pretty big feather in his
+cap, Miss Mathewson?”
+
+“Indeed it was, Mr. Chester. Every one of the other city surgeons said
+it couldn't be done without killing the patient. They all admitted that
+if she survived the operation she would have every chance for recovery.
+They were all there to see. I never knew them all there at once before.”
+
+“It would be ungenerous to imagine they wanted him to fail,” chuckled
+Chester, “but we're all human. How did they take it when he succeeded?”
+
+“They remembered they were gentlemen and scientists,” declared Miss
+Mathewson--“all but one or two who aren't worth mentioning. When they
+saw he had done it, they began to clap. I don't believe there was ever
+such a burst of applause in that surgery.”
+
+“What did the old fellow do? Tried to look modest, I suppose,” laughed
+Chester, glowing with pride and pleasure.
+
+“He was white all through the operation--he always is, with the strain.
+But he turned red all over when they cheered, and just said: 'Thank you,
+gentlemen.' It really was a wonderful thing, Mr. Chester, even in these
+days. Only one man has done it, a German, and he has done it only twice.
+Doctor Burns will be distinguished after this.”
+
+“Good for him! No wonder he looks the way he does--as if he'd like to
+turn a few handsprings,” Chester reflected as he watched the nurse's
+trim figure walk away.
+
+Burns came back. “Jump in,” he said. “Work enough to keep me busy till
+bedtime. If there hadn't been, I'd have proposed a beefsteak in the
+woods by way of a celebration and a let down. I'm beginning to get a bit
+of reaction, of course; should have liked an hour or two of jollity. You
+and Win, and Mrs. Lessing and I might have--”
+
+“Mrs. Lessing! You old chump, don't you remember she's gone? Why, Mac
+started for the train with them all in his car, not ten minutes before
+you came. They haven't been gone fifteen. I begged off from going along
+because I was dusty and tired. Just got home myself.”
+
+R. P. Burns, making the circuit of the driveway behind the houses and
+now turning the Imp's nose toward the street again, stared at his friend
+in amazement.
+
+“Why, she wasn't going till day after to-morrow!” he exclaimed.
+
+“I came over last night,” drawled Chester in a longsuffering tone, “and
+explained to you and shouted at you and tried in every way to ram the
+idea into your head that Pauline had wheedled Mrs. Lessing to start when
+she did, because their routes lay together as far as Washington. You put
+me out, calling me names and generally insulting me. It's all right, of
+course. She's to spend the winter in South Carolina, but she'll be back
+next summer. You can say good-bye to her then. It'll do just as well.”
+
+Burns's watch was in his hand. “What time does that train go?” he
+demanded.
+
+“Five-thirty. You can't make it.” Chester's watch was also out. “What
+do you care? Send her a picture postcard explaining that you forgot all
+about her until it was too--”
+
+The last word was jerked back into his throat by the jump of the Green
+Imp. She shot out of the driveway like a stone out of a catapult, and
+was off down the mile road to the station, All conveyances going to that
+train had passed quarter-hour before, and the course was nearly clear.
+
+“There's the train's smoke at the tunnel. You can't do it,” asserted
+Chester, pointing to the black hole a few rods to one side of the
+station whence a gray cloud was issuing. “She only makes a two minute
+stop. You won't more than get on board before--”
+
+“If I get on board you drive into the city and meet me there, will you?”
+ begged Burns.
+
+“I can't drive the Imp, Red; you know I can't.”
+
+“Then 'phone Johnny Caruthers from the station and send him in for me.
+That'll give me fifteen minutes on the train.”
+
+“What's the use? Pauline'll be at your elbow every minute. She'll--”
+
+But Burns was paying no attention. He was taking the Imp past a
+lumbering farm-wagon with only two inches to spare between himself and
+the ditch. Then the car was at the station, Burns was out and through
+the building, through the gate and upon the slowly-moving train after
+a moment's hasty argument with a conductor to whom he could show no
+ticket. On the platform James Macauley, junior, and Martha Macauley,
+Winifred Chester, and four small children of assorted ages stared after
+the big figure bolting into the Pullman. Bobby Burns gave a shriek of
+delight followed by a wail of disappointment.
+
+“By George, he's turned up, after all!” exulted Macauley, and the two
+women looked at each other with meaning, relieved glances.
+
+In the car, the passengers observed interestedly the spectacle of a
+large man with a mop of fiery red hair, from which he had pulled a
+leather cap, striding, dust-covered, into the car and up to the two
+prettiest young women there. One of these very smartly clad in blue,
+received him with looks half gay, half pouting, and with a storm of
+talk. The other, in gray, with a face upon which no eye could rest once
+without covertly or openly returning in deference to its charm, gave him
+a quiet hand and turned away again to wave her farewell to the group of
+friends on the platform.
+
+“Take my chair and I'll perch on the arm of Ellen's,” commanded
+Pauline, “while you explain, apologize and try to make your peace with
+us. You'll find it hard work. I may smile for the sake of appearances,
+but inside I'm really awfully angry. So is Ellen, though she doesn't
+show it.”
+
+Thus Pauline, indefinitely prolonged and repeated, with variations,
+interpolations, interruptions. It didn't matter; Redfield Pepper Burns
+heard none of it. Even with Pauline “perching” on the arm of Ellen
+Lessing's chair, her face within eight inches of the other face, she was
+not within the field of his vision.
+
+“I am sure the operation was successful,” said Mrs. Lessing.
+
+“One can see it in his eyes,” declared Pauline. “I never knew hazel eyes
+could be so brilliant.”
+
+“It went through,” admitted Burns. “It had to, you know. And I had a
+thing to make last evening.”
+
+“Arthur told us about it,” chattered Pauline. “It was like a sna--”
+
+“You didn't miss my not coming over,” said Burns. He was leaning
+forward, his hands on his knees, his rumpled head near enough so that
+very low tones could reach the person to whom he spoke. He did not once
+look at Pauline. One would have thought that that fact alone would have
+quieted her, but it did not.
+
+“Indeed we did--awfully!” cried Pauline.
+
+“Neither did I myself, then, Mrs. Lessing. I miss it now. I shall miss
+it more whenever I think about it. I don't know of but one thing that
+can possibly make it up to me.”
+
+“Name it! You don't deserve it, but our hearts are rather tender, and
+we might grant--” Pauline looked arch. But what was the use? Nobody saw.
+Even the passengers were watching the one in gray. Spectators always
+watch the woman at whom the man is looking. And in this case it seemed
+well worth while, for even the most admirable reserve of manner could
+not control the tell-tale colour which was slowly mounting under the
+direct and continued gaze of the man with the red hair. The man himself,
+it occurred to more than one passenger, was rather well worth study.
+
+“It's always been a theory of mine that no woman can know a man until
+she's exchanged letters with him for a considerable period of time--say,
+a winter,” Burns went on. Pauline, made some sort of an exclamation,
+but he failed to notice it--“Neither can a man know a woman. It's a
+stimulating experience. Suppose we try it?”
+
+“How often do you propose to write to us?” inquired Pauline.
+
+Now, at last, Red Pepper Burns looked at her. If she had known him
+better, she would have known that all his vows to keep his tongue from
+certain words were at that moment very nearly as written in water. But
+the look he gave her stung her for an instant into silence.
+
+“I shall want to hear about Bob,” Ellen replied, “all you can tell me.
+I have promised to write to him. You will have to read the letters aloud
+to him--which will give you a very fair idea of what I am doing. But if
+you care for an extra sheet for yourself--now and then--”
+
+“An extra sheet! When I am in the mood I am likely to write a dozen
+sheets to you. When I'm not, a page will be all you'll care to read.
+Will you agree to the most erratic correspondence you ever had, with the
+most erratic fellow?”
+
+“It sounds very promising,” she answered, smiling.
+
+The train drew into the city station. The stop was a short one, for the
+Limited was late. In the rush of outgoing and incoming passengers
+Burns managed, for the space of sixty seconds, to get out of range of
+Pauline's ears.
+
+“I shall count the hours till I get that first letter,” said he.
+
+She looked up. “You surely don't expect a letter till you have sent
+one?”
+
+He laughed. “I'm going home to begin to write it now,” he said.
+
+Pauline accompanied him to the vestibule where he shook hands with her
+forgivingly. From the platform he secured a last glimpse of the other
+face, which gave him a friendly smile as he saluted with his dusty
+leather cap held out toward her at the length of his arm. When he could
+no longer see her he drew a gusty sigh and turned away.
+
+As he stood at the street entrance of the big station, waiting for
+Johnny Caruthers and the Green Imp, this is what he was saying to
+himself:
+
+“Red, you've made more than one woman unhappy, to say nothing of
+yourself, by making love to her because she was a beauty and your head
+swam. This time you've tried rather hard to do her the justice to wait
+till you know. Only time and absence can settle that. Remember you found
+a nest of gray hairs in your red pate this morning? That should show
+that you're gaining wisdom at last, the salt in the red pepper, 'the
+seasoning of time,' eh, R. P.? But by the rate of my pulse at this
+present moment I'm inclined to believe--it's going to be a bit hard to
+write an absolutely sane letter. Perhaps it would be safer if I knew
+Pauline Pry would see it! I'll try to write as if I knew she would....
+But by the spark I thought I saw in those black eyes I don't really
+imagine Pauline will!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. IN WHICH HE SUFFERS A DEFEAT
+
+
+The hands of the office clock were pointing to half after two, on a
+certain September night, when Burns came into his office, alone. The
+fire in the office fireplace, kept bright until nearly midnight, when
+his housekeeper had given up waiting for him and gone to bed, had burned
+to a few smouldering lumps of cannel-slag. A big leather easy-chair,
+its arms worn with much use, had been pulled into an inviting position
+before the fireplace, and the night-light by the desk was burning, as
+usual. All that could be expected had been done by the kind-hearted
+Cynthia, who comprehended, by signs she knew well and had been watching
+for several days, that affairs were going wrong with her employer.
+
+But he needed more than could be given him by things inanimate--needed
+it woefully. He came in as a man comes who is not only physically' weary
+to the point of exhaustion, but heart sick and sore besides. He dropped
+his heavy surgical bags upon the floor by the desk as if he wanted never
+to take them up again, pulled off coat and cap and let them fall where
+they would, then stumbled blindly over to the big chair and sank into it
+with a great sigh, as if he had reached the end of all endeavour.
+
+If it had been physical fatigue alone which had brought him to this pass
+he might have dropped asleep where he sat, and waked, after an hour or
+two, to drag himself away to bed, like one who had been drugged. For a
+short space, indeed, he lay motionless in the chair in the attitude of
+one so spent for sleep that he must needs find it in the first place his
+body touches. But there are times when the mind will not let the body
+rest. And this was one of them.
+
+The scene he had left lately was burning before his tired eyes; the
+sounds he had lately heard were beating in his brain. For a week he had
+been putting every power he possessed into the attaining of an end for
+which it had more than once seemed to him that he would be willing to
+sacrifice his own life. He had dared everything, fought every one, had
+his own way in spite of every obstacle, believing to the last that he
+could win, as he had so often won before, by sheer contempt of danger.
+But this time he had failed.
+
+That was all there was of it--he had failed, failed so absolutely, so
+humiliatingly, so publicly--this was the way he put it to himself--that
+he was in disgrace. He had operated when others advised against
+operation and had seemed to succeed, brilliantly and incredibly. Then
+the case had begun to go wrong. He had operated a second time--against
+all precedent, taking tremendous risks--and had lost.
+
+But this was not the worst. He had lost cases before and had suffered
+keenly over them, but not as he was suffering now. In a world of death
+some cases must be lost, even by the most successful of all of his
+profession. But this was an unusual case. This was--O God--how could he
+bear losing this one?
+
+He had known her from a little girl of eight till now, when at sixteen,
+bright, beautiful, winsome sixteen, he had... what had he done? She
+might have had a chance for life--without operation. He had taken that
+chance away. And she had trusted him--how she had trusted him! Ah, there
+was the bitter drop in the cup the turn of the knife in the raw wound.
+When the others had opposed, she had looked up at him with that smile
+of hers--how could she smile when she was in such pain?--and whispered:
+“Please do whatever you want to, Doctor Burns.” And he had answered
+confidently: “Good for you, Lucile--if only they'd all trust me like
+that I'd show them what I could do!”
+
+Vain boast--wild boast! He had been a fool--twice a fool--thrice a
+fool! He was a fool clear through--that was the matter with him--a proud
+fool who had thought that with a thrust of his keen-edged tools he
+could turn Death himself aside.
+
+And when he had tried his hand a second time, in the last futile effort
+to avert the impending disaster, she had trusted him just the same. When
+he had said to her, speaking close to her dull ear: “Dear little girl,
+I'm going to ask you to go to sleep again for me,” she had turned
+her head upon the pillow, that tortured young head--he would not have
+thought she could move it at all--and had smiled at him again... for the
+last time... He would remember that smile while he lived.
+
+He got up from his chair as the intolerable memory smote him again, as
+it had been smiting him these three hours since the end had come. He
+began to pace the floor, back and forth back and forth. There were those
+who said that R. P. Burns threw off his cases easily, did not worry
+about them, did not take it to heart when they went wrong. It is a thing
+often said of the men who must turn from one patient to another, and
+show to the second no hint of how the first may be faring. Those who say
+it do not know--can never know.
+
+The hours wore on. Burns could not sleep, could not even relax and rest.
+To the first agony of disappointment succeeded a depression so profound
+that it seemed to him he could never rise above it and take up his work
+again. A hundred times he went painfully over the details of the case,
+from first to last. Why had he done as he had? Why had he not listened
+to Grayson, to Van Horn, to Fields? Only Buller had backed him up in his
+decisions--and he knew well enough that Buller had done it only because
+of his faith in Burns himself and his remembrance of some of his
+extraordinary successes, not because his own judgment approved.
+
+Five o'clock--six o'clock--he had thrown himself into the chair again,
+and had, at last, dropped into an uneasy sort of half slumber, when the
+office door quietly opened and Miss Mathewson came in. It was two hours
+before she was due. Burns roused and regarded her wonderingly, with eyes
+heavy and blood-shot. She stood still and looked down at him, sympathy
+in her face. She herself was pale with fatigue and loss of sleep, for
+she had been with him throughout the week of struggle over the case
+he had lost, and she knew the situation as no one else, even his
+professional colleagues, knew it. But she smiled wanly down at him, like
+a pitying angel.
+
+“You didn't go to bed, Doctor,” she said, very gently. “I was afraid you
+wouldn't. Won't you go now? You know there's a day's work before you.”
+
+He shook his head. “No--I'd rather get out in the air. I'm going now.
+I'd like to take the Imp and--drive to--”
+
+“No, no!”--She spoke quickly, coming closer, as if she understood and
+would not let him use the reckless, common phrase which sometimes means
+despair. “I thought you might be feeling like that--that's why I came
+early. Not that I can say anything to cheer you, Doctor Burns--I know
+you care too much for that. But there's one thing you must realize--you
+must say it over and over to yourself--you did your best. No human being
+can do more.”
+
+“A fool's best,” he muttered. “Cold comfort that.”
+
+“Not a fool's best--a skilful surgeon's best.”
+
+He shook his head again, got slowly up from his chair, and stood
+staring down into the ashes of the long-dead fire. The usually straight
+shoulders were bent; the naturally well-poised head, always carried
+confidently erect, was sunk upon the broad chest.
+
+Amy Mathewson watched him for a minute, her own face full of pain; then
+laid her hand, rather timidly, upon his arm. He looked round at her
+and tried to smile, but the effort only made his expression the more
+pitiful.
+
+“Bless your heart,” said he, brokenly, “I believe you'd stand by me to
+the last ditch of a failure.”
+
+Her eyes suddenly filled. “I'd let you operate--on my mother--to-day,”
+ said she, in a low voice.
+
+He gazed into her working face for a long moment, seized her hand and
+wrung it hard, then strode away into the inner office and flung the door
+shut behind him.
+
+A half-hour later he came out. He had himself sternly in hand again. His
+shoulders were squared, his head up; in his face was written a peculiar
+grim defiance which those who did not comprehend might easily mistake
+for the stoicism imputed to men of his calling under defeat. Miss
+Mathewson knew better, understood that it was taking all his courage
+to face his work again, and realized as nobody else could that the day
+before him would be one of the hardest he had yet had to live. But
+she was hopeful that little by little he would come back to the same
+recognition of that which she felt was really true, that, in spite of
+the results, he had been justified in the risk he had taken, and that he
+could not be blamed that conditions which only a superhuman penetration
+could have foreseen would arise to thwart him.
+
+“Cynthia has your breakfast ready for you Doctor,” Miss Mathewson said
+quietly, as he came out. She did not look up from the desk, where
+she was working on accounts. But as he passed her, on his way to the
+dining-room, he laid his hand for an instant on her shoulder, and when
+she looked up she met his grateful eyes. She had given him the greatest
+proof of confidence in her power, and it had been the one ray of light
+in his black hour.
+
+“Won't you take just a taste o' the chops, Doctor?” urged his
+housekeeper, anxiously. She knew nothing of the situation, but she had
+not served him for eight years not to have learned something of his
+moods, and it was clear to her that he had had little sleep for many
+nights.
+
+But he put aside the plate. “I know they're fine, Cynthia,” said he in
+his gentlest way. “But the coffee's all I want, this morning. Another
+cup, please.”
+
+Cynthia hesitated, a motherly sort of solicitude in her homely face.
+“Doctor, do you know you've had four, a'ready? And it's awful strong.”
+
+“Have I! Well--perhaps that's enough. Thank you, Cynthia.”
+
+His housekeeper looked after him, as he left the room. “He's terrible
+blue, to be so polite as that,” she reflected. “When he's happy he's in
+such a hurry he don't have time to thank a body. Of the two. I guess I'd
+rather have him hustlin' rude!”
+
+In the middle of the day Burns met Van Horn.
+
+“Sorry the case went wrong, Doctor,” said his colleague. There was a
+peculiar sparkle in his eye as he offered this customary, perfunctory
+condolence.
+
+“Thank you,” replied Burns, shortly.
+
+“I didn't wish to seem skeptical, and you certainly have had remarkable
+success in somewhat similar cases. But it seemed to me that in advising
+as I did I was holding the only safe ground. Personally I'm not in
+favour of taking chances and in this case it seemed to me they were
+pretty slim.”
+
+“They were.”
+
+“I did my best to assure the family that you were within your rights.”
+
+“Much obliged.”
+
+“I don't blame you for feeling broken up about it,” declared the
+other man, soothingly. “But we all have to learn by experience, and
+conservatism is one of the hardest lessons.”
+
+An ugly light was growing in Red Pepper's eye. He got away without
+further words. Only last week Van Horn had been helped out of a serious
+and baffling complication by Burns himself, and no credit given to the
+rescuer. From him this sort of high and mighty sympathy was particularly
+hard to bear.
+
+Around the corner he encountered Grayson. This, as it was so little to
+be desired, was naturally to be expected.
+
+“Too bad, Doctor,” Grayson began, stopping to shake hands. Van Horn had
+not even shaken hands. “I hoped till the last that we were all wrong and
+you were right. But that heart seemed dangerously shaky to me, though I
+know you didn't think so.”
+
+“I didn't.”
+
+“There was a queer factor in the case, one I felt from the first, though
+I couldn't put my finger on it. It was the thing that made me advise
+against operation.”
+
+“I understand.”
+
+“But of course there's no use crying over spilt milk; you did your
+best,” continued Grayson cheerfully. “Pretty little girl--plucky, too.
+Sorry to see her go.”
+
+Burns nodded--and bolted. These Job's comforters--were they trying to
+make the thing seem even more unbearable than it already was? Certainly
+they were succeeding admirably. He went on about his work with
+set teeth, expecting at the next turn to run into Fields. He would
+undoubtedly find him at the hospital, ready to greet him with some
+croaking sympathy. True to his expectations Fields met him at the door.
+He himself was looking particularly prosperous and cheerful, as people
+have a way of appearing to us when our trouble is root theirs.
+
+“Good morning, Doctor.” Fields shook hands, evidently trying to modify
+his own demeanour of unusual good cheer over a list of patients all
+safely on the road to ultimate recovery. “I want to express my regret
+over the way things came out last night. Mighty pretty operation--if it
+had succeeded. Sorry it didn't. Better luck next time.”
+
+“Much obliged.” Burns had a bull-dog expression now. Not the most
+discerning observer would have imagined he felt a twinge of regret over
+his failure.
+
+“Would you mind telling me what made you so confident that the
+spleen had nothing to do with the complication?” Fields inquired in a
+deprecatory manner which made Burns long to twist his neck.
+
+“Did you suggest that it did--beforehand?”
+
+“I believe I did--if I remember.”
+
+“I believe you didn't--nor any other man till I got in and found it.
+You all observed it then--and so did I. Excuse me--I'm in too much of a
+hurry to stop to discuss the case now. I'm due upstairs.” And once more
+Burns made good his escape.
+
+“Sore,” was Field's verdict, looking after the man who had been his
+successful rival for so long that this exception could hardly fail
+to afford a decided, if rather shame-faced satisfaction to a brother
+surgeon not above that quite human' sentiment.
+
+But in the course of the day Burns met Buller. He had dreaded to meet
+him, but not for the same reason that he had dreaded the others. Meeting
+Buller was quite another story.
+
+“Old boy, I'm so sorry I could cry, if it would do you any good,” said
+Buller, his steady, honest gaze meeting his friend's miserable eyes.
+For the defiance had melted out of Burns's aspect and left it frankly
+wretched before the hearty friendship in this man's whole attitude;
+friendship which could be counted upon, like that of his office nurse's,
+to the end of all things.
+
+Burns swallowed hard, making no reply, because he could not. But his
+hand returned the steady pressure of Buller's in a way that showed he
+was grateful.
+
+“I knew you'd take it hard--much harder than common. And, of course, I
+understand why. Any man would. But I wish I could make you feel the
+way I do about it. There's not one particle of reason for you to blame
+yourself. I've thought the case over and over from start to finish, and
+I'm more and more convinced that she wouldn't have lived without the
+operation. You gave her her only chance. Take that in? I mean it. I went
+around there this morning and told the family so--I took that liberty.
+It was a comfort to them, though they believed anyway. They haven't lost
+a particle of faith in you.”
+
+Burns bit his lip till he had it under control, and could get out a word
+or two of gratitude.
+
+“And now I want a favour of you,” the other went on hurriedly. “A case I
+want you to see with me--possible operation within a day or two.”
+
+Burns hesitated an instant, changing colour. Then: “Are you sure you'd
+better have me?” he asked, a trifle huskily.
+
+The other looked him in the eye. “Why not? I know of nobody so
+competent. Come, man--put that Satan of unreasonable self-reproach behind
+you. When man becomes omniscient and omnipotent there'll be no errors in
+his judgment or his performance--and not before. Meanwhile we're all in
+the soup of fallibility together. I--I'm not much at expressing myself
+elegantly: but I trust I'm sufficiently forcible,” smiled Buller.
+“Er--will you meet me at four at my office? We'll go to the Arnolds'
+together, and I'll give you the history of the case on the way. It's a
+corker, I assure you, and it's keeping me awake nights.”
+
+Proceeding on his way alone in the Imp--he had not wanted even Johnny
+Caruthers's company to-day--Burns found the heaviness of his spirit
+lifting slightly--very slightly. Tenderness toward the little lost
+patient who had loved and trusted him so well began gradually to
+usurp the place of the black hatred of what he felt to be his own
+incompetency. Passing a florist's shop he suddenly felt like giving that
+which, as it had occurred to him before, had seemed to him would be only
+a mockery from his hands. He went in and selected flowers--dozens and
+dozens of white rosebuds, fresh and sweet--and sent them, with no card
+at all, to her home.
+
+Then he drove on to his next patient, to find himself surrounded by an
+eager group of happy people, all rejoicing in what appeared to them to
+be a marvelous deliverance from a great impending danger, entirely due
+to his own foresight and skill. He knew well enough that it was Nature
+herself who had come to the rescue, and frankly told them so. But they
+continued to thrust the honour upon him, and he could but come away with
+a softened heart.
+
+“I'll go on again,” he said to himself. “I've got to go on. Last night I
+thought I couldn't, but, of course, that's nonsense. The best I can--God
+knows I try... And I'll never make that mistake again... But oh!--little
+Lucile--little Lucille!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. IN WHICH HE PROVES HIMSELF A HOST
+
+
+“Winifred,” said R. P. Burns, invading Mrs. Arthur Chester's sunny
+living-room one crisp October morning, leather cap in hand, “I'm going
+to give a dinner to-night. Stag dinner for Grant, of Edinburgh--man who
+taught me half the most efficient surgery I know. He's over here, and
+I've just found it out. Only been in the city two days: goes to-morrow.”
+
+“How interesting, Red! Where do you give it? At one of the clubs or
+hotels in town?”
+
+“That's the usual thing, of course. That's why I'm not going to do it.
+Grant's a rugged sort of commonsense chap--hates show and fuss. He gets
+an overpowering lot of being 'entertained' in precisely the conventional
+style. He's a pretty big gun now, and he can't escape. When I told him
+I was going to have him out for a plain dinner at home he looked as
+relieved as if I'd offered him a reprieve for some sentence.”
+
+“Undoubtedly he'll enjoy the relaxation. But you'll have a caterer out
+from town, I suppose?”
+
+“Not on your life. Cynthia can cook well enough for me, and I know
+Ronald Grant's tastes like a book. But what I want to ask is that
+you and Martha Macauley will come over and see that the table looks
+shipshape. Cynthia's a captain of the kitchen, but her ideas of table
+decoration are a trifle too original even for me. Miss Mathewson's away
+on her vacation. I'll send in some flowers. My silver and china are
+nothing remarkable, bur as long as the food's right that doesn't
+matter.”
+
+“I shall be delighted to do it for you, Red, as you know. So will
+Martha. We--”
+
+“Thanks immensely. I want Ches of course, and Jim Macauley's coming. The
+rest are M, D.'s. I must be off.”
+
+He would have been off, without doubt, in an instant more, for he was
+half out of the door as he spoke, but Winifred Chester flew after him
+and laid an insistent hand on his coat sleeve.
+
+“Red! You must stop long enough to tell me something about it. How can I
+help you unless I know your plans? What hour have you set? How many
+are coming, and who? How many courses are you going to have? Have you
+engaged a waitress?”
+
+Red Pepper looked bewildered. “Is there all that to it?” he inquired
+helplessly. “How in thunder--I beg your pardon--how do I know how many
+courses there'll be? Ask Cynthia that. The hour's seven-thirty; can't
+get around earlier, even if I wanted to be less formal. There's Van Horn
+and Buller and Fields and Grayson and Grant and Ches and Jim and--and
+myself. I may have asked somebody else, seems as if did but I can't
+remember. You'd better put on an extra plate in case I have.”
+
+He was starting off again, but Winifred, laughing helplessly, again
+detained him. “Red, you're too absurd! What about the waitress? Shall I
+find one for you?”
+
+“I supposed Cynthia could serve us; she always does me.”
+
+“She can't to-night, and prepare things to send in, too.”
+
+“Oh, well, see to it if you'll be so kind; only let me go, for I've only
+fifteen minutes now to meet a consultant ten miles away. Good-bye, Win.”
+
+He took time to turn and smile at her, and for the sake of the
+smile--she knew of none other just like it--she forgave him for
+involving her in the labours she already clearly foresaw were to be
+hers. How precisely like Red Pepper Burns it was to plan for a “stag”
+ dinner in this inconsequent way! If it had been a coming operation, now,
+no detail of preparation would have been too insignificant to command
+his attention. But in the present instance unquestionably all he had
+done was to appear at the door of the kitchen and casually inform
+Cynthia that eight or nine men were coming to dinner to-night, and
+he'd trust her to see that they should have something good to eat. Poor
+Cynthia!
+
+Winifred ran over to consult Martha Macauley and together they braved
+Burns's housekeeper in her kitchen. The result was relief, as far as
+the dinner itself was concerned. Cynthia was a superior cook, and long
+experience with exclusively masculine tastes had taught her the sort of
+thing which, however out of the beaten line for entertaining, was likely
+to prove successful in pleasing “eight or nine men,” wherever they might
+hail from.
+
+“Cynthia's planned a dinner that will be about as different from
+Lazier's concoctions as could be imagined,” Winifred said to Martha,
+“but it will taste what Ches calls 'licking good.' Now for the table.
+I'm afraid Red's china and linen are none too fine. We'll have to help
+him out there.”
+
+They helped him out. Only the finest of Martha's linen and silver, the
+thinnest of Winifred's plates and cups and the most precious of her
+glass would content them. When the table was set in the low-ceiled,
+casement-windowed old dining-room where Red Pepper was accustomed to
+bolt his meals alone when he took time for them at all, it was a
+table to suggest arrogantly the hand of woman, Winifred eyed it with
+milled satisfaction and concern.
+
+“It looks lovely, Martha, but not a bit bachelor-like. Do you suppose
+he'll mind?”
+
+“Not as long as the food is right; and judging by the heavenly smells
+from the kitchen there's no fear for that. But it's five o'clock,
+and the flowers he promised you haven't come. Do you suppose he's
+forgotten?”
+
+“Of course he has. If he remembers the dinner itself it'll be all we can
+expect of him. It doesn't matter. There are heaps of pink and crimson
+asters yet in the garden, and some fall anemones. We'll arrange them,
+and then if his flowers do come we'll change. But they won't.”
+
+They didn't. But the pink and crimson asters furnished a centrepiece
+decidedly more in keeping, somehow, with a men's dinner than roses
+would have been, and the decorators were content with them. Dora, Mrs.
+Macauley's own serving maid, who was to take the part of the waitress
+Red Pepper had not thought necessary, said they looked “awful tasty
+now.”
+
+“It's after seven and Red hasn't come yet.” Winifred Chester rushed at
+Arthur, dressing placidly. “Jim went in for the men with his car, and
+said he'd surely have them here by seven-twenty. You'll have to go over
+and do the honours for him till he comes. He'll have to dress after he
+gets here.”
+
+“He won't stop to dress--not if he's late,” predicted Chester,
+obediently hastening. “He'll rush in at the last minute, smelling
+horribly of antiseptics, and set everybody laughing with some story.
+They won't care what he wears. It's always a case of 'where MacGregor
+sits, there's the head of the table,' you know, with Red. I certainly
+hope nothing will make him late. I'm not up to playing host to a lot of
+physicians and surgeons. I should feel as if I were about to be operated
+on.”
+
+“Nonsense, dear, there's no jollier company when they're off duty. But
+Red isn't here yet, and I'm sure I hear Jim's Gabriel down the road. Do
+hurry!”
+
+Chester ran across the back lawn and in through Burns's kitchen,
+startling Cynthia so that she nearly dropped the salt-box into a sauce
+she was making for the beefsteak. He reached the little front porch just
+in time to welcome the batch of professional gentlemen who came talking
+and laughing up the path together.
+
+“Doctor Burns has been detained, but I'm sure he'll be here soon,”
+ Chester explained, shaking hands, and discovering for himself which was
+the famous Scottish surgeon by the “rugged commonsense” look of the man,
+quite as R. P. Burns had characterized him.
+
+Seven-thirty--no Red Pepper. Seven-forty-five--eight o'clock--still no
+sign of him; harder to be explained, no sign from him. Why didn't he
+telephone or send a telegram or a messenger? Waiting longer would not
+do; Cynthia, in the kitchen, was becoming unnervingly agitated.
+
+The dinner was served. Chester, at one end of the table, Macauley at the
+other, both feeling a terrible responsibility upon them, did their best.
+There had turned out to be two extra guests instead of the one whom
+Burns had thought he might have asked but couldn't be sure; and Winifred
+had had a bad ten minutes looking out a full set of everything with
+which to set his place. For Red Pepper's place must certainly be left
+unfilled; it would be beyond the possibilities that the dinner should
+end without him.
+
+“I believe he has forgotten,” whispered Martha to Winifred in the
+office, from whose dim shadows they were surreptitiously peering into
+the dining room to make sure that everything was going properly.
+
+“Oh, he couldn't, not with the Edinburgh man here. He's often told us
+about Doctor Grant and how much he owes him. He does look splendid and
+capable, doesn't he--for all he's so burly and homely? And the other
+men all feel honoured to be here with him; even Doctor Van Horn, who's
+always so impressed with himself.”
+
+“They seem to be having a good time. And they're eating as if they never
+saw food before. It's a success--as much as it can be without the host
+himself. Oh, why doesn't Red come?”
+
+“He wouldn't desert a patient in a crisis for a dozen dinners.”
+
+“No, but he'd send word.”
+
+“Look at Arthur. He's hobnobbing with Doctor Grant as if he'd always
+known him.”
+
+“Jim is having a bad time with Doctor Van Horn. I can see it in his eye.
+Mercy! one of them looked this way. I'm afraid he saw me. Come!”
+
+The next time they reconnoitred, the dinner was working toward its end.
+It was time, for it was nearly ten o'clock, and Cynthia's courses though
+not many, had been mighty. Presently the table had been cleared, and
+the men were drinking coffee and lighting the excellent cigars which had
+been Macauley's thought when he found that Red Pepper was not on hand to
+provide them himself.
+
+Under the influence of these genial stimulants--Burns never offered any
+others, and one man who knew it had declined to come--the sociability
+grew more positive. Chester relaxed his legs under the table, feeling
+that at last Red's guests could take care of themselves. Grayson proved
+an accomplished story-teller; Buller had lately had some remarkable
+adventures; even Ronald Grant, who had seemed a trifle taciturn, related
+an extraordinary experience of another man. The Scottish surgeon had the
+reputation of never talking about himself.
+
+The smoke grew thick. Macauley's cigars were of a strong brand; the
+air was blue with their reek. Still the guests sat about the table, and
+still the talk went on.
+
+It was interrupted quite suddenly by the advent of Red Pepper Burns
+himself. Macauley saw him first, standing in the doorway between dining
+room and office, but for an instant he did not know him. Macauley's
+startled look caught Chester's attention; he sprang to his feet. At the
+same moment the Scottish surgeon, following Chester's eyes, observed the
+figure in the door. He was first to reach it.
+
+“What's happened ye, lad?” he asked, and acted without waiting for an
+answer. He threw a powerful arm about Burns's shoulders and led him,
+reeling, back into the office where the air was purer.
+
+They crowded round, doctors though they were and had many times sharply
+ordered other people not to crowd. They could see at a glance that Burns
+was very faint, that his right arm hung helpless at his side, that his
+forehead wore a blackening bruise, and that his clothes were torn and
+covered with dirt. For the rest they had to wait.
+
+Grant took charge of his friend--the pupil whom he had never forgotten.
+The arm was badly broken, too badly to be set without an anaesthetic. In
+the inner office Van Horn, his dress coat off, gave the chloroform
+while the Scotchman set the arm; and the American surgeons, no longer
+crowding, but standing off respectfully as if at a clinic, looked on
+critically. It was rapid and deft work, they admitted, especially since
+the surgeon was using another man's splints, and the patient proved to
+be one of the subjects who fight the anesthetic from beginning to end.
+
+Chester, white-faced but plucky, stuck it out, but Macauley fled to
+the outer air. Seeing a familiar long, dark form half on, half off the
+driveway, he hurried toward it. A minute later he had all the unoccupied
+guests around him on the lawn, and one of the Green Imp's lamps was
+turned upon its crippled shape.
+
+“By George, he's had a bad accident,” one and another of them said
+as they examined the car's injuries. The hood was jammed until they
+wondered why the engine was not disabled; the left running-board was
+nearly torn off and the fender a shapeless wreck. The green paint was
+scraped and splintered along the left side.
+
+“He must have come home by himself. How far, do you suppose?”
+
+“Not far, driving with his left hand, and faint.”
+
+“He probably wasn't faint till he struck the indoor heat and the tobacco
+smoke.”
+
+“He's come at least five miles. Look at that red clay on her sides.
+There's no red clay like that around here except in one place--at
+the old mill on the Red Bank road.” Chester demonstrated his
+theory excitedly. “I ought to know, I've ridden with him on every
+out-of-the-way by-path in the county, first and last. There's a fright
+of a hill just there.”
+
+“Five miles with that arm? Gee!” This was Buller.
+
+“Plucky,” was Grayson's comment, and there was a general agreement among
+the men standing round.
+
+Macauley put his shoulder to the Imp. “Let's push her in, fellows,” he
+proposed. He had forgotten that they were medical gentlemen of position.
+“I don't seem to want to drive her just now,” he explained.
+
+They pushed the Imp to the red barn and shut it in with its injuries.
+Then they went back to the house, where presently Burns came out from
+under his anaesthetic and lay looking at his guests from under the
+bandage which swathed his head.
+
+“I'm mighty sorry to have broken up the fun this way, gentlemen,” he
+said with a pale sort of smile. “Grayson was telling a story when I
+butted in, I think. Finish it, will you, Grayson?”
+
+“Not much. Yours is the story we want now, if you're up to telling it.
+What happened out there on the Red Bank road?”
+
+Burns scanned him. “How do you know what road?”
+
+“Your friend Mr. Chester's detective instincts. He says there's no other
+red clay like that that plasters your car. By the way, that's a fast
+machine of yours. Did you lose control on the hill?”
+
+“That's it,” acknowledged Burns simply. “I lost control.”
+
+Chester was staring at him. It was not in the nature of reason to
+suppose that Red Pepper had lost control of that car unless something
+else had happened first. The steering gear of the Imp was certainly in
+perfect condition; Macauley had said so. He wondered if Red meant that
+he had lost his temper. But what could make him lose his temper--on Red
+Bank hill?
+
+They questioned him closely, all of them in turn. But that was all he
+would say. He had lost control of the car. One or two of the men who
+knew Burns least looked as if they could tell what was the probable
+cause of such loss of control. Chester wanted to knock them down as
+he fancied he recognized this attitude of mind. And at last they
+went away--which was certainly the best thing they could do in the
+circumstances.
+
+All but Ronald Grant. The Scottish surgeon accepted without hesitation
+Burns's suggestion that Doctor Grant should stay and keep him company
+for an hour or two while he got used to his arm, and should then sleep
+under his roof. So they settled down, Burns on his couch, Grant in an
+armchair. When Chester left he was thinking that, except for the outward
+signs of his adventure, Burns did not look as unfit as might have been
+expected for a happy hour with an old friend.
+
+Just outside the house Chester himself had an adventure. He was quite
+alone, and he almost ran into a slim figure on the walk. The lights from
+the office shone out into the October night, and Chester could see at a
+glance who the girl was, even if the gleam of golden hair which all
+the town knew had not told him. She was panting and her hand was on her
+side.
+
+“Did Doctor Burns get home all right?” she cried under her breath.
+
+“What do you know about Doctor Burns?” was Chester's quick reply. He was
+startled by the girl's appearance here at this hour.
+
+“It doesn't make any difference what I know. Tell me if he got home. Was
+he much hurt? Why shouldn't you tell me that, Mr. Chester?”
+
+“He is home and all right. Do you want him professionally? He can't go
+out to-night.”
+
+“I know he can't. But I had to know he got home. I--”
+
+She sank down on the doorstep, shaken and sobbing. Chester stood looking
+down at het, wondering what on earth he was to say. What had Rose Seeley
+to do with Red? What had she to do with his losing control on the Red
+Bank hill? A quick thought crossed his mind, to be as quickly dismissed.
+No, whatever Red's private affairs were, they could have nothing to do
+with this Rose--too bruised and trampled a rose to take the fancy of a
+man like him even in his most evil hour.
+
+Suddenly she lifted her head. “He saved my life and 'most lost his.
+They'd been making repairs on the hill and, some way, the lanterns
+wasn't lit. It's an awful dark night. He saw what he was comin' to and
+turned out sudden into the grass. He had to go into the ditch, then, not
+to run over me--and somebody else. He ran away!” Plainly that scornful
+accent did not mean Burns. “I didn't. I helped him get the car up. I
+got his engine goin' for him; he showed me how. His arm was broke. There
+ain't no house for a mile out there. I hated to see him try to come
+home alone. I've walked all the way--run some of it--to make sure he got
+here.”
+
+“He got here,” murmured Chester, thinking to himself that this was the
+queerest story he'd over heard, but confident he would never have any
+better version of it and pretty sure that it was the true one.
+
+“I suppose I'm a crazy fool to tell you, Mr. Chester,” said the girl
+thickly. “But you're a gentleman. You won't tell. No more will he. He
+didn't tell you how it happened, did he?”
+
+She did not ask the question. She made the assertion, looking to him for
+confirmation. Chester gave it. “No, he didn't tell,” he said gravely.
+
+When she had gone he crossed the lawn to his own home, musing. “For a
+'plain, quiet dinner,'” said he, quoting a phrase of Burns's used
+when he gave Chester the invitation, “I think Red's has been about as
+spectacular as they make 'em. Bully old boys.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. IN WHICH HE GETS EVEN WITH HIMSELF
+
+
+R. P. Burns sat at his desk in the inner office, laboriously inscribing
+a letter with his left hand. It did not get on well. The handwriting
+in the four lines he had succeeded in fixing upon paper bore not the
+slightest resemblance to his usual style; instead, it looked like the
+chirography of a five-year-old attempting for the first time to copy
+from some older person's script.
+
+He held up the sheet and gazed at it in disgust. Then he glanced
+resentfully at his sling-supported right arm, especially at the fingers
+which protruded from the bandages in unaccustomed limp whiteness. Then
+he shook his left fist at it. “You'll do some work the minute you
+come out of those splints,” he said. “You'll work your passage back to
+fitness quicker than an arm ever did before, you pale-faced shirk!”
+
+Then he applied himself to his task, painfully forming a series of
+pothooks until one more sentence was completed. He read it over, then
+suddenly crumpled the sheet into a ball and dropped it into the waste
+basket.
+
+“Lie there!” he whimsically commanded it. “You're not fit to go to a
+lady.”
+
+He got up and marched into the outer office where his office nurse sat
+at a typewriter, making lout bills.
+
+“Miss Mathewson,” he requested gruffly, “please take a dictation. No,
+not on the bill letterheads--on the regular office sheets. I'll speak
+slowly. In fact, I'll probably speak very slowly.”
+
+“I'm sorry I don't know shorthand,” said Miss Mathewson, preparing her
+paper.
+
+“I'm not. Instead, I'd rather you'd be as slow as you can, to give me
+time to think. I'm not used to transmitting mediums--the battery may be
+weak--in fact, I'm pretty sure it is. All ready? My dear Mrs. Lessing”:
+
+His cheek reddened suddenly as he saw the nurse's waiting hands poised
+over the keys when she had written this address. He cleared his throat
+and plunged in.
+
+“This has been a typical November day, dull and cold. We had fine
+October weather clear into the second week of this month, but all at
+once it turned cold and dull. The leaves are all off the trees--Hold
+on--don't say that. She knows the leaves are all off the trees the middle of
+November.”
+
+“I have it partly written.”
+
+“Oh! Well, go on, then; I'll fix it: a fact it may be necessary to
+remind you of down there in South Carolina, where--Miss Mathewson, do
+you suppose the leaves are on in South Carolina?”
+
+“I really don't know, Doctor Burns. I have always lived in the North.”
+
+“So have I--bother it! Well, leave that out.”
+
+“But I've written 'a fact it may be necessary--”
+
+“Well, finish it: a fact at may be necessary to remind you of, you have
+been gone so long. Oh, hang it--that sounds flat! How can I tell how
+a sentence is coming out, this way? Let that paragraph stand by
+itself--we'll hasten on to something that will take the reader's mind
+off our unfortunate beginning:
+
+“You will be glad to know that Bobby Burns is well, and not only well,
+but fat and hearty. He had a wrestling bout with Harold Macauley the
+other day and downed him. He got a black eye, but that didn't count,
+though you may not like to hear of it. He is heavier than when you saw
+him--Oh, I've said that! Miss Mathewson, when you see I'm repeating
+myself, hold me up.”
+
+“I can't always tell when you're going to repeat yourself,” Miss
+Mathewson objected.
+
+“That's enough about Bob, anyhow. Mrs. Macauley writes her all about him
+every week, only she probably didn't mention the black eye. Well, let's
+start a new paragraph. When in doubt, always start a new paragraph. It
+may turn out a gold mine.
+
+“I found my work much crippled by the loss of my arm. Good Heavens, that
+sounds as if I'd had it amputated! And I suppose she naturally would
+infer that a man can't do as much with his arm in a sling as he can
+when it's in commission. Well, let it stand. I didn't realize how much
+surgery I was doing till I had to cut it all out. 'Cut it out,' that
+certainly has a surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I'm
+afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles atrophying
+from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the
+splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints
+have--Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson--this sounds like a paper for a
+surgical journal!”
+
+Burns, who had been walking up and down the room, cast himself into an
+armchair and stared despairingly at his amanuensis. But she reassured
+him by saying quietly that it was always difficult to dictate when one
+was not used to it, and that the letter sounded quite right.
+
+“Well, if you think so, we'll try another paragraph--that's certainly
+enough about me. Let me see--” He ran his left hand through his hair.
+
+Footsteps sounded upon the porch. Arthur Chester opened the door.
+
+“Oh, excuse me, Red. It's nothing. I was going for a tramp, and I
+thought--”
+
+“I'm with you.” Burns sprang to his feet looking immensely relieved.
+“Thank you, Miss Mathewson, we'll finish another time. Or perhaps I can
+scrawl a finish with my left hand. I'll take the letter. I'll look in at
+Bob and get my hat in a jiffy, Ches.”
+
+He seized the letter, ran into the inner office, looked in at the
+dimly-lighted room where the boy was sleeping, took up a soft hat and,
+out of sight of Miss Mathewson, crammed the typewritten sheet into his
+pocket in a crumpled condition. Pulling the soft hat well down over his
+eyes he followed Chester out into the fresh November night, drawing a
+long breath of satisfaction as the chill wind struck him.
+
+“You were just in time to save me from an awful scrape I'd got myself
+into,” he remarked as they tramped away.
+
+“I thought you looked hot and unhappy. Were you proposing to Miss
+Mathewson by letter? It's always best to say those things right out:
+letters are liable to misinterpretation,” jeered Chester.
+
+“You're right there. I was riding for a fall fast enough when you reined
+up alongside. But what's a fellow to do when he can't write himself,
+except in flytracks?”
+
+“I presume the lady would prefer the fly-track to a typewritten document
+executed by another woman.”
+
+“How do you know the thing was to a lady?” Burns demanded.
+
+“That's easy. No man looks as upset as you did over a communication to
+another man. What do you write to her for, anyhow, when she's as near as
+Washington?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Doesn't she keep you informed? Winifred says Martha says Ellen came
+back up to Washington yesterday for the wedding of a friend--hastily
+arranged--to an army officer suddenly ordered somewhere--old friend of
+Ellen's--former bridesmaid of hers, I believe. She--”
+
+Burns had stopped short in the middle of the hubbly, half-frozen street
+they were crossing. “How long does she stay in Washington?”
+
+“I don't know. Ask Win. Probably not long, since she only came for this
+wedding. It's tonight, I think she said. Aren't you coming?”
+
+Burns walked on at a rapid stride with which Chester, shorter-legged and
+narrower-chested, found it difficult to keep up. They had their tramp, a
+four-mile course which they were accustomed to cover frequently together
+at varying paces. Chester thought they had never covered it quite so
+quickly nor so silently before. For Burns, from the moment of receiving
+Chester's news, appeared to fall into a reverie from which it was
+impossible to draw him, and the subject of which his companion found it
+not difficult to guess. After the first half mile, Chester, than whom
+few men were more adaptable to a friend's mood, accepted the situation
+and paced along as silently as Burns, until the round was made and the
+two were at Burns's door.
+
+“Good night. Afraid I've been dumb as an oyster,” was Burns's curt
+farewell, and Chester chuckled as he walked away.
+
+“Something'll come of the dumbness,” he prophesied to himself.
+
+Something did. It was a telegram, telephoned to the office by a sender
+who rejoiced that having one's left arm in a sling did not obstruct
+one's capacity to send pregnant messages by wire. He had obtained the
+address from Martha Macauley, also over the telephone:
+
+“Mrs. E. F. Lessing, Washington, D. C. Am leaving Washington to-night.
+Hope to have drive with you to-morrow morning in place of letters
+impossible to write. R. P. BURNS.”
+
+“I suppose that's a fool telegram,” he admitted to himself as he hung
+up the receiver, “but after that typing mess I had to express myself
+somehow except by signs. Now to get off. Luckily, this suit'll do. No
+time to change, anyhow.”
+
+He telephoned for a sleeper berth; he called up a village physician and
+the house surgeon at the city hospital, and made arrangements with each
+for seeing his patients during the two nights and a day of his absence.
+He had no serious case on hand and, of course, no surgical work, so that
+it was easier to get away than it might be again for a year after his
+arm should be once more to be counted on. Then he interviewed Cynthia on
+the subject of Bob; after which he packed a small bag, speculating with
+some amusement, as he did so, on the succession of porters, bell-boys,
+waiters and hotel valets he should have to fee during the next
+thirty-six hours to secure their necessary assistance, from the
+fastening of his shoes to the tying of his scarfs, the cutting up of his
+food, and the rest of the hundred little services which must be rendered
+the man with his right arm in a sling.
+
+“I may not look a subject for travel, Miss Mathewson,” he announced with
+a brilliant smile, appearing once more in the outer office, where the
+bill-copying was just coming to a finish, “but I'm off, nevertheless.
+Thank you for your struggle with my schoolboy composition. We won't need
+to finish it. I'm--Oh, thunder!”
+
+It was the office bell. Miss Mathewson answered it. Burns, prepared to
+deny himself to all ordinary petitioners, saw the man's face and stopped
+to listen. It was a rough-looking fellow who told him his brief story,
+but the hearer listened with attention and his face became grave. He
+turned to Miss Mathewson.
+
+“Call Johnny Caruthers and the Imp, please,” he directed. “Telephone
+the Pullman ticket office and change my berth reservation from the
+ten-thirty to the one o'clock train.”
+
+He went out with the man, and Miss Mathewson heard him say: “You walked
+in, Joe? You can ride back with us on the running-board.”
+
+Ten minutes after he had gone Chester came again. He found Miss
+Mathewson reading by the office droplight. On the desk stood a
+travelling bag; beside it lay a light overcoat, not the sort that Red
+Pepper was accustomed to wear in the car, a dress overcoat with a silk
+lining. On it reposed a that and a pair of gloves rolled into a ball,
+man fashion. Chester regarded with interest these unmistakable signs of
+intended travel.
+
+“Doctor Burns going out of town?” he inquired casually. It must be
+admitted that he had scented action of some sort on the wind which
+had taken his friend from his company at the conclusion of the walk.
+Ordinarily, Burns would have gone into Chester's den and settled down
+for an hour of talk before bedtime.
+
+“I believe so,” Miss Mathewson replied in the noncommittal manner of the
+professional man's confidential assistant. “But he has gone out for a
+call now.”
+
+“Back soon?”
+
+“I don't know, Mr. Chester.”
+
+“Did he go in the Imp?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Country call, probably--they're the ones that bother a man at night as
+long as he does country work. I've often told Doctor Burns it was time
+he gave up this no-'count rural practice. Well, do you know what time
+his train goes?”
+
+“After midnight, some time.” Miss Mathewson knew that Mr. Chester was
+Doctor Burns's close friend, but she was too accustomed to keep, her
+lips closed over her employers affairs to give information, even to
+Chester, except under protest.
+
+“Hm! Well, I believe I'll sit up for him and help him off. A one-armed
+man needs an attendant. Don't stay up, Miss Mathewson. I'll take any
+message he may leave for you.”
+
+“I'm afraid I ought to wait,” replied the faithful nurse doubtfully.
+
+“I don't believe it. Go home and go to bed, like a tired girl, as you
+no doubt are, and trust me. If he wants you I promise to telephone you.
+I'll see him off and like to do it. Come!”
+
+There being no real reason for doing otherwise than follow this most
+sensible advice, Miss Mathewson went away. Chester, settling himself by
+the drop-light in the chair she had vacated, fancied she looked a trifle
+disappointed and wondered why. Surely, he reasoned, the girl must get
+enough of erratic night work without sitting up merely to hand Burns his
+overcoat and wish him a pleasant journey.
+
+It was a long wait. Chester enlivened it by telephoning Winifred that
+he wouldn't be home till morning--or sooner, and elicited a flurry of
+questioning which he evaded rather clumsily.
+
+It was all right for him to be curious concerning Red's affairs, he
+considered, but there was no need for the women to get started on
+inquisitive questions.
+
+He read himself asleep at last over the office magazines, and was
+awakened by a hurried step on the porch and a gust of November night air
+on his warm face.
+
+“What are you doing here?” was the question which assaulted him.
+
+“Sitting up for you,” was Chester's sleepy reply. He rubbed his eyes.
+“Thought you might like to have me see you off:”
+
+“I'm not going anywhere except back to the case I've just left. Go home
+and go to bed.”
+
+Chester sat up. He looked at Burns with awakening interest. He had
+never seen his friend's face look grimmer than it did now under the gray
+slouch hat, which he had worn for the tramp, pulled well down over his
+brows, and which, during all his preparations and his hasty departure
+in the car, it had not occurred to him to remove or to exchange for the
+leather cap he usually wore on such trips.
+
+“Back to a country case instead of to Washington?” Incredulity was
+written large on Chester's face.
+
+Burns nodded, growing grimmer than before, if that were possible. He
+sat down on the arm of a chair, glancing over at the desk where his
+belongings lay. “How did you know I was going to Washington?”
+
+“Inferred it.”
+
+“You're mighty quick at inference. Maybe I wasn't. But I was. Now I'm
+not. That's all there is to it.”
+
+“But why not? Can't you turn the case over? I'll bet my hat it's a
+dead-beat case at that!”
+
+Burns nodded again. “It is.”
+
+“You're an ass, then.”
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“You don't expect--her--to stay in Washington waiting for you, do you,
+when she only came up for that wedding and is going straight back to
+keep some other engagements? That's what Win says she's to do.”
+
+“No, I don't expect her to wait.” Burns pulled the slouch hat lower yet.
+Chester could barely see his eyes. He could only hear the tone of his
+denial of any such absurd expectation.
+
+Chester rose and stood looking down at his friend, who had folded his
+left arm over his right in its sling, as he sat on the chair arm, and
+looked the picture of dogged resignation.
+
+“I suppose there's some reason at the bottom of what strikes me as pure
+foolishness,” he admitted. “You won't do me the honour of mentioning
+it?”
+
+“Case of infected wound in the foot. Threatened tetanus. Five-year-old
+child.”
+
+“Nobody competent to treat the case but you?”
+
+Burns looked up. Chester saw his eyes now, gloomy but resolute. “No.
+It's up to me alone. I owe it to the woman. It's the only child she has
+left: a girl. It was her boy I sent to a better world with maledictions
+on his mother's head.”
+
+Comprehension dawned at last on Chester's face. He saw that, taking into
+consideration Burns's feeling in that matter, there was really nothing
+to be said. “I hope you win out,” he evolved at length from the
+confusion of ideas in his mind.
+
+“I hope I do.” Burns rose. “I must send a telegram,” he said, and went
+to the telephone in the inner office.
+
+While he was there Chester heard the honk of the Imp's horn outside.
+When Burns came back he opened the outer door and called to Johnny
+Caruthers, to know if he had obtained the serum for which he had been
+sent to the druggist. Johnny shouted back that he had. Burns turned to
+Chester.
+
+“Good night,” he said. “Much obliged for waiting up for me.”
+
+Then, with a certain fighting expression on his lips which Chester had
+learned to know meant that his whole purpose was set on the attainment
+of an end for which no price could be too great to pay, Burns went out
+to Johnny Caruthers and the Green Imp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH HE HAS HIS OWN WAY
+
+
+“Doc”--Joe Tressler followed Burns down the path, leaving his wife
+standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed, on the retreating figure of the
+man who had saved to her her one remaining child--“Doc, we ain't a-goin'
+to forget this!”
+
+“Neither am I, Joe, for various reasons,” replied Burns, watching Johnny
+Caruthers try the Green Imp's spark. He jumped in beside Johnny and
+looked back at Joe. “Remember, now, keep things going just as I leave
+them, and I shall expect to find Letty nearly as well as ever when I see
+her again. I shall be back in five days. Good-bye.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I'll be around when you get back, with some money.”
+
+Burns looked the man in the eye. “Oh, come, Joe, don't say anything you
+don't mean.”
+
+“I mean it this time, Doe--I sure do. Me and the old woman--we--Letty--”
+ The fellow choked.
+
+“All right, Joe. I'm as glad as you are Letty's safe. Take care of her.
+Take care of your wife. Do a stroke of good, back-breaking work once
+in a while. It'll help that tired feeling of yours that's getting to be
+dangerously chronic. You've no idea, Joe, what a satisfaction it is, now
+and then, to feel that you've accomplished something. Try it. Good-bye.”
+
+He waved his hand at the woman in the door, who responded with a flutter
+of her dingy apron; which was immediately thereafter applied to
+her eyes. Within, by the window, a little pale-faced girl hugged a
+remarkable doll with yellow hair and a red silk frock.
+
+“You'd ought to be pretty proud, Letty Tressler,” said the woman,
+returning to the small convalescent, “to think Doc kissed you when he
+left. He's been awful good to you, Doc has, and him with that arm in a
+sling a-bothering him all the time. But I didn't think he'd do that.”
+
+“Maybe it's 'cause I'm so clean now,” speculated the child weakly. “When
+he did it he whispered in my ear that he liked clean faces.”
+
+“Letty, you ain't goin' to have any kind o' face but a clean face after
+this, jest on account o' Doc Burns,” vowed her mother emotionally, and
+the child, her doll pressed against her face, nodded.
+
+Far down the road Burns was bidding Johnny Caruthers put on more speed.
+“We have to make time to-day, Johnny,” he explained. “I'm going to get
+off on that ten-thirty to-night if I have to break my other arm to do
+it. I don't know that I'd be much more helpless than I am now if I
+did. Curious, Johnny, how many things there are a man can't do with one
+hand.”
+
+“I should say you could do more with that left hand of yours than most
+folks can with both,” declared young Caruthers, honest admiration in his
+eye.
+
+Burns laughed--a hearty, care-free laugh. He was in wild spirits, Johnny
+could see that, and wondered why the Doctor should be so happy over
+pulling a dead-beat family out of their troubles. Everybody knew Joe
+Tressler. And Johnny understood that the Doctor had given up going away
+on Joe's account ten days ago, when he took the case on the eve of his
+departure. Johnny had seen his employer in all stages of tension since
+that day, as he had driven him out, at first half-a-dozen times in the
+twenty-four hours, to this same little old wreck of a house. Johnny had
+driven him to other houses, also to one especially, in the city, where
+the lad had sat and speculated much on the extremes of experience in the
+life of a busy practitioner.
+
+It was to this same house that Johnny took Burns next; a house reached
+by a long drive through wonderful grounds, to a palace of a home within
+which the man with his arm in the sling disappeared with precisely
+the same rather brusque and hurried bearing characteristic of him
+everywhere. But Johnny could not see within. If he had, his honest eyes
+might have opened still wider.
+
+On his way upstairs Burns was intercepted by the master of the house.
+
+“You've decided to go with us, Doctor Burns, I hope?” The question
+was put in the fashion of a person who expects but one answer. But the
+answer proved to be not that one expected.
+
+“I'm sorry, but I can't do it, Mr. Walworth.” Burns's left hand, in the
+cordial grip which expresses hearty liking, was retained while William
+Walworth, who was accustomed to be able to arrange all things to his
+pleasure by the simple expedient of paying whatever it might cost,
+stared into the bright hazel eyes which met his with their usual
+straightforward glance.
+
+“Can't'! But you must, my dear Doctor, Pardon me, but I feel that no
+ordinary considerations can be allowed to stand in the way. My daughter
+needs your care on this journey. Her mother and I have agreed that her
+wish to have you with us must be fulfilled. It's an essential factor in
+her recovery.”
+
+“It's not essential at all, Mr. Walworth. Miss Evelyn is well started
+on the road to full health; she has only to keep on. My going with you
+would be a mere matter of pleasing her, and that's not in the least
+necessary.”
+
+His smile softened the words which struck upon the ear of the magnate
+with an unaccustomed sound. Mr. Walworth released Burns's hand, his
+manner stiffening slightly.
+
+“I must differ with you, Doctor. I feel that at this stage Evelyn's
+pleasure is a thing to be planned for. She has taken this fancy to have
+you with us on the Mediterranean cruise. We'll agree to land you and
+send you home at the end of a couple of months if you positively feel
+that you can't neglect your practice longer. But let me remind you,
+Doctor, that your fee will be made to cover all possible income from
+your practice during that time, and--I shall not be contented to measure
+its size by that.”
+
+It was Burns's turn to stiffen within, if he did not let it show
+outwardly. He spoke positively and finally. Even William Walworth saw
+that it would be of no use to urge a man who said quite quietly:
+
+“I've thought it over, as I promised you, and decided against it.
+I assure you I appreciate the honour you would do me, and I should
+immensely like the experience. But I know my going is not necessary to
+Miss Evelyn's recovery, and that's the only thing that could make me
+hesitate. I'll go up and see her at once, if you will forgive my haste.
+I have a busy day before me.”
+
+William Walworth looked after him as he ran up the stately staircase,
+and his thoughts were somewhat as Johnny Caruthers's had been. “He's
+more of a man, crippled like that, than any I know. I wonder why he
+won't go. I wonder. But he won't, that's settled. Now to appease Evelyn.
+He'll not find that so easy.”
+
+Burns did not find it easy. He sat down beside the convalescent, a
+patient who had everything on her side with which to win her chosen
+physician's consent to stay by her till she should be in the possession
+once more of the blooming beauty which had made her one of the envied
+of the earth. He told her, in the direct manner he had used with her
+father, that he could not fall in with their plans.
+
+When he came away he was tingling all over. It had been so plain. She
+had tried to disguise it, but she was where she could not run to cover,
+and he had seen it all. It gave him no pleasure: he was not that sort.
+He was sorry for the girl, but he was not in the least anxious
+about her. She would get over it; it was not his fault--he was
+conscience-clear on that. If ever he had been coolly--however
+kindly--professional in his bearing it had been in this home of great
+wealth, where it would have gone against his inmost grain to have
+seemed to court liking. If anything, his orders had been more curt, his
+concessions fewer, his whole treatment of the case on simpler lines than
+it might have been in almost any less pretentious home with which he was
+familiar.
+
+He ran down the stone steps in eager haste to be gone, his vision still
+engaged with the reproachful look Evelyn's mother had given him when
+she heard of his incredible refusal to accompany the Walworths on the
+luxuriously-equipped expedition in search of recuperation and enjoyment
+for the idolized only daughter. “This settles me with them to the end of
+time, I suppose,” he said to himself. As the car ran down the drive,
+he straightened his shoulders with a sense of thankfulness that his
+practice was not often in the homes of the comparatively few people who
+can afford to buy even that most precious of commodities, the time of
+others, when that time has been consecrated to certain uses.
+
+“Not going to stop for lunch, Doctor?” inquired young Caruthers
+anxiously, as the round of calls went on and one o'clock passed, with
+the Imp in a portion of the city remote from the hotel at which Burns
+was accustomed to refresh himself and Johnny when home was out of the
+question.
+
+“We'll go to the hospital next, and I shall be there a couple of hours.
+You can go and fill up then. I must be back at the office by four--for
+engagements.”
+
+So the day went. The busy physician who goes out of town for even a five
+days' vacation must plan for it and do much arranging in various ways.
+In spite of the fact that it would still be many weeks before Burns
+could attempt surgery again, he was having plenty to do. Only the
+determination to get away this time without fail made it possible for
+him to go. But there would be never a time when he could better be
+spared, and he meant to let nothing hinder his purpose.
+
+“The arm's coming on well,” was Doctor Buller's verdict late that
+afternoon as he gave the healing member its usual manipulation and
+massage. “It takes patience to wait, though, doesn't it, Burns? Never
+tried a broken arm myself, but I should say that hand must be itching to
+be at work in the operating-room again.”
+
+“Itching! It's burning, blistering, scarifying! I never knew how I liked
+that part of my work till I had to come down to an exclusive practice
+in pills and plasters. Grayson's doing a stunt to-day that would have
+driven me mad with envy if I could have stopped to look on. Doing it
+cleverly, too, by the report I had from Van Horn just now. When Van
+takes the trouble to praise another man it means something.”
+
+“Means it's been forced from him,” commented Buller. “Besides, Van
+enjoys praising Grayson to you. He's enjoyed your smashed arm, too, the
+old fraud. Was he ever so decent to you before?”
+
+Burns laughed. “You can't strike fire that way today,” he declared.
+“Hold on! You're not going to put that arm back into the splints?”
+
+“Of course I am. It lacks two days yet off the shortest modern
+regulation period. Come on here.”
+
+“Leave 'em off. I'll take the consequences.”
+
+“Don't be foolish, man. If I had my way I'd keep the thing put up
+another full week. I'm not an advocate of this hurry business.”
+
+“I am. The arm's well enough to come out. I'll wear it in a sling, but
+I want my coat sleeve on, and I'm going to have it on. Fix me up, will
+you? I'm in a hurry.”
+
+“You're going on a journey?”
+
+“Yes. Get busy.”
+
+“That's the very reason why you should keep that arm out of danger till
+you get back. Jostling round in a crowd.”
+
+“Is this my arm or yours?” thundered Burns.
+
+Buller laughed. “Don't knock me down with it, Pepper-pot. It may be your
+arm, but you're my patient, and I--”
+
+“Don't you fool yourself. If you won't fix me up I'll go out with it
+hanging, I can judge my own condition. Will you dress me and put any
+arm in this sling here, or must I send for Grayson? He's none of your
+idiotic conservatives.”
+
+“Keep quiet, and I'll make you look pretty, little boy. I see--these are
+new clothes just home from the tailor, and they're an elegant fit. Bully
+fresh scarf, peach of a pin, brand-new black silk sling--Oh, I say!”
+
+For with his good left arm Burns was threatening his professional friend
+in a way that looked ominous. But a laugh was in his eye, now that he
+had got his way, and the altercation ended in a fire of jokes. Then
+Burns stood up.
+
+“You're a jewel, Buller boy,” said he. “You've brought me through in
+great shape. It was a nasty fracture, and you've given me an arm that'll
+be as good as new. I'm grateful--you know that. Now, if you'll look over
+that list I gave you of cases here in the city, and go out once to take
+a look at Letty Tressler, I'll be ever faithfully yours. Griggs'll see
+to my village practice. Now I'm off.”
+
+“Hope you enjoy your trip. Must be a concentrated pleasure, to be
+crammed into five days and still make you look like a schoolboy just let
+out,” observed Buller as Burns turned, with his band on the door-knob.
+
+“A dose doesn't have to be big to be powerful,” rejoined Burns, opening
+the door.
+
+“Nitro-glycerin, eh?” Buller called after the departing bulk of his
+friend. “Don't let it carry you too far up. You might come down with a
+thud!”
+
+“He's right enough there,” was what Burns murmured to himself as he
+caught the elevator in the great building in which Buller's office was
+a crowded corner. “I may come down in just that style. But better that
+than any more of this dead level of suspense. I don't think I could
+stand that one more day.”
+
+He and Johnny Caruthers whirled home in the Imp to find Burns's village
+office as crowded as Buller's city one. It was late before he could get
+his dinner, and after it he was kept busy turning calls over to other
+men. It was the usual experience to have work pile up during the last
+hours, as if Fate were against his breaking his chains and meant to tie
+him hand and foot.
+
+“I'm going to get out of this right now,” he announced suddenly to Miss
+Mathewson an hour before train time, as he turned away from a siege over
+the telephone with one hysterical lady who felt that her life depended
+upon his remaining to see her through an attack of indigestion. “If I
+don't, something will come in that will pull hard to keep me home, and
+I'm not going to be kept. I'll trust you not to look me up for the next
+hour, for I'll not tell you where I'm going, and you can't guess, you
+know. Good-bye. Be a good girl.”
+
+He wrung her hand, looking at her with that warmth of friendliness which
+he was accustomed, when in the mood, to bestow on her, recognizing how
+invaluable she was to him, and never once recking what it meant to her
+to be so closely associated with him. She answered in her usual quiet
+way, wishing him a safe journey and bidding him be very careful of the
+arm, no longer protected except by the silken sign that injury had been
+done.
+
+“In a crowd, you know, they won't notice the sling,” she warned him.
+
+“Won't they? Well, if my trusty left can't protect my battered right
+I've forgotten my boxing tricks. Don't be anxious about that, little
+friend. See that Amy Mathewson has a good time in my absence, will you?
+She's looking just a bit worn, to me.”
+
+She smiled, but her eyes did not meet his: she dared not let them. With
+all his kindness to her he did not often speak with the real affection
+which was in his voice now. She understood that he was, for some reason,
+keyed high over his prospective journey even higher than he had been ten
+days before when on the point of leaving. And she knew well enough where
+he was going, though he had not told her. It would have taken thirty-six
+hours to go to Washington, spend a brief time there and return. It was
+going to take five days to go to South Carolina, remain long enough to
+transact his business--was it business?--and come back. And there had
+been no more attempts to write letters by way of an amanuensis. The
+affection for his assistant in his manner to her was genuine, she did
+not doubt that, but it did not deceive her for a moment. So, she did
+not let her eyes meet his. They rested, instead, on the scarfpin which
+Buller had termed a “peach,” but they did not see it. She could not
+remember when it had been so hard to maintain that quiet control of
+herself which had long since made her employer cease to reckon with the
+possibilities of fire beneath.
+
+R. P. Burns stole away with Johnny and the Imp, without so much as
+letting his neighbours know of his intentions. He had made sure that
+they were all well; that no incipient scarlet fever or invading measles
+was threatening them. He smiled to himself as the car went past the
+Chester house, to think how interested they would be to know where he
+was going. But he got safely off and nobody opened a door at sound of
+the Imp to call to him to come in a minute because somebody seemed not
+quite well.
+
+And then, after all, he ran upon Arthur Chester--and at the city
+station, to which he had taken the precaution to go, although the
+ten-thirty stopped for a half-minute at the village. It must be admitted
+that he tried to dodge his best friend, but he did not succeed. His
+shoulders were too conspicuous: he could not get away.
+
+“Going to see an out-of-town patient at this hour of night?” queried
+Chester, coming up warmly interested, as best friends have a trick of
+being, in spite of all that can be done to avert their curiosity.
+
+“Where else would I be going?”
+
+“I don't know where else, but I doubt if it's to see a patient. There's
+an air about you that's not professional. You--er--you can't be going to
+Washington? There's nobody there now.”
+
+“No, only a few Government officials and some odds and ends of
+hangers-on. To be sure, Congress is in session, but there's nobody
+there. My train's been called, Ches; so long.”
+
+“Let me carry your bag.” Chester reached for it. “I say, this isn't a
+tool-kit--this is a stunner of a regulation travelling bag. See here,
+Red,” he was rushing along on the other's side, fairly running to keep
+up with Burns's strides--“how long are you going to be gone?”
+
+“Long enough to get a change of air. The atmosphere's heavy here with
+inquisitive people who call themselves your friends. See here, Ches,
+you're not looking well. You need rest and sleep. Go home and go to
+bed.”
+
+“You're always telling me to go home and go to bed. Not till I see which
+train you take,” panted Chester, his eyes sparkling. “Ha! Going to turn
+in at Number Four gate, are you? Sorry I can't take your bag inside.
+Well, possibly I can guess your destination. Got your section clear
+through to South Carolina? I say, keep your head, old man, keep your
+head!”
+
+Burns turned about, shook his fist at Arthur Chester, seized his bag,
+rushed through the gateway and boarded the last of the long string of
+Pullmans. On the platform he pulled off his hat and waved it at his
+friend. He could forgive anybody for anything tonight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. IN WHICH HE MAKES NO EVENING CALL
+
+
+Burns opened the white gate--it was sagging a little on its hinges--and
+walked up the moss-grown path between the rows of liveoaks to the
+tall-columned portico of the still stately, if somewhat timeworn and
+decayed, mansion among the shrubbery. It was just at dusk, and far away
+somewhere a whippoorwill was calling. It was the only sound on the quiet
+air.
+
+The door was opened by an old negro servant, who hesitated over his
+answer to the question put by this unknown person looming up before him
+with his arm in a sling. Mrs. Elmore was in, but she was not well and
+could not see any visitors this evening.
+
+“Is Mrs. Lessing in?”
+
+“Yas, Sah, she is. But she done tole me she couldn't see nobody herse'f.
+She tekkin' cah ob Miss Lucy.”
+
+Burns produced his card and made a persuasive request. The old darky
+led the way to a long, nearly dark apartment, where the scent of roses
+mingled with the peculiar odour of old mahogany and ancient rugs and
+hangings. The servant lit a tall, antique lamp with crystal pendants
+hanging from its shade, the light from which fell upon a bowlful of
+crimson roses so that they glowed richly. He left Burns, departing
+with a shuffling step and an air of grudging the strange gentleman the
+occupancy of the room, although it was to be for only so long as it
+would take to bring back word that neither of the ladies would see him
+to-night.
+
+Burns sat still for the space of two minutes then, as no further sound
+could be heard in the quiet house, he became restless. His pulses beat
+rather heavily and, to quiet them or the sense of them, he got up and
+walked about, pausing at one of the long French windows to gaze out
+into the dusky labyrinth of a garden, where he could just make out paths
+winding about among the bushes. The night was mild, and the window stood
+ajar as if some one had lately come in.
+
+Then he turned and saw her. She had almost reached him, but he had not
+heard her, her footfall upon the old Turkey carpet with its faded roses
+and lilies had been so light. She was in white, and the light from the
+old lamp shone on her arms end face and brought out the shadows of her
+hair and eyes. She put out both hands--then quickly drew back one as her
+glance fell upon the sling, and gave him her left, smiling. But he drew
+the arm that had been broken out of its support and held it out.
+
+“Please take this hand, too,” he said. “It will be its first experience
+and, perhaps, it will put new life into it. It's pretty limp yet.”
+
+She laid hers in it very gently, looking down at it as his fingers
+closed slowly over hers.
+
+“That's doing very well, I should think,” she said. “It's barely time
+for it to be independent yet, is it?”
+
+“About time. I had something of a wrestle with Doctor Buller to get him
+to leave the splints off. How warm and soft your hand is. This one of
+mine has forgotten how the touch of another hand feels.”
+
+“I'm sure you ought not to use it yet. Please put it back in the sling.”
+ She drew her own hand gently away.
+
+It occurred to him that while he had been absent from her he had not
+been able to recall half her charm, and that if he had he would never
+have been able to wait half so long before pursuing her down into this
+Southern haunt of hers. He drew a full, contented breath.
+
+“At last,” he said, “I am face to face with you. It's worth the
+journey.”
+
+In the lamplight it seemed to him the rose cast a reflection on her face
+which he had not observed at first.
+
+“I'm so sorry Aunt Lucy isn't able to see you tonight,” she
+said--“unless she would consent go see you professionally. She really
+ought--”
+
+He held up his hand “Not unless she is in serious straits, please,” he
+begged. “I've fled from patients, only to find them all the way down
+on the train. I don't know what there can be about me to suggest to a
+conductor that I'm the man he's looking for to attend some emergency
+case, but he seems to spot me. Only at the station before this did I get
+released from the last of the series. Let me forget my profession for a
+bit if I can, just now I'm only a man who's come a long way to see you.
+Is it really you?”
+
+He leaned forward, studying her intently. His head, with its coppery
+thatch of heavy hair, showed powerful lines in the lamplight; beneath
+his dark throws the hazel eyes glowed black.
+
+“It's certainly I,” she answered lightly. “And being I, with the
+mistress of the house prevented from showing you hospitality, I must
+offer it. She begged me to make you comfortable and to tell you she
+would see you in the morning. You've had a long journey. You must want
+the comfort of a room and hot water. I'll ring for Old Sam.”
+
+She crossed the room and pulled an old-fashioned bell-cord, upon which a
+bell was heard to jangle far away. The old darky reappeared.
+
+“I should have gone to a hotel,” Burns said, “if I could have found one
+in the place.”
+
+“There is none. And if there had been Aunt Lucy would have been much
+hurt to have you go there. Where did you leave your bag?”
+
+“At the station. I can stay only for a night and a day, so it's a small
+one.”
+
+“I'll send Young Sam for it. Now let Sam take you to your room, and in a
+few minutes I'll give you supper.”
+
+“Don't bother about supper at this hour. I only want--”
+
+“You want what you are to have,--some of Sue's delicious Southern
+cookery.” She smiled at him as he looked back at her, following the old
+servant. “She's been in the family for forty years and she loves to have
+company to appreciate her dishes. Sam, you are to help Doctor Burns. He
+has had a broken arm.”
+
+When Burns came down, fresh from a bath and comfortable with clean
+linen, he smelled odours which made him realize that, eager as he was
+for other things, he was human enough to be intensely hungry with a
+healthy man's appetite. So he surrendered himself to the fortunes that
+now befell him.
+
+Old Sam conducted him to the dining-room, a quaintly attractive
+apartment where candle-light illumined the bare mahogany of the round
+table laid with a large square of linen at his place and set with
+delicate ancient china and silver. Ellen Lessing was already there in
+a high-backed chair opposite the one set for him, a figure to which his
+eyes were again drawn irresistibly and upon which they continued to rest
+as he took his seat.
+
+Sam disappeared toward the kitchen, and Burns spoke in a low voice
+across the table.
+
+“I feel as if I were in a dream,” said he. “Forty-eight hours ago I
+was rushing about, hundreds of miles from here, trying to attend to the
+wants of a lot of people who seemed determined not to let me get away.
+Now I'm down here in the midst of all this quiet and peace, with you
+before me to look at, and nobody to demand anything of me for at least
+twenty-four hours. It's all too good to be true.”
+
+“It seems rather odd to me, too,” she answered, letting her eyes stray
+from his and rest upon the bowl of japonicas of a glowing pink, which
+stood in the centre of the table. The candle-light made little starry
+points in her dark eyes as she looked at the rich-hued blooms. “The last
+person in the world I was expecting to see to-night was you.”
+
+“I suppose I was as far from your thoughts as your expectation,” he
+suggested.
+
+“How should I be thinking of a person who had not written to me for so
+long I thought he had forgotten me?” she asked, and then as he broke out
+into a delighted laugh at her expense she grew as, pink as her flowers
+and seemed to welcome the return of Sam bearing a trayful of Sue's good
+things to eat.
+
+Fried chicken and sweet potatoes, beaten biscuit and fragrant coffee,
+had a flavour all their own to Burns that night. He ate as a hungry man
+should, yet never forgot his companion for a moment or allowed her to
+imagine that he forgot her. And by and by the meal was over and the two
+rose from the table.
+
+“I must go and see that Auntie is comfortable for the night, if you will
+excuse me for half an hour,” said the person he had come to see. “Will
+you wait in the drawing-room? I will have Sam bring you some late
+magazines.”
+
+“I'll wait, and no magazines, thank you. I can fill the time somehow,”
+ he answered. “But don't let it be more than the half-hour, will you?”
+
+He watched her until she disappeared from his sight at the turn of the
+staircase landing, then went in to pace up and down the long room, his
+left arm folded over his right, after the fashion he had acquired since
+the right arm became useless. After what seemed an interminable interval
+she came back. He met her at the door.
+
+“Are the duties all done?” he inquired.
+
+“All done for the present. I must look in on Auntie by and by, but I
+think she is going to sleep.”
+
+“May she sleep the sleep of the just! And there's nothing more you feel
+it incumbent upon you to do for me? No more sending me to my room, no
+more waiting upon me by Sam, no more feeding me till my capacity is
+reached? Is there really no notion in your mind as to how you can put
+off the coming hour?”
+
+His voice had its old, whimsical inflection, but there was a deeper note
+in it, too. She parried him gently, yet not quite so composedly as was
+her wont.
+
+“Why should I want to put if off? Aren't we going to sit down and have
+a delightful talk? I want to hear all about Bob and Martha and all of
+them, and about your work since I saw you.”
+
+“You want to hear all about those things, do you? I had the impression
+that we discussed them quite thoroughly while I was at supper. Still,
+I can go over them all again if you insist. It may take up another five
+minutes, and when one is fencing for time, even five minutes counts.”
+
+It was his old way, with a vengeance. There was a saying of Arthur
+Chester's current among his and Burns's friends that it never was of any
+use to try to evade Red Pepper when once he had begun to fire upon your
+defenses. With his eyes searching you and his insolent tongue putting
+point blank questions to you, you might as well capitulate first as
+last.
+
+There being no conceivable answer to this thrust about fencing for time,
+even for a woman experienced in replying skilfully to men under all
+sorts of conditions, Ellen Lessing was forced to look up or play the
+part of a shy girl. So she looked up, lifting her head bravely. There
+really was nothing else to do.
+
+It was all in his face. He had not come all those hundreds of miles to
+pay her an evening call, nor did he mean to be put off longer. His eyes
+held hers: she could not withdraw them.
+
+“It's odd,” he said, speaking slowly, “how like a magnet drawing a steel
+bar you've drawn me down here. Pull-pull-pull--an irresistible force. I
+wonder if the magnet feels the attraction, too? Could it pull so hard if
+it didn't?”
+
+There was a long minute during which neither stirred--it might have
+been the counterpart of that minute, months back, when they had first
+observed each other. Recognition it was, perhaps, at the very first;
+there could be no question about the recognition now--it went deep.
+
+Suddenly he slipped his right arm out of the sling. Before she could
+draw breath she was in the circle of his arms, but he had not touched
+her.
+
+“Am I wrong?” he was saying. “Has it pulled both ways from the first?”
+
+It must be as useless for the magnet to resist as for the bar. And when
+they, have come within a certain distance of each other--
+
+If Red Pepper's left arm caught her in the stronger grasp, the right did
+all, and more than all, that could have been expected of it. It was
+his right arm which slowly drew her hands up, one after the other, and
+indicated to them that their place was locked together, behind his
+neck.
+
+
+An old garden in South Carolina is a place to lure the Northerner
+out-of-doors. Before breakfast next morning Burns was walking down the
+box-bordered paths, feasting his gaze and his sense of fragrance on
+the clumps of blue and white violets, the clusters of gay crocuses, the
+splendid spikes of Roman hyacinths. But he did not fail to keep track of
+all doorways in sight, and when she appeared at the open French window
+of the drawing-room he was there in a trice, offering her a bunch of
+purple violets and feasting his eyes upon her morning freshness.
+
+“I'm still dreaming, I think,” said he when he had drawn her back
+into the quiet room long enough to satisfy himself with the active
+demonstration that possession means privilege, and had himself fastened
+the violets in the front of her crisp white morning dress. “Dreaming
+that I can stay down here in this wonderful paradise with you and not go
+back to the slave's life I lead.”
+
+“You would never be happy away from that slave's life long, you know,”
+ she reminded him. “The rush of it is the joy of it to you.”
+
+“How will it be to you? I shall be yours, you remember, till Joe
+Tressler or any other ne'er-do-weel wants me, then I'm his.”
+
+“But you'll always come back to me,” said she.
+
+“And will you be content with that?”
+
+“So long as you want to come back.”
+
+He looked steadily into her eyes, and his own took fire. “Want to come
+back! I've waited a long time to find the woman I could be sure I should
+always want to come back to. I thought there would never be such a
+woman: not for an erratic fellow like me.... But now I'm wondering how I
+shall ever be able to stay away.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. IN WHICH HE DEFIES SUPERSTITION
+
+
+“Hades of Hymen! Red, are you making calls this morning?”
+
+“Why not? I'm not to be married till noon, am I?”
+
+“I say, take me with you, will you? I want to go along with a man who
+has the nerve to see patients up to the last minute before his wedding!”
+
+“Takes less nerve than to sit around and wait for the fateful hour, I
+should say. Come on, if you think you'll have time to dress when you get
+back. It may be close work.”
+
+“Haven't you got to dress yourself?” demanded Arthur Chester, settling
+himself in the car beside its driver. “Or shall you go to the altar in
+tweeds with April mud on your boots?”
+
+“Rather than not get there, yes. But I can dress in half the time you
+can--always could, and necessity has developed the art. Look here, there
+isn't any April mud. The roads are fine.”
+
+“Oh, I suppose if I were booked for a wedding journey in the Green Imp
+before the leaves were fairly out I shouldn't be able to see any mud
+myself. As it is, well, I don't know the colour of the bride's motoring
+clothes, but I presume they'll be adapted to the circumstances. I never
+saw her look anything but ready for whatever situation she happened to
+be in. That's a trick that'll serve her many a good turn as the wife of
+R. P. Burns, M.D., eh, Red?”
+
+The Imp whirled about the country all the morning, having made an early
+start. The car was in fine fettle, like a horse that has been trained
+for a race. Although it was beginning its second season it had never
+been in better trim for business. The engine, having been cared for and
+seldom abused, was running more smoothly than when it had been first put
+upon the road. The Imp had had a fresh coat of the dark-green which gave
+it its name, and its brasswork was shining as only Johnny Caruthers by
+long and untiring labors could make metal shine. It had that morning
+acquired a luggage-rack attached to its rear, which was soon to receive
+a leather-covered motor trunk at that moment receiving its final
+consignments in the Macauley house; and there were several other new
+fittings about the machine which indicated that it was presently to be
+put to uses which had never been required of it before.
+
+The Imp drew up in front of the hospital. Chester looked anxiously at
+his watch for the twenty-seventh time that morning. “For Heaven's sake,
+hurry, Red,” he urged. “Women are the dickens about having a wedding
+late, and it's ten minutes of eleven now. Noon comes sure and soon, and
+at noon, allow me to remind you--”
+
+Burns nodded. “Keep cool, boy,” he recommended. “No use getting excited
+before a critical operation.”
+
+But he disappeared at a pace fast enough to satisfy Chester, who sat
+back and said to himself that R. P. had come nearer giving the crisis
+before him its appropriate name than he had ever heard done before.
+
+He became anxious again, however, before Burns returned, and his watch
+was in his hand when the prospective bridegroom bolted out of the
+hospital door and ran for his car as if he had not a moment to spare.
+
+“Glad to see you're losing your head a trifle at last,” commented
+Chester as the Imp turned a dizzy curve and shot away. “It's the only
+proper thing. But we've really enough time if you don't stop anywhere
+else. What's the matter? Good Lord, man, you'll get nabbed if you speed
+up like this within limits. You--”
+
+“Cut it and don't talk. I've got to make time,” was all the answer
+or explanation he received; and Chester, with the wisdom of long
+association with Red Pepper at his pepperest, obeyed.
+
+As they approached the house Burns spoke for the first time since they
+had left the city. “Go in and tell the bunch I have to do an operation
+at the hospital as quick as I can get my stuff and drive back there.
+I'll be back at--”
+
+“Great Christopher, man! But--”
+
+“I can be back by two. Ellen will understand.”
+
+“The deuce she will! Don't ask me to explain to her.”
+
+“I won't. I'll do it myself. You tell the rest.”
+
+The Imp shot up the driveway. Burns jumped out and ran to his office.
+Five minutes later, instrument bag in hand, he ran out again, Miss
+Mathewson following. He bolted in at the Macauleys' front door. Chester
+had already broken the incredible news to Martha Macauley and was
+standing out a storm of expostulations and reproaches, as if by any
+chance anybody could expect Arthur Chester to be able to stop R. P.
+Burns when he had started upon any course of action whatsoever. But when
+Burns himself appeared at the doorway the situation came to a crisis.
+Towering beside a group of palms which decorated the foot of the
+staircase Burns demanded to see Ellen.
+
+“Why, Red, you can't. She's--besides how can you--”
+
+“Ask her to come where I can speak to her then. Quick, please.”
+
+“But she--”
+
+There was no knowing how long the sparring might have lasted, or what
+extreme measures might have been taken, had not a figure in a floating
+lilac-and-white garment, with two long braids of dark hair hanging over
+its shoulders, appeared upon the staircase landing. Burns looked up, saw
+it, and was up the stairs to the landing before Chester could flick an
+eyelash.
+
+“Dear, to save a life I want to delay things just two hours. There's
+nobody else to do it. Van Horn was taken ill just as he was
+getting ready. The only other man who would venture under the
+conditions--Grayson--is out of town.”
+
+His arms were about her as she stood a step above him. So, her eyes were
+level with his.
+
+“Do it, of course,” she whispered. “And take my love with you.”
+
+For one minute Burns stayed to tell her that he had known she would
+send him to his duty, then he was off. The door slammed behind him, and
+outside the Imp's horn sent back a parting salute.
+
+From the bottom stair Martha Macauley, distressed young matron
+and hostess, gazed up at her sister, who, with arms leaning on the
+vine-wreathed rail at the landing, was smiling down at her.
+
+“Ellen! Was ever anything so crazy! I did suppose Red would take time
+enough to be married in. There's everybody coming.”
+
+“So few you can easily telephone them all to wait.”
+
+“And the breakfast under way--”
+
+“It will keep.”
+
+“Aren't you superstitious enough not to want to postpone your wedding?”
+ demanded Martha urgently.
+
+The dark braids of hair swung violently as the bride's head was
+emphatically shaken. “Martha! Take it back! Let somebody die because I
+was afraid to wait two hours?”
+
+“I don't believe anybody would die,” insisted Martha. “Somebody could be
+found. It's just Red's ridiculous craze for surgery. I always said he'd
+rather operate than eat. Now, it seems he'd rather operate than be--”
+
+But at this moment a large, determined hand came over her mouth from
+behind, as James Macauley, junior, arriving upon the scene, asserted
+his authority. He was in bathrobe and slippers, having been excitedly
+interviewed by Chester through the bathroom door.
+
+“Quit fussing, Marty. The thing can't be helped, and if Ellen doesn't
+mind I don't know why we should. If we were having a houseful it would
+be fierce, but with only ourselves and the Chesters and the minister's
+family and Red's people--I'll go telephone Mr. Harding now.”
+
+As Martha freed herself from the silencing hand the front door opened
+again. This time it was Mrs. Richard Warburton--Burns's young sister
+Anne--also in somewhat informal attire, over which she had thrown an
+evening coat. She surveyed the group with laughing eyes. She herself had
+been married within the year.
+
+“It's absurd, isn't it?” she cried. “But it's just like Red. Ellen knows
+that, don't you, dear? Ellen'll not only take him for better and for
+worse, but for present and for absent--mostly absent! But we're rather
+proud of him over at the house. Father's walking up and down and
+saying no other fellow would have done it, and Mother's all tearful and
+smiling. Dick wanted to go in with him, but of course Miss Mathewson had
+to go: he seldom operates without her.”
+
+“It's so uncertain when he'll get back,” mourned Martha, still
+unreconciled.
+
+“I made Miss Mathewson promise to telephone, the moment she should know.
+It's lucky the wedding guests are all in the family, isn't it? Ellen,
+dear”--pretty Anne ran up the stairs to the landing--“I really don't see
+how, after he caught sight of you in that fascinating garb, with your
+hair down, he could ever tear himself away! You're positively the
+loveliest thing I ever saw in all my life, and I'm almost out of my
+senses with joy that you're to be my sister, even though I never saw you
+in the world till yesterday! I always said when Red did care for anybody
+for keeps, she'd be a jewel!”
+
+Red Pepper came back at precisely twenty minutes of three. His patient
+had given him a bad hour of anxiety immediately after leaving the table,
+and he could not desert her until she had rallied. But he felt
+easy about her now, and he had arranged to leave her in Buller's
+hands--Buller, who did not do major surgery himself, but was a most
+competent man when it came to the care of surgical patients after
+operation. Burns brought Amy Mathewson back with him, though she had
+begged to be allowed to stay with the case.
+
+“And not be at my wedding?” cried Red Pepper, in exuberant spirits.
+“Why, I couldn't be properly married without you to see me through!”
+
+Upon which she had smiled and obeyed him, and taken a tighter grip upon
+herself as he put her into the Green Imp for the last ride together.
+That was what it was to her, though she might yet go with him a thousand
+times to help him in his work. To him it was a quick and joyful journey
+back to his marriage.
+
+“All right, Mother and Dad!” he exulted, coming in upon them in their
+festal array. He shook hands with his father and his brother-in-law; he
+kissed his mother. Then he ran for his own room where Bobby Burns, just
+being finished off by Anne, herself superbly dressed, shrieked with
+rapture at the sight of him.
+
+“Red! At last! I've laid everything ready; you've only to jump into your
+bath; I turned on the water when Dick saw the Imp down the road. Don't
+you dare have a vestige of a surgical odour about you when you come
+out!”
+
+In precisely seventeen minutes and three-quarters the bridegroom was
+ready to the last coppery affair on his head.
+
+“Have I a 'surgical odour,' Anne?” he asked as he came up to her.
+
+She buried her face on his shoulder, both arms about him, regardless of
+her finery. “You're the dearest, sweetest old trump of a brother that
+ever lived, and you smell like sunshine and fresh air!” she cried.
+Whereat he shook with laughter and patted her back as she clung to him.
+
+“Promise me, Red,” she begged, lifting her head, “that you won't let
+anything--anything--keep you from going off with Ellen in the Imp. She's
+been so lovely about this horrid delay, but I'm always suspicious of
+you. Promise!”
+
+“I promise you this,” agreed her brother: “Wherever the Imp and I go,
+after the minister has said the words, for this two weeks Ellen shall go
+with me.”
+
+
+
+“Chester,” said Dick Warburton as he stood in that gentleman's company,
+looking over a stupendous assortment of wedding gifts, which, in
+spite of the fact that nobody outside the family had been asked to see
+Redfield Pepper Burns married, overflowed two large rooms into the upper
+hall and almost over the railing, “will you tell me who in the name of
+time sent that rat-trap? This is the most extraordinary display of
+gold, silver, and tinware that I ever saw, and I'm at the end of my
+astonishment. But that rat-trap, is it a joke?”
+
+“No joke whatever--,” declared Chester. “It comes from one of
+Red's devoted friends--his own invention. And the point of the thing is
+that the making of that rat-trap is going to be the making of the
+worst dead-beat of a patient Red ever stood by. I really believe Joe
+Tressler's going to get a patent on it, which also will be Red's doing.
+But this is a special, particular rat-trap made of extra fine materials,
+suitable for a wedding gift!”
+
+“Well, well,” mused Burns's brother-in-law. “And what millionaire sent
+the diamond pendant? By Jove, I haven't seen finer jewels than those
+this side of the water.”
+
+“That came from the Walworths, I believe. Take it all together, it's a
+great collection, isn't it? It shows up the odder because Ellen wouldn't
+have the freak grateful-patient gifts put to one side--or even thrown
+into a sort of refining shadow. Fix your eye on that rainbow quilt, will
+you, Dicky, alongside of the Florentine tapestry? That quilt would put
+out your eye if you gazed upon it steadily, so let up on it by regarding
+this match-safe. Wouldn't that--”
+
+“That came from Johnny Caruthers,” said a richly modulated low voice
+behind him. “Please set it down carefully, Mr. Arthur Chester.”
+
+The two men wheeled to see the bride come to the defense of her wedding
+gifts. Behind her loomed her husband, laughing over her head, his eyes
+none the less tender, like hers, for the queer presents which meant no
+less of love and gratitude than the costlier gifts, of which there was
+no mean array.
+
+“I see you've married him, patients and all, Ellen Burns,” declared
+Richard Warburton. “On the whole, it's your wisest course. The less he
+knows you mind their devotion to him--”
+
+“Mind it!” She gave him the flash of which the soft black eyes were
+brilliantly capable. “Dick, I have no gift I like so well as that
+rat-trap. You don't know the story, but I do, and it means to
+me--fidelity to duty. And if there's one great big thing in the world I
+think it's that!”
+
+Over her head, Dick Warburton nodded at his brother-in-law. “I'm glad
+we've got her into the family, Red,” said he. “It's a mighty rare thing
+to find a beautiful woman who knows how to dress like a picture, with
+that ideal at the back of her head! Cherish her, Red. If you don't I'll
+come around and knock you down!”
+
+“I'll let you do it,” agreed Burns soberly. All his marriage vows were
+in his face.
+
+It was quite dusk when the Green Imp got away. Johnny Caruthers had the
+satisfaction of lighting up the car's lamps--always a joy to him, and
+particularly so to-night, for even the oil taillight bore witness to his
+trimming and polishing till its red eye could gleam no brighter. As for
+the front lamps and the searchlight the Imp's progress would be as down
+an avenue of brilliance if its driver allowed them all full play upon
+the road.
+
+“She's in great trim, Johnny,” said Burns's voice in his ear. “I like
+her looks immensely. I shall hate to get a speck of mud on her.”
+
+“Meaning the lady, Doc?” asked Johnny anxiously. “There's a wet bit
+there under the elms, Doc, remember. It would be a pity to splash any
+mud on her!”
+
+He glanced toward the porch, his freckled face eloquent of his
+admiration for the figure which was the centre of the group gathered
+there.
+
+Burns's eyes followed his. Bob, a picturesque, small person in his
+wedding attire of white linen, was attempting to tie Ellen's motor-veil
+for her, as she stooped, smiling, to the level of his eager little arms.
+It occurred to both master and man, as they watched the child's efforts
+to adjust the floating chiffon, that veils, however useful, were to be
+regretted when they were allowed even partially to obscure faces like
+those of Red Pepper's wife.
+
+“I meant the car, lad,” explained Burns, laughing. “You've done a great
+piece of work an her since I brought her home this afternoon. I'm afraid
+you've done some last polishing with your wedding clothes on, Johnny.
+Here's something to take the spots out.”
+
+“Oh, Doc!” breathed the boy. “Not to-night, Let me do it--for you--and
+her.”
+
+The money went back into Burns's pocket, and his hand met Johnny's in
+a hearty grasp. “That's better yet,” said he, “and thank you, John. If
+anybody but you were sending me off I'd ask if everything was surely in
+the car But I'll not even ask you.”
+
+“You don't need to,” vowed the boy proudly. “And there's some things in
+you don't need to know about, just extrys in case of breakdown.”
+
+“Now, that,” said his employer, “is what call proving one's self a
+friend.”
+
+The Imp went cautiously through the “wet bit,” for it lay under the
+corner arc-light, and Johnny Caruthers would be watching. But, once on
+the open road outside the village, the pace quickened. For late April
+the roads were not bad, and if they had been sloughs the Imp could have
+pulled through them. She had a great power hidden away in those six
+cylinders of hers, had the Imp.
+
+“You'll not mind if I stop at the hospital as we go through?” questioned
+Burns. “Then we'll be off, out the old west road, out of reach of
+telephones and summonses of any sort. But I shall be just that much
+easier.”
+
+“Do stop, please. I'm sure you'll be more satisfied and so shall I.”
+
+She sat quietly in the car while he was gone looking up at the lighted
+windows and thinking all sorts of sympathetic thoughts concerning those
+inside--yet with a tiny fear in her heart that he would find some new
+and unavoidable duty to detain him. If he should--
+
+But he was back, and as the Imp's searchlight fell upon his face,
+returning, she read there that he was free.
+
+“Doing well, everything satisfactory, and I've not a care in the world,”
+ he exulted as he leaped in. “Now we're off, and never a stop till we've
+put a wide space between us and the rest of them.”
+
+The Green Imp ran at its quietest along the city streets, then through
+the thinning suburbs, and finally, with the lights all behind them, the
+open country ahead, the long, low car came out upon the straight
+highway which leads a hundred miles before it comes again to any but
+insignificant hamlets and small, rustic inns.
+
+Burns had said little thus far, but as he glanced over his shoulder at
+the now distant lights of the city he suddenly spoke low, out of the
+quiet:
+
+“We're out of reach of everything and everybody; nobody even knows the
+road we're taking. We're all alone in the world together. You can't
+think what that means to me. I've lived nine years at the call of every
+soul that wanted me: hardly a vacation except for study. A fortnight
+seems pretty short allowance for a honeymoon; we'll take a longer one
+when we go to Germany in the fall. But--for two weeks--”
+
+He looked down at her in the April starlight. He bent to finish the
+statement, whatever it might have been, upon her lips, for speech failed
+him. Then, with a happy laugh, he gave the Green Imp her head.
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 2725 ***