Lee said no more. The young doctor was still labouring under the excitement of the past hour and swimming in exultation at performing an operation that would have taxed the skill of an experienced surgeon. It had been one of those wicked cases--arm crushed to the shoulder, everything gone into a hodge-podge of flesh and arteries and splintered bone, a case for fast work and at the same time for delicate closure of the stump. This had been thrust at Higginson like a flash, he out of a medical school but a year and a half, still coaxing a moustache, so to speak. Lee perceived it all. The matter for Higginson had been like the ditch with Bryant: something tremendous, something to be met with the means at hand, something to be accomplished at all costs. And now his brain was ringing with triumph. He was superior to anything Bryant might think or say or do. For the moment he was quite ecstatic. One in his exalted state could conceive nothing unmeet in having haled a strange, sensitive girl into the ghastly business for an assistant. "I'll conduct Miss Graham to my office, where she can remain until she's wholly herself," Bryant said. "This air is too sharp. You have everything, Rymer--cap, coat, gauntlets? Bring them along." "But I'm feeling better now," Louise protested. "You're not yet fit to start home. Over there it's warm and quiet." He rose to help her remove the great apron. In the shack at the head of the street where he led her, he made her comfortable in an old arm-chair from his ranch house with a Navajo rug over her lap. As he stirred up the fire, she gazed about at the room. In one corner was a desk knocked together of boards, littered with papers; near it on the floor were boxes stuffed with rolls of blue-prints; the wall spaces between windows were filled with statements and reports; bulging card-board files rested on a shelf; from nails hung an old coat and a camera; in another corner leaned a tripod, rod, and a six-foot brass-edged measure specked with clay; and piled in a heap beyond the stove were a saddle, a pair of boots, chunks of pinon pine, and a discarded flannel shirt on which lay a gray cat nursing a kitten. Through the inner door, standing open, she had a glimpse of two cots with tumbled blankets. The place was the office and temporary home of a busy man, a rough board-and-tar-paper habitation that went forward on skids as the camp went forward, the workshop and living-quarters of a director who was stripped down to the hard essentials of toil and whose brain was the nerve centre of a desperate effort by a host of horses and men. "You have companions, I see," Louise remarked, indicating the mother cat and kitten. "Dave's," was his reply, as he finished at the stove. "He found them somewhere. There were four kittens to begin with, but only one is left. It's a hard game for cats to survive in a camp like this." "Poor little things!" "Dave says he'll save this kitten, or know why."