atisfying the demands of healthy hunger was paramount
to all things else. It was no feast of wit and wisdom, but of something,
for the time being, more desirable, and the application of the other
three gave Donald an opportunity to study covertly the unusual group of
which he had so unexpectedly become a part.

Although he was essentially a man of action, his brusqueness of manner
was, in part at least, a pose which had become unconscious, and, deep
within his heart, in a chamber carefully locked from the gaze of his
fellow men, dwelt Romance and Imagination--the spirit gifts of a mother,
whose death, five years before, had brought him his first black grief.
Had this visioning power been lacking in him he could never have
accomplished the modern miracles which he had already wrought many times
in constructive and restorative surgery. Now, the spirit of imagery in
his soul was stirred by something in the romantic unreality of his
surroundings--the rude, yet interesting room which served all family
purposes save that of slumber; the mellow radiance from a crude lamp and
the ever-changing light of the open fire; the long, wavering shadows
within the cabin; and, without, the banshee wailing of the storm wind
around the eaves, the occasional crash of thunder, the creaking of limbs
and fitful dashes of rain. He found himself leaning back in his chair
and mentally attempting to dissect and study not the bodies, but the
personalities, of the three who were the representatives of a type, in
manners and customs at least, new to him.

In his boyhood, and before the pressing demands of his profession had
enslaved him, Donald had been an insatiate reader, and now he
endeavored to recall to memory some of the stories which he had read
about this strange people, whose dwelling place was within the limits of
the busy, progressive East, yet who were surprisingly isolated from it
by natural barriers, and still more so by traditions slow to perish.
Pure of stock he knew them to be, for their unmixed blood had had its
fountain source in the veins of some of America's best and earliest
settlers; primitive in their ideals, strong in their simple purposes and
passions, the products of, and perhaps even now factors in, blood feuds
whose beginnings dated back generations. And, although he laughed at
himself for his imaginings as he remembered that the twentieth century
was ten years old, he found himself assigning both the men places in his
me