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There were days of high temperature and delirium; days of heart-sinking when Strang’s pulse was barely perceptible; days when he lay conscious, eyes weary and drawn, the sweat of pain on his face. Linday was indefatigable, cruelly efficient, audacious and fortunate, daring hazard after hazard and winning. He was not content to make the man live. He devoted himself to the intricate and perilous problem of making him whole and strong again.

“He will be a cripple?” Madge queried.

“He will not merely walk and talk and be a limping caricature of his former self,” Linday told her. “He shall run and leap, swim riffles, ride bears, fight panthers, and do all things to the top of his fool desire. And, I warn you, he will fascinate women just as of old. Will you like that? Are you content? Remember, you will not be with him.”

“Go on, go on,” she breathed. “Make him whole. Make him what he was.”

More than once, whenever Strang’s recuperation permitted, Linday put him under the anaesthetic and did terrible things, cutting and sewing, rewiring and connecting up the disrupted organism. Later, developed a hitch in the left arm. Strang could lift it so far, and no farther. Linday applied himself to the problem. It was a case of more wires, shrunken, twisted, disconnected. Again it was cut and switch and ease and disentangle. And all that saved Strang was his tremendous vitality and the health of his flesh.

“You will kill him,” his brother complained. “Let him be. For God’s sake let him be. A live and crippled man is better than a whole and dead one.”

Linday flamed in wrath. “You get out! Out of this cabin with you till you can come back and say that I make him live. Pull–by God, man, you’ve got to pull with me with all your soul. Your brother’s travelling a hairline razor-edge. Do you understand? A thought can topple him off. Now get out, and come back sweet and wholesome, convinced beyond all absoluteness that he will live and be what he was before you and he played the fool together. Get out, I say.”

The brother, with clenched hands and threatening eyes, looked to Madge for counsel.

“Go, go, please,” she begged. “He is right. I know he is right.”

Another time, when Strang’s condition seemed more promising, the brother said:

“Doc, you’re a wonder, and all this time I’ve forgotten to ask your name.”

“None of your damn business. Don’t bother me. Get out.”

The mangled right arm ceased from its healing, burst open again in a frightful wound.

“Necrosis,” said Linday.

“That does settle it,” groaned the brother.

“Shut up!” Linday snarled. “Get out! Take Daw with you. Take Bill, too. Get rabbits–alive–healthy ones. Trap them. Trap everywhere.”

“How many?” the brother asked.

“Forty of them–four thousand–forty thousand–all you can get. You’ll help me, Mrs. Strang. I’m going to dig into that arm and size up the damage. Get out, you fellows. You for the rabbits.”

And he dug in, swiftly, unerringly, scraping away disintegrating bone, ascertaining the extent of the active decay.

“It never would have happened,” he told Madge, “if he hadn’t had so many other things needing vitality first. Even he didn’t have vitality enough to go around. I was watching it, but I had to wait and chance it. That piece must go. He could manage without it, but rabbit-bone will make it what it was.”

From the hundreds of rabbits brought in, he weeded out, rejected, selected, tested, selected and tested again, until he made his final choice. He used the last of his chloroform and achieved the bone-graft–living bone to living bone, living man and living rabbit immovable and indissolubly bandaged and bound together, their mutual processes uniting and reconstructing a perfect arm.

And through the whole trying period, especially as Strang mended, occurred passages of talk between Linday and Madge. Nor was he kind, nor she rebellious.

“It’s a nuisance,” he told her. “But the law is the law, and you’ll need a divorce before we can marry again. What do you say? Shall we go to Lake Geneva?”