Go ahead and take her, if she'll
have you. And don't be too long about it. I'm not as young as I used to
be."

"What I feel," he had replied, "is this: I don't know, of course, if she
cares." David had grunted. "I do know I'm going to try to make her care,
if it--if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranch
again, David, before things go any further."

"Why?"

"I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow."

What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's
attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it,
offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a
dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear.
David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose
eyes never wavered, nor his courage!

"You let well enough alone, Dick," he had finished. "You've got
everything you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about.
When people want him they want him."

But he had noticed that David had been different, since. He had taken to
following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken once of retiring
and turning all the work over to him. Was it possible that David did not
want him to go back to Norada?

He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse. It was stronger, not so
rapid. The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of David.

He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David,
beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his
pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he
had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with
snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the day
a woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, and she moved about the
cabin like a thin ghost. At night she slept in a lean-to shed and David
kept the fire going. A man who seemed to know him well--John Donaldson,
he learned, was his name--was Maggie's husband, and every so often he
came, about dawn, and brought food and supplies.

After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and David
had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the beans. Before
she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits, and David would
study over it painstakingly, and then produce a panfull of burned and
blackened lumps, over which he would groan and agonize.

He himself had been totally incurious. He had l