The old doctor’s forehead for the first time was beaded.  He wanted silver wire.  He would have accepted catgut.  He had neither.  For one moment, in agony himself, he looked about; then a look of joy came to his face.  An old fiddle was lying in the window.  A moment, and he had ripped off a string.  In two strides he was back at the dripping table, where lay one marble figure, stood a second figure also of marble.

“We were just trailing along, not paying much attention to anything, when all at once that dog. . .”

Doctor Jamieson’s story of his famous coon dog was never entirely completed.  His voice droned away and ceased now, as he bent once more over his work.

What he did, so far as he in his taciturn way ever would admit, was in some way to poke the catgut violin string under the bone, with the end of the probe, and so to pass a ligature around the broken bone itself.  After that, it was easier to fasten the splinter back in place where it belonged.

Doctor Jamieson used all his violin string.  Then he cleaned the wound thoroughly, and with a frank brutality drenched it with turpentine, as he would have done with a horse or a dog; for this burning liquid was the only thing at hand to aid him.  His own eyes grew moist as he saw the twitching of the burned tissues under this infliction, but his hand was none the less steady.  The edge of the great table was splintered where Dunwody’s hands had grasped it.  The flesh on the inside of his fingers was broken loose under his grip.  Blood dripped also from his hands.

“I’m only a backwoods doctor, Dunwody,” said Jamieson at length, as he began rebandaging the limb.  “I reckon there’s a heap of good surgeons up North that could make a finer job of this.  God knows, I wish they’d had it, and not me.  But with what’s at hand, I’ve done the best I could.  My experience is, it’s pretty hard to kill a man.

“Wait now until I get some splints—­hold still, can’t you!  If we have to cut your leg off after a while, I can do a better job than this, maybe.  But now we have all done the best we could.  Young lady, your arm again, if you please.  God bless you!”

The face of Josephine St. Auban was wholly colorless as once more she assisted the doctor with his patient.  They got him upon his own bed at last.  To Dunwody’s imagination, although he could never settle it clearly in his mind, it seemed that a hand had pushed the hair back from his brow; that some one perhaps had arranged a pillow for him.

Jamieson left the room and dropped into a chair in the hall, his face between his hands.  “Sally,” he whispered after a time, “whisky—­quick!” And when she got the decanter he drank half a tumblerful without a gasp.

“Fiddle string in his leg!” he grinned to himself at last.  “Maybe it won’t make him dance, but I’ll bet a thousand dollars he’d never have danced again without it!”