The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles.

“What’s the matter with your shoulder, Venner?”

Dick answered sullenly, that he didn’t know,—­fell on it when his horse came down.  The Doctor examined it as carefully as he could through his clothes.

“Out of joint.  Untie his hands, Abel.”

By this time a small alarm had spread among the neighbors, and there was a circle around Dick, who glared about on the assembled honest people like a hawk with a broken wing.

When the Doctor said, “Untie his hands,” the circle widened perceptibly.

“Isn’t it a leetle rash to give him the use of his hands?  I see there’s females and children standin’ near.”

This was the remark of our old friend, Deacon Soper, who retired from the front row, as he spoke, behind a respectable-looking, but somewhat hastily dressed person of the defenceless sex, the female help of a neighboring household, accompanied by a boy, whose unsmoothed shock of hair looked like a last-year’s crow’s-nest.

But Abel untied his hands, in spite of the Deacon’s considerate remonstrance.

“Now,” said the Doctor, “the first thing is to put the joint back.”

“Stop,” said Deacon Soper,—­“stop a minute.  Don’t you think it will be safer—­for the women-folks—­jest to wait till mornin’, afore you put that j’int into the socket?”

Colonel Sprowle, who had been called by a special messenger, spoke up at this moment.

“Let the women-folks and the deacons go home, if they’re scared, and put the fellah’s j’int in as quick as you like.  I’ll resk him, j’int in or out.”

“I want one of you to go straight down to Dudley Venner’s with a message,” the Doctor said.  “I will have the young man’s shoulder in quick enough.”

“Don’t send that message!” said Dick, in a hoarse voice;—­“do what you like with my arm, but don’t send that message!  Let me go,—­I can walk, and I’ll be off from this place.  There’s nobody hurt but I. Damn the shoulder!—­let me go!  You shall never hear of me again!”

Mr. Bernard came forward.

“My friends,” he said, “I am not injured,—­seriously, at least.  Nobody need complain against this man, if I don’t.  The Doctor will treat him like a human being, at any rate; and then, if he will go, let him.  There are too many witnesses against him here for him to want to stay.”

The Doctor, in the mean time, without saying a word to all this, had got a towel round the shoulder and chest and another round the arm, and had the bone replaced in a very few moments.

“Abel, put Cassia into the new chaise,” he said, quietly.  “My friends and neighbors, leave this young man to me.”

“Colonel Sprowle, you’re a justice of the peace,” said Deacon Soper, “and you know what the law says in cases like this.  I a’n’t so clear that it won’t have to come afore the Grand Jury, whether we will or no.”