de him. Tomorrow I've planned to get into that
arm and take out the kink. It will mean a couple of days on his back.
I'm sorry there's no more chloroform. He'll just have to bite his teeth
on a spike and hang on. He can do it. He's got grit for a dozen men."

Summer came on. The snow disappeared, save on the far peaks of the
Rockies to the east. The days lengthened till there was no darkness, the
sun dipping at midnight, due north, for a few minutes beneath the
horizon. Linday never let up on Strang. He studied his walk, his body
movements, stripped him again and again and for the thousandth time made
him flex all his muscles. Massage was given him without end, until
Linday declared that Tom Daw, Bill, and the brother were properly
qualified for Turkish bath and osteopathic hospital attendants. But
Linday was not yet satisfied. He put Strang through his whole repertoire
of physical feats, searching him the while for hidden weaknesses. He put
him on his back again for a week, opened up his leg, played a deft trick
or two with the smaller veins, scraped a spot of bone no larger than a
coffee grain till naught but a surface of healthy pink remained to be
sewed over with the living flesh.

"Let me tell him," Madge begged.

"Not yet," was the answer. "You will tell him only when I am ready."

July passed, and August neared its end, when he ordered Strang out on
trail to get a moose. Linday kept at his heels, watching him, studying
him. He was slender, a cat in the strength of his muscles, and he walked
as Linday had seen no man walk, effortlessly, with all his body, seeming
to lift the legs with supple muscles clear to the shoulders. But it was
without heaviness, so easy that it invested him with a peculiar grace,
so easy that to the eye the speed was deceptive. It was the killing
pace of which Tom Daw had complained. Linday toiled behind, sweating and
panting; from time to time, when the ground favoured, making short runs
to keep up. At the end of ten miles he called a halt and threw himself
down on the moss.

"Enough!" he cried. "I can't keep up with you."

He mopped his heated face, and Strang sat down on a spruce log, smiling
at the doctor, and, with the camaraderie of a pantheist, at all the
landscape.

"Any twinges, or hurts, or aches, or hints of aches?" Linday demanded.

Strang shook his curly head and stretched his lithe body, living and
joying in every fibre of it.

"You'll do, Strang. For a winter or two