He lay on a litter of overcoats, the hub of a wheel of men that broke of itself before the first doctor on the scene. He was not even insensible, neither was he uttering moan or groan; but his white lips were drawn away from his set teeth, and his left leg had an odd look of being no more a part of him than its envelope of knickerbocker and stocking. "It's a bu'st, doctor, I'm afraid," the boy ground out as Dollar knelt in the snow. "Hurting? A bit--but I can stick it." Courage was the one quality he had not lost during the last year; nobody could have shown more during the slow and excruciating progress to the village, on a bobsleigh carried by four stumbling men; everybody was whispering about it. Everybody but the crime doctor, who headed the little procession with a face in keeping with the tone which had made Edenborough wince and Scarth look round. The complex case of the night--this urgent one--both were forgot in Dollar's own case of years ago. He was back again in another Winterwald, another world. It was no longer a land of Christmas-trees growing out of mountains of Christmas cake; the snow melted before his mind's eye; he was hugging the shadows in a street of toy-houses yielding resin to an August sun, between green slopes combed with dark pines, under a sky of intolerable blue. And he was in despair; all Harley Street could or would do nothing for him. And then--and then--some forgotten ache or pain had taken him to the little man--the great man--down this very turning to the left, in the little wooden house tucked away behind the shops. How he remembered every landmark--the handrail down the slope--the little porch--the bare stairs, his own ladder between death and life--the stark surgery with its uncompromising appliances in full view! And now at last he was there with such another case as his own--the minor case that he had yet burned to bring there--and there was Alt to receive them in the same white jacket and with the same simple countenance as of old! They might have taken him on to the hotel, as Scarth indeed urged strongly; but the boy himself was against another yard, though otherwise a hero to the end. "Chloroform?" he cried faintly. "Can't I have my beastly leg set without chloroform? You're not going to have it off, are you? I can stick anything short of that." The two doctors retired for the further consideration of a point on which they themselves were not of one mind. "It's the chance of our lives, and the one chance for him," urged Dollar vehemently. "It isn't as if it were such a dangerous operation, and I'll take sole responsibility." "But I am not sure you have been right," demurred the other. "He has not even had concussion, a year ago. It has been only the ear."