ttle things like that. It uses its
tools before it blunts them. Then Opdyke had gone back again into the
vein, to see if he could make up his mind, at a superficial glance,
concerning the extent of the damage and the best chances for repairing
it. It was then that he found one more miner, wedged between the
loosened timbers of the shoring. At best, minutes were ahead of him,
not hours. At best, the danger in freeing him was almost infinite. None
the less, while other men faltered and drew back, afraid, Opdyke had
sent an ax crashing into the weakened timbers.

All this was told to the professor briefly. The rest of the message was
couched in terms so surgical as to convey scant meaning to Scott
Brenton's brain. At the very end, there were two dates, both only
possible, both so remote as to turn Brenton sick at heart. Was it for
this that such men as Reed Opdyke were created? Was nature merciless,
was law, that it ordained such pitiful, pitiless waste?

It was with these questions ringing in his brain, then, that Scott
Brenton, after his old fashion, shut his teeth askew and awaited the
still distant homecoming of his old-time idol. He gained the slimmest
sort of comfort by remembering how characteristic it all was of the boy
he used to know.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That Reed Opdyke was very badly broken, no one, seeing him, could deny.
Exactly what was the nature of the break, no one but Reed Opdyke and
the surgeons knew. The surgeons were inclined to secrecy. Reed himself
welcomed no queries on the subject. He merely smiled inscrutably, and
talked about the weather.

When, in late May, he first came home, his room threatened to become a
place for penitential pilgrimage, a _memento-mori_ species of lay
shrine; but Reed stopped all that quite firmly. He had no mind to be a
hero anywhere, least of all in a town where ninety-seven per cent of
the populace was feminine. Moreover, unkindly as he took to hero
worship, he took still more unkindly to visits that quite obviously
were intended to console him.

"The Lord knows how long I'm destined to be lying up here," he remarked
to Olive Keltridge, after one such visitation. "Anyhow, it is sure to
be long enough for people to get the habit of me, and a chronic invalid
is bound to be used as a spiritual salve. One takes him tracts and
grape-fruit jelly, by way of offset to domestic rows. I'm not going to
become accessory after the fact to all the local improprieties. I