Chantry made no comment.  Opening a drawer of the desk, he fumbled amid a litter of articles useful and useless, and, extracting a battered stethoscope, shifted his chair forward until it was close to the other and stuck the tiny tubes to his ears.  Still without comment he opened the rancher’s shirt, applied the instrument, listened, shifted it, listened, shifted and listened the third time—­slid his chair back to the former position.

“What else do you know?” he asked.

Landor buttoned up the gap in his shirt methodically.

“Nothing, except that the thing is in the family.  My father went that way when he was younger than I am, and his father the same.”  The stogie had gone dead in his fingers, and he lit a fresh one steadily.  “I’ve been expecting it to catch up with me for years.”

“Your father died of it, you say?”

“Yes; on Thanksgiving Day.”  The big rancher shifted position, and in sympathy the rickety chair groaned dismally.  “Dinner was waiting, I remember, a regular old-fashioned New England dinner with a stuffed sucking pig and a big turkey with his drumsticks in the air.  Mother and Frances—­that’s my sister—­were waiting, and they sent me running to call father.  He was a lawyer, and a great hand to shut himself up and work.  I was starved hungry, and I remember I hot-footed it proper upstairs to his den and threw open the door.”  Puff! puff! went the big stogie.  “An Irish plasterer with seven kids ate that turkey, I recollect,” he completed, “and I’ve never kept Thanksgiving from that day to this.”

“And your grandfather?” unemotionally.

“Just the same.  He was a preacher, and the choir was singing the opening anthem at the time.”

The doctor threw one thin leg over the other and stared impassively out the single window.  It faced the main street of the town.

“The doings are over for this time, I fancy,” he digressed evenly.  “I see a row of bronchos tied down in front of Red’s place.”

Landor did not look around.

“Mary and Mrs. Burton will count them, never fear,” he recalled in mock sarcasm.  “What I want to know is your opinion.”

“In my opinion there’s nothing to be done,” said Chantry.

Landor shifted again, and again the chair groaned in mortal agony.

“I know that.  What I mean is how long is it liable to be before—­” he halted and jerked his thumb over his shoulder—­“before Bob and the rest will be doing that to me?”

Chantry’s gaze left the window, met the shrewd grey eyes beneath the other’s drooping lids.

“It may be a day and it may be ten years,” he said.

Unconsciously Landor settled deeper into his seat.  His jaws closed tight on the stump of the stogie.  Unwaveringly he returned the other’s gaze.

“You have a more definite idea than that, though,” he pressed.  “Tell me, and let’s have it over with.”

For five seconds Chantry did not speak; but the restless black eyes bored the other through and through, at first impersonally, as, scalpel in hand, he would have studied a patient before the first incision in a major operation; then, as against the other’s will, a great drop of sweat gathered on the broad forehead, personally, intimately.