“You see, sir,” he said, lowering his voice as though in the room with a corpse, “Mr. Conover sent word for me to ride with him. We started off at a dead run, and my horse couldn’t noways keep up with Dunderberg, so I follows along behind as fast as I could, but I couldn’t keep up to the right distance between us, to save me. Mr. Conover turns out of the drive, up Pompton Av’noo, sir, and on past the Humason place, me a-followin’ as fast as I could. All of a sudden I catches up. It’s in that dark, woody patch of road just this side the quarries. The way I happens to catch up is because Dunderberg was havin’ one of them tantrums of his an’ Mr. Conover was givin’ it to him for all he was worth, crop an’ spur, an’ Dunderberg a-whirlin’ around and passagin’ an’ tryin’ his best to rear. An’ every time that horse’s forelegs goes up in the air Mr. Conover’d bring his fist down between his ears an’ down’d come Dunderberg on all-fours again. They was takin’ up all the road, wide as it is, an’ Dunderberg was lashin’ an’ plungin’ like he was crazy, an’ Mr. Conover stickin’ on like he was glued there an’ sendin’ in the spurs and the whacks of the crop till you’d ’a’ thought he’d kill the brute. Then, Dunderberg makes a dive ahead an’ gets out alongside the quarry-pit an’ tries to rear again. Right on the edge of the pit.” “Yes,” said Clive excitedly, as the groom paused, “and then?” “Why, sir, I can’t rightly tell, the light was so bad. If it’d been anyone else but Mr. Conover, I’d say he lost his nerve, an’ when Dunderberg reared up he forget to bring him down like he’d done those other times, or maybe he _did_ hit the horse between the ears again an’ didn’t hit hard enough. Anyhow, over goes Dunderberg backward—clean fifteen feet drop—into the quarry. An’ Mr. Conover under him. An’ then——” But Clive had moved away. The doctors had finished their consultation, and one of them—Dr. Hawes, the Conover family physician—had again approached that silent figure on the couch. At sight of Standish the second doctor came forward to meet the young man. “No,” he whispered, reading the unspoken question in Clive’s face, “no possible hope. He can’t last over an hour longer at most. Another man, crushed as he was, would have been killed at once. As it is, he probably won’t recover consciousness. Nothing but his tremendous vitality holds the shreds of life in him so long as this.” “Does his wife know——?” “She is not in a state to be told. I wish we could persuade her to leave the room. Perhaps Miss Lanier——” A gesture from Dr. Hawes drew them toward the couch. “He is coming to his senses,” said the family physician, adding under his breath, so that only his colleague and Clive could hear; “it is the final rally. Not one man in a thousand——” But Clive had caught Anice’s eye and beckoned her to lead Mrs. Conover to the side of the couch.