s buttoned across a bare throat, for his shirt had been
ripped into bandages; his face, apparently, had been harrowed for a red
planting; he moved awkwardly, breathed with a gasp from a stabbing pain in
the side ... but he moved, breathed. He drank with long delight from a
sparkling spring. He had the money, two hundred and eighty dollars, safely
in his pocket.

XIII

The afternoon was waning when he gazed again into the deep, sombrous rift
of Greenstream: from where Gordon stood, on the heights, in the flooding
sun, it appeared to be already evening below. As he descended the
mountainside the cool shadows rose about him, enveloping him in the
quietude, the sense of security, which brooded over the withdrawn
valley--the resplendent mirage of nature kind, beneficent, the illusion of
Nature as a tender and loving parent ... of Nature, as imminent, as
automatic, as a landslip crushing a path to the far, secret resting place
of its destiny.

Dr. Pelliter's light carriage with its pair of weedy, young horses stood
hitched by the road above the Makimmon dwelling; and, on entering the
house, Gordon found Clare in bed and Pelliter seated at her side. A
gaily-patched quilt hid all but her head. She smiled at Gordon through her
pale mask of suffering; but her greeting turned to swift concern at his
battered countenance. "An accident," he explained impatiently.

The doctor greeted him seriously. He had, Gordon knew, a sovereign and
inevitable remedy for all the ills of the flesh--pain, he argued, and
disease were inseparable, subdue the first and the latter ceased to exist
as an active ill, and a dexterously wielded hypodermic needle left behind
him a trail of narcotized and relieved sufferers. Bottles of patent
medicines, exhilarating or numbing as the purchaser might require, lined
the shelves of his drug store.

But now his customary, soothing smile was absent, the small, worn case
that contained the glittering syringe and minute bottles filled with white
or vivid yellow pellets was not to be seen.

"Clare here's gone and got herself real miserable," he stated, rising and
beckoning Gordon to follow him to the porch. "She's bad," he pronounced
outside; "that pain's got the best of her, and it's getting the best of
me. She ought to be cut, but she's so weak, it's gone so long, that I'm
kind of slow about opening her. And the truth is, Gordon, if I was
successful she wouldn't have a chance of getting well here--it'll