The meager sick-room, stripped to its bare pine skin of every tawdry colored print and fluttering cheese-cloth curtain, faced bluntly toward the west--a vital little laboratory in which the unknown quantity of a woman's endurance and the fallible skill of one man, the stubborn bravery of another, and the quite inestimable will of God were to be fused together in a desperate experiment to precipitate Life rather than Death. So October waxed into November, and so waxed misgiving into apprehension, and apprehension into actual fear. In any more cheerful situation it would have been at least interesting to have watched the infuriated expletives issue from Andrew's perennially smiling lips. "Oh, hang not having anything to work with!" he kept reiterating and reiterating. "Hang being shut off like this on a ranch where there aren't anything but sheep and goats and one old stingy cow that Hanlon's Mary guards with her life 'cause the lady's only a school teacher, but a baby is a baby.' Hang Hanlon's Mary! And hang not being altogether able to blame her! And hang not knowing, anyway, just what nanny-goat's milk would do for a typhoid patient! And hang--" But before the expletives, and through the expletives, and after the expletives, Andrews was all hero, working, watching, experimenting, retrenching, humanly comprehensive, more than humanly vigilant. So, with the brain of a doctor and the heart of a lover, the two men worked and watched and waited through the tortuous autumn days and nights, blind to the young dawn stealing out like a luminous mist from the night-smothered mountains; deaf to the flutter of sun-dried leaves in the radiant noon-time; dull to the fruit-scented fragrance of the early twilight, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, sensing nothing, except the flicker of a pulse or the rise of a temperature. And then at last there came a harsh, wintry feeling day, when Andrews, stepping out into the hall, called Guthrie softly to him and said, still smiling: "Guthrie, old man, I don't think we're going to win this game!" "W-h-a-t?" gasped Guthrie. With his mouth still curling amiably around his words, Andrews repeated the phrase. "I said, I don't think we're going to win this game. No, nothing new's happened. She's simply burning out. Can't you understand? I mean she's probably--going to die!" Out of the jumble of words that hurtled through Guthrie's mind only four slipped his lips. "But--she's--my--wife!" he protested. "Other men's wives have died before this," said Andrews still smiling. "Man," cried Guthrie, "if you smile again, I'll break your head!" With his tears running down like rain into the broadening trough of his smile, Andrews kept right on smiling. "You needn't be so cross about it," he said. "You're not the only one who likes her! I wanted her myself! You're nothing but a tramp on the face of the earth--and I could have given her the snuggest home in Yonkers!"