He carefully drove the horses into stalls.
Her toes were coals of pain. “Let’s
run for the house,” she said.
“Can’t. Not yet. Might never
find it. Might get lost ten feet away from it.
Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We’ll
rush for the house when the blizzard lifts.”
“I’m so stiff! I can’t walk!”
He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes
and boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers
as he fumbled at her laces. He rubbed her feet,
and covered her with the buffalo robe and horse-blankets
from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy,
hemmed in by the storm. She sighed:
“You’re so strong and yet so skilful and
not afraid of blood or storm or——”
“Used to it. Only thing that’s bothered
me was the chance the ether fumes might explode, last
night.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead
of chloroform like I told him, and you know ether
fumes are mighty inflammable, especially with that
lamp right by the table. But I had to operate,
of course—wound chuck-full of barnyard
filth that way.”
“You knew all the time that——Both
you and I might have been blown up? You knew
it while you were operating?”
“Sure. Didn’t you? Why, what’s
the matter?”
Kennicott was heavily pleased by her Christmas
presents, and he gave her a diamond bar-pin.
But she could not persuade herself that he was much
interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree
she had decorated, the three stockings she had hung,
the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages.
He said only:
“Nice way to fix things, all right. What
do you say we go down to Jack Elder’s and have
a game of five hundred this afternoon?”
She remembered her father’s Christmas fantasies:
the sacred old rag doll at the top of the tree, the
score of cheap presents, the punch and carols, the
roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which
the judge opened the children’s scrawly notes
and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for
opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She
remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself
for being a sentimentalist, against the peace and
dignity of the State of Minnesota. She remembered
his thin legs twinkling before their sled——
She muttered unsteadily, “Must run up and put
on my shoes—slippers so cold.”
In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom
she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.
Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment,
Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is not certain
in what order he preferred them. Solid though
his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine—his
admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation
of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners
to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about
fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus—none
of these beatified him as did motoring.
