His bed, upon which she lay, was a most crude and inadequate affair. It was of his own construction, and had been intended to serve its part in the life of severe austerity that he had made for himself in the mountains. It was made of rough boards nailed to wooden posts. To serve for mattress, fragrant pine-needles filled it. Upon this were spread sheets and blankets. The pillow also was made of pine-needles. Thus, without springs, the bed was hard and unfit for a daintily reared woman; more so because of the illness that she would suffer and the great length of time that she would be confined to the bed; but it was the best he had. As the hut was very small and had but one room, this bed had been fitted snugly into a corner. Wilder moved it out, that he might be able to work freely on both sides of it. This cramped the hut all the more. The examination that he had made in the road was for the purpose of discovering broken bones. There he had found the bone of the left thigh broken at some undetermined point between the knee and the hip. But broken bones are not all the hurts that one may receive in such an accident,--cuts and contusions might prove equally dangerous if overlooked. With exquisite care he prepared her for the work that he must do. As she was fully dressed, this required patience from his unskilled hands. Finally, this part of the task, inexpressibly hard for a man of his delicacy of feeling, was accomplished. What anguish he suffered on his own account and in foreseeing her confusion and possible resentment upon realizing that he, an utter stranger, and not a physician, had done all this for her, it were idle to set forth here. To his great relief he found that the bone of the left thigh was, so far as he could judge, the only one that had suffered fracture; but a careful inspection revealed several bruises; and at last, in searching for the source of the blood that had covered her face when he drew her from the débris, he found a cut in her crown. His first work must be there. Covering her comfortably, he washed the blood from her hair and face, and, bearing in mind the pride that she must have cherished for her glorious hair, he quickly shaved as small a space on her crown as possible. He first tried adhesive plaster to bring the edges of the cut together; but the water and his handling of the wound started the hemorrhage afresh, and this compelled him to close the wound with ligatures. He was pleased to observe that the hemorrhage was stopped. This made him so well satisfied and so confident that the greater magnitude of the remaining work appalled him less. Indeed, that had begun to exercise a scientific fascination that abnormally sharpened his wits and steadied his nerves. It was this task that he now attacked.