would fight this disease
before it could establish a hold. Locking the cow's head in an iron
stanchion, he had shed his coat, rolled up his right sleeve almost to
the shoulder, washed his hand and arm in a solution of carbolic and hot
water, carefully examining them to make sure there was no abrasion
of any kind. But despite his caution, a tiny cut so small that it had
escaped his searching, had come in contact with the infected mucous
membrane and blood poisoning had set in. And here he was, lying in bed,
given up by Doctor Bradley and the younger men the older physician had
called into consultation and who had tried in vain to stem the spread of
poison through his system. Martin was going to die, and no power could
save him. The irony of it! This farm to which he had devoted his life
was taking it from him by a member of its herd.

Martin made a wry little grimace of amusement as he realized suddenly
that even at the very gate of death it was still on life, his life,
that his thoughts dwelt. In these last moments, it was the tedious,
but stimulating, battle of existence that really occupied his full
attention. He would cling to it until the last snap of the thin string.
This cavern of oblivion that was awaiting him, that he must enter--it
was black and now more than ever his deep, simple irreligion refused
to let fairy tales pacify him with the belief that beyond it was
everlasting daylight. Scepticism was not only in his conscious thought
but in the very tissues of his mind.

He remembered how his own father had died on this farm--he had had
no possessions to think about; only his loved ones, his wife and his
children; but he had brought them here that they might amass property
out of Martin's sweat and the dust of the prairie. Now he, the son,
dying, had in his mind no thought of people, but of this land and of
stock and of things. And how strangely his mind was reacting to it. His
concern was not who should own them all, but what would actually be
the fate of each individual property child of his. Why, he had not even
written a will. It would all go to his wife, of course, and how little
he cared to whom she left it. He would have liked, perhaps, to have
given Rose Mall twenty-five thousand or so--so she could always be
independent of that young husband of hers--snap her fingers at him if he
got to driving her too hard, and crushing out the flower-like quality of
her--but his wife wouldn't have understood, and he