“BY gad, Glen,” the doctor shouted, “it’s our boy! And he’s hurt!” He dropped to his knees and gently turned Luke Manders over so that he rested upon his back. “Gimme some light!” Glen, who had been forcing the door shut in the face of the storm, ran to pull the light from the tiny bead which served at night to its full force. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed, looking down at the inert figure, sensing that her dismal fiction was visualized in fact before her, “he’s dead!” “Dead, nothing!” her father snapped. “Go get my bag!” He was beginning to unfasten the sodden rain and blood-soaked clothing. “But he’s hurt, all right; hurt bad. ’S’matter with you? Don’t stand there gawping at me! _Get my bag!_” He scowled up at her horror-stricken face and swore under his breath as she stumbled away. This was the way the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie would have acted: was the girl, for all his toughening processes, more her mother’s daughter than his? She redeemed herself in the raw hour which followed. Her father saw, presently, that there had been nothing craven in her shrinking. It had been pure grief for the end of their golden legend, their golden lad. “Ought to get him on the table,” the doctor fretted, “but--” he regarded the gaunt length of the young mountaineer. “I can help you carry him, Dad!” the girl interrupted eagerly. “You take the hurt part of him and I’ll carry his feet! Wait--I’ll fix the table!” She flew to spread a folded blanket and a sheet over the glistening golden oak. The removal was accomplished with comparative ease, the boy coming only to partial consciousness and relapsing instantly into merciful stupor. “He’ll wake up, fast enough, when I get busy after that bullet,” said the man grimly. “You’ll have to hold him steady, Glen, if you can.” “I can,” she answered palely. She worked quietly and capably, swiftly and intelligently obedient to a curt word or even a gesture. It was a strange, a grotesque scene, and the memory of it was to stay with her as long as she lived--their splendid, wild young savage, bold and fearless and free against his background of rocky hills and rushing streams and dark forests, free no longer, and no longer wild and splendid, lying limp on the dining table in the hideous room Effie Darrow had hated, now slackly swept and dusted by the yellow slattern Emma-_leen_. The child, working wordlessly with her father, bringing hot water and soft old linen, setting her teeth when he probed into the raw flesh, putting all her young muscle into holding the twisting shoulders down, tried vainly to make a reality of it all. The stark reversal was what made it so crassly unbelievable. One day he had been leaping away into his mountain fastnesses like a young stag, scorning them, and another day he had come crawling down from his heights to their level, scorning them still, no doubt, but begging their bounty. It hurt her conception of him, her pride in him.