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Page 62
"That does settle it," groaned the brother.
"Shut up!" Linday snarled. "Get out! Take Daw with you. Take Bill, too.
Get rabbits--alive--healthy ones. Trap them. Trap everywhere."
"How many?" the brother asked.
"Forty of them--four thousand--forty thousand--all you can get. You'll
help me, Mrs. Strang. I'm going to dig into that arm and size up the
damage. Get out, you fellows. You for the rabbits."
And he dug in, swiftly, unerringly, scraping away disintegrating bone,
ascertaining the extent of the active decay.
"It never would have happened," he told Madge, "if he hadn't had so many
other things needing vitality first. Even he didn't have vitality
enough to go around. I was watching it, but I had to wait and chance it.
That piece must go. He could manage without it, but rabbit-bone will
make it what it was."
From the hundreds of rabbits brought in, he weeded out, rejected,
selected, tested, selected and tested again, until he made his final
choice. He used the last of his chloroform and achieved the
bone-graft--living bone to living bone, living man and living rabbit
immovable and indissolubly bandaged and bound together, their mutual
processes uniting and reconstructing a perfect arm.
And through the whole trying period, especially as Strang mended,
occurred passages of talk between Linday and Madge. Nor was he kind, nor
she rebellious.
"It's a nuisance," he told her. "But the law is the law, and you'll need
a divorce before we can marry again. What do you say? Shall we go to
Lake Geneva?"
"As you will," she said.
And he, another time: "What the deuce did you see in him anyway? I know
he had money. But you and I were managing to get along with some sort
of comfort. My practice was averaging around forty thousand a year
then--I went over the books afterward. Palaces and steam yachts were
about all that was denied you."
"Perhaps you've explained it," she answered. "Perhaps you were too
interested in your practice. Maybe you forgot me."
"Humph," he sneered. "And may not your Rex be too interested in panthers
and short sticks?"
He continually girded her to explain what he chose to call her
infatuation for the other man.
"There is no explanation," she replied. And, finally, she retorted, "No
one can explain love, I least of all. I only knew love, the divine and
irrefragable fact, that is all. There was once, at Fort Vancouver, a
baron of the Hudson Bay Company who chided the resident Church of
England parson. The dominie had written home to England complaining that
the Company folk, from the head factor down, were addicted to Indian
wives. 'Why didn't you explain the extenuating circumstances?' demanded
the baron. Replied the dominie: 'A cow's tail grows downward. I do not
attempt to explain why the cow's tail grows downward. I merely cite the
fact.'"
"Damn clever women!" cried Linday, his eyes flashing his irritation.
"What brought you, of all places, into the Klondike?" she asked once.
"Too much money. No wife to spend it. Wanted a rest. Possibly overwork.
I tried Colorado, but their telegrams followed me, and some of them did
themselves. I went on to Seattle. Same thing. Ransom ran his wife out to
me in a special train. There was no escaping it. Operation successful.
Local newspapers got wind of it. You can imagine the rest. I had to
hide, so I ran away to Klondike. And--well, Tom Daw found me playing
whist in a cabin down on the Yukon."
Came the day when Strang's bed was carried out of doors and into the
sunshine.
"Let me tell him now," she said to Linday.
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