“Young man,” said Mr Hicks, flinging his sinewy arms round the intending avenger, and holding him fast, “the bugle has sounded the ‘cease fire,’ and I guess you had better obey. Here’s your boss with a broken arm and pretty near bleeding to death, and no doctor in this forsaken locality but the one at the Scythian hospice. I reckon we won’t requisition his services, but I shall want your help if I am to fix things myself, old campaigner though I am. Give me that shooting-iron for the present. Those things have a nasty trick of going off of themselves when a young fellow is seeing red.” Sobered by Mr Hicks’s speech, and very much ashamed of his temporary madness, Mansfield surrendered his revolver, and returned to Cyril’s side, feeling an irresistible inclination to choke. “My dear youth, don’t be an idiot,” said Cyril, and the lump in Mansfield’s throat vanished instantly. He even laughed, in a husky and shame-faced manner. “That’s better,” said Mr Hicks. “Take this chunk of wood, my young friend, and split it in two, if you have a knife about you.” He handed him one of the broken clubs with which the pilgrims had been armed instead of the regulation staves, and Mansfield succeeded in obtaining two fairly suitable pieces of wood, rounded on one side and flat on the other. The surgeon continued to improve the occasion even while the operation of setting the broken arm was proceeding, talking meditatively as he worked, perhaps with the benevolent intention of diverting the patient’s thoughts from what was going on. “Yes, young man, I like your face, and I guess I don’t object to your grit; but you’ll have to learn how to take things. A week as a special in war time would teach you a thing or two. What’s happened to that kodak of yours, now? I saw you figuring around with it while I was interviewing the old nigger who calls himself a saint up there. You hurled it away, did you, just as if it was a rock? and all the pictures with it that you had concluded to take home to your best girl? Now what a wicked waste! Pull, pull harder; that’s right. Keep cool, young man; the frozen deep is not a circumstance to the coolness you want before you’ll make a good man at a pinch.” With such cheerful counsels as these Mr Hicks lightened the gloom of the painful process he had in hand, but Mansfield scarcely heard them, in his anxiety for Cyril. At last the patient opened his eyes and said, “Don’t be too hard on him, Hicks. He’s a good chap all round.” The busy surgeon nodded. “I guess I’d turn him out a better if I had him on the ‘Crier’ staff,” he said; but when the work was over, and Mansfield had gone to fetch the servants, that they might lend their aid in carrying Cyril down the path, Mr Hicks smiled confidentially at his patient.