He was now a fine, tall, grave young fellow of twenty-eight; even handsome and distinguished. His ambition, he told his father, was to be a surgeon in children's deformities. To this end he hoped to get an appointment as assistant to a certain surgeon, the most famous children's surgeon in the world. Frank was a quiet fellow; "hoped" was the word he used, but the father knew it was more than hope--it was ardent desire. He thought maybe he had attracted some attention, Frank said, and that his work had reached the ears of the surgeon. If he could get the appointment he felt that his future was secure. "What do you want to be a child's surgeon for?" asked the father. "To make money?" Frank looked at him quietly and shook his head, and that was all they said. He left soon after that. Tom drove him to the station, the blind dog sitting in the foot of the buggy. "Don't you and Mother let your hopes get too high," warned the young man. "There'll be a hundred applicants besides myself. I'll telegraph the result." A few days afterward bird season opened and Tom Jennings and Mac set off after dinner. There had been three or four days of heavy rains but now the weather had cleared. It was a silent, gorgeous afternoon, high colours everywhere, gold in the sky and in the frosty air. As he walked along Tom was thinking of his boy and of his girls; for if Mac was growing a bit doting, so, perhaps, was he. Before him old Mac, head high, circled slowly, with ever-wagging tail. Suddenly, not very far from the river, he stopped, and his tail stiffened. "Comin', ol' boy," said Tom. The birds rose and the gun barked twice. One bird tumbled dead. The other, only winged, recovered itself and, fluttering across the field, came down near the bank of the river. Mac brought the dead bird, and Tom Jennings, stooping first to pat his head, dropped it in his pocket. Then they went on after the wounded one, which had come down near the river. Even now Tom was thinking in a mooning sort of way of his children. The river made a sharp curve inward near the point where the bird had gone down. Then, forming the remainder of a letter S, it swept out again and around a curve. Below this curve it tumbled over extensive and dangerous shoals of rock. The rains had swollen it. And now the roar from these shoals filled the air. It was this roar, together with a chance feather that had got into the whistle, that drowned out the frantic signal Tom Jennings tried to give. For ahead of him a terrible thing was about to happen. The wounded bird, frightened at the approach of the dog, rose, fluttered along the ground toward the river, and stopped near the shore. And old Mac, his nose telling him exactly what had occurred, was following with wagging tail and pricked ears--following toward that sharp inward curve of the river, where the banks had caved in and were very steep, and where the current below made a sudden swerve, then swept outward again.