“Shut the door, shut the door!” he called.  “Come in, boys; here, let me brush that snow off you—­it’s my move Charlie, remember—­now, what the devil’s the matter?”

Then we would pant out our hurried exclamations, both together.

“Bah!” he growled, “ill nothing!  Mere belly ache, I guess.”

That was his term, his favorite word, for an undiagnosed disease—­“belly ache.”  They call it supergastral aesthesia now.  In a city house, it sounds better.  Yet how we hung upon the doctor’s good old Saxon term, yearning and hoping that it might be that.

But even as he growled the doctor had taken down a lantern from a hook, thrown on a huge, battered fur coat that doubled his size, and was putting medicines—­a very shopful it seemed—­into a leather case.

“Your horse is done up,” he said.  “We’ll put my mare in.  Come and give me a hand, Charlie.”

He was his own hostler and stable-man, he and his burly son.  Yet how quickly and quietly he moved, the lantern swinging on his arm, as he buckled the straps.  “What kind of a damn fool tug is this you’ve got?” he would say.

Then, in a moment, as it seemed, out into the wind and snow again, the great figure of the doctor almost filling the seat of the cutter, the two of us crushed in beside him, with responsibility, the unbearable burden, gone from us, and renewed comfort in our hearts.

Little is said on the way:  our heads are bent against the storm:  the long stride of the doctor’s mare eats up the flying road.

Then as we near the farm house and see the light in the sick-room window, fear clutches our hearts again.

“You boys unhitch,” says the doctor.  “I’ll go right in.”

Presently, when we enter the house, we find that he is in the sick-room—­the door closed.  No word of comfort has come forth.  He has sent out for hot blankets.  The stoves are to be kept burning.  We must sit up.  We may be needed.  That is all.

And there in that still room through the long night, he fights single-handed against Death.  Behind him is no human help, no consultation, no wisdom of the colleges to call in; only his own unaided strength, and his own firm purpose and that strange instinct in the fight for a flickering life, that some higher power than that of colleges has planted deep within his soul.

So we watch through the night hours, in dull misery and fear, a phantom at the window pane:  so must we wait till the slow morning shows dim and pale at the windows.

Then he comes out from the room.  His face is furrowed with the fatigue of his long vigil.  But as he speaks the tone of his voice is as that of one who has fought and conquered.

“There—­he’ll do now.  Give him this when he wakes.”

Then a great joy sweeps over us as the phantom flees away, and we shudder back into the warm sunshine of life, while the sound of the doctor’s retreating sleighbells makes music to our ears.