a happy man, in spite of the fact that a horse was to him the
last means of locomotion that he would have chosen for an all night trip,
with the possible exception of a camel or an elephant. Except as objects
for his scientific skill, horses were not dear to his heart. A wagon, a
train, an automobile, these were sensible conveyances for an intellectual
man of an old and distinguished family going about his business, but a
horse, never!

Not that Li would have admitted that his family was old. Distinguished,
perhaps, but scarcely old when it only counted its ancestry through some
eight or nine hundred years. In China that is to be classed among the
blatantly new. He was happy, however, because he was being given a chance
to use his skill for that great purpose for which it had been acquired,
the alleviation of pain.

Li was a student, and for five years he had had very little opportunity
for the work that he loved. With the patience of the Oriental, he had
toiled at an inferior art; now opportunity had come, and so eager was he
to grasp it, that a twenty-mile ride on an uncongenial animal, in the
night, did not deter him. Not that he was afraid of the dark as we like to
think the Chinese are. Li Yow had a philosophy, old when the Christian
philosophy was born, which amply sufficed to relieve his mind of any
superstitious terrors. Mexicans on the rampage, and Yaquis on the warpath,
did not, however, come under the category of superstitious fears, and he
heartily hoped he might accomplish his journey without meeting either of
them.

He rode Scott's big roan, Cochise, a common-sense animal which could be
trusted to the tender mercies of what its master called "a crazy Chink."
This excellent beast understood thoroughly the art of saving his strength,
and curbing any foolish enthusiasm on the part of a rider to race up-hill
or to exhaust one's wind too early in the game.

"Spirit and a bit of deviltry are all right in a horse or a woman, I'll
grant you," Scott used to say when anyone derided the roan. "But the horse
or the woman who lives with me has got to have common sense."

So Li Yow and Cochise trotted placidly along the mesa, one thinking of the
joys of surgery, and the other of the pleasure of feeding in one's own
corral. They had been out a couple of hours perhaps, and Li, moved by the
beauty of the night, quoted a fragment of eighth century poetry and turned
in his saddle to see how far he had come--when, suddenl