tood beside him,
clasping his brawny left forearm with both of her small but sinewy
hands.

As Donald approached them on the run he noticed that the girl had
sacrificed her treasured hair ribbon to make a tourniquet halfway up the
old man's arm, and that blood was running down his hand and falling from
the finger tips with slow, rhythmical continuity.

"Hit haint nothin' et all, Smiles," Big Jerry was rumbling forth. "Hit
air jest er scratch. I don't know how I come fer ter do hit an' I reckon
I ought ter be plumb ershamed. Why, Smiles, I been erchoppin' wood fer
nigh onter fifty year, an' I haint never chopped myself erfore. Hit war
thet tarnation knot. But hit haint nothin', this hyar haint."

"Come over to the well where we can give it a wash," was Donald's curt
command, and Big Jerry followed him obediently, while the girl hastened
ahead and drew up a bucket full of pure, sparkling, ice-cold spring
water. The doctor tipped it unceremoniously over the giant's arm, and,
as the already coagulating blood on the surface was washed away, made a
hasty examination of the slanting, ugly gash beneath.

"Superficial wound. No artery or major muscle severed," he announced, as
though addressing a class. "Still, you were right in taking the
precaution of applying that tourniquet, Rose. I suppose it was bleeding
pretty merrily at first."

"Hit war spoutin' powerful," she answered, in her stress of excitement
lapsing into the language of childhood.

"Yes, I suppose so. That is in a way a good thing in such cases,
however. It automatically cleanses the wound of any infectious matter.
Look, Rose," he added, as though explaining to a clinic, "see how the
blood is thickening up into a clot? That is chiefly the work of what we
call 'white corpuscles'--infinitely tiny little organisms whose sole
purpose in life is to eat up disease germs which may get into the veins,
and to hurry to the surface when there is a cut, cluster together and
die, their bodies forming a wall against the wicked enemies who are
always anxious to get inside the blood for the purpose of making
trouble."

"I told ye 'twarnt nothin'," said Big Jerry, not without a note of
relief in his voice, however. "A leetle blood-lettin' won't do me no
hurt. I'll jest wind a rag eround hit, an' ..."

"Not so fast," laughed Donald. "In all probability 'a rag just wound
round it' would do the business, for your blood is apparently in
first-class condition, with its full s