“Dunwody, we’re going to hurt you a little,” said Jamieson, at last.  “You’ve got to stand it, that’s all.  Lie down there on the table and get ready.”

He himself turned his back and was busy near by at a smaller table, arranging his instruments.  “What then represented surgical care would to-day be called criminal carelessness.  Next he went out to the front door and called aloud for Eleazar.

“Come here, man,” commanded Jamieson, after he had the old trapper in the room.  “Take hold of this good leg and hold it still.  Madam, I want you at the foot on the other side.  You may get hold of the edge of the table with your hands, Dunwody, and hold still, if you can.  I won’t be very long.”

Swiftly the doctor cut away the garments from the wounded limb, which lay now exposed in all the horrors of its inflammation. . . .  The next instant there was a tense tightening of the muscles of the man on the table.  There was a sigh of deep, intaken breath, followed, however, by no more than a faint moan as the knife went at its work. . . .

“I’m not going to do it!” came back from under the surgeon’s arm.  “There’s half a chance—­I’m going to try to save it!  Hold on, old man,—­here’s the thing to do—­we’re going to try—­”

He went down now into the quivering tissues and laid bare the edge of the broken bone, deep to the inner lines.  Thus the front of the shattered bone lay exposed.  The doctor sighed, as he pushed at this with a steady finger, his eyes frowning, absorbed.  The bullet wound in the anterior edge was not clean cut.  Near it was a long, heavy splinter of bone, the cause of the inflammation—­something not suspected in the hurried dressing of the wound in the half darkness at the river edge.  This bone end, but loosely attached, was broken free, thrust down into the angry and irritated flesh.

For an instant Jamieson studied the injury.  The silence of death was in the room.  The tense muscles of the patient might have been those of a lifeless man.  Only the horrid sound of the dripping blood, falling from the table upon the carpet, broke the silence.

“I had a coon dog once,” began Doctor Jamieson cheerfully—­“I don’t know whether you remember him or not, Dunwody.  Sort of a yellow dog, with long ears and white eye.  Just wait a minute.”  He hastened over to the side of the table and bent again over his case of instruments.

“There’s been all kinds of coon dogs in these bottoms and hills, I suppose, ever since white folks came here, but Dunwody, I’m telling you the truth, that dog of mine—­”

By this time he had fished out from his case a slender probe, which he bent back and forth as he once more approached the table.

“There’s wasn’t anything he wouldn’t run, from deer to catamount; and, one day, when we were out back here in the hills—­I don’t know but Eleazar here might remember something about that himself. . . . Hold on, now, old man!”