But I didn’t feel that I could leave, and he began to cut through bandages and dressings.  Oh!  Aunt Jennie dear!  I didn’t realize that people could have such dreadful things the matter with them.  It made me just a little faint to look at it, and I had to turn away.  There was but a slight injury at first, I was told, and it had become awful for lack of proper treatment and care.  Dr. Grant, I was also informed by old Sammy, was confronted at first with the horrible problem of either taking fair chances for the man’s life by an amputation which would have meant starvation for the family, or of assuming the risk of trying to save that arm upon which the woman and her little ones were depending.  Such things must surely try a man’s soul, Aunt Jennie.  The doctor told me that he had gone out of the house and sat on a rock, to think it over, and had looked at the flakes with their pitiful showing.  The kiddies were ravenous and the wife exhausted with care.  Then he had stared at the other old house, now abandoned by a family that had been unable to keep body and soul together in the place.

And so he had been compelled to decide upon this great gamble and spent three nights and days in watching, in a ceaseless struggle to save that arm, using every possible means of winning his fight, knowing that the penalty of failure was death.  It was no wonder that he looked happy now that he knew he had won.

I suppose that such things happen often, Auntie dear, but we have never seen things like these, and they make an awfully strong impression.

Dr. Grant was working away, looking well pleased, and I handed him a few things he needed.

“That’s fine!” he declared, after he had completed a fresh dressing.  “You are well enough now to come back with me to the Cove, Dick, because that arm must be attended to every day and I can’t come here so often.  You will be able to stand the trip all right and I’ll send you back as soon as you are well.”

“I sure kin stand anythin’ so long as yer says I kin,” answered the man.  His eyes were full of a confidence one usually sees only in happy children.

For a few minutes the wife had gone out of the house, and she returned, breathlessly.

“They is all laughin’ down ter th’ beach,” she announced.  “They is Frenchy’s little bye, all wid’ yeller curls, a-playin’ wid our laddies, and Sammy Moore he’ve brung a barrel o’ flour, and a box wid pork, and they is more tea and sugar.  What d’ yer think o’ that?”

She was much excited, and looked from her husband to us, nervously, as if fearing to awaken from a dream.

“That ere trader he said I couldn’t have no more, afore I sent him a few quintals o’ fish,” said Dick, “I don’t see how it come.”

“You had to have it,” said the doctor, just a little bit gruffly.  “You can pay me back after you get to work again.”

The woman grabbed his arm, and made him wince, and then she returned to the beach again and brought back the box.