Just before the dawn they had coffee and a bite to eat from Norton’s little pack.  Close to the drugged man they builded a rude low table by dragging the squared blocks of fallen stone from their place by the wall.  Upon this Virginia placed the saddle-blankets, neatly folded.  Already Patten was showing signs of nervousness.  Looking into her face he saw that it was white and drawn but very calm.  Patten was asking himself countless questions, many of them impossible of answer yet.  She was closing her mind to everything but the one supreme matter.

He helped her give the chloroform when she told him that there was sufficient light and that she was ready.  He brought water, placed instruments, stood by to do what she told him.  His nervousness had grown into fear; he started now and then, jerking about guiltily, as though he foresaw an interruption.

Together they got Norton’s inert form upon the folded blankets.  Patten’s hands shook a little; he asked for a sip of brandy from her flask.  She granted it, and while Patten drank she cut away the hair from the unconscious man’s scalp.  Long ago her fingers had made their examination, were assured that her diagnosis was correct.  Her hands were as untrembling as the steel of her knife.  She made the first incision, drawing back the flap of skin and flesh, revealing the bone of the skull. . . .

For forty-five minutes she worked, her hands swift, sure, capable, unerring.  It was done.  She was right.  The under-table of the skull had been fractured; there was the bone pressure upon the underlying area of brain-tissue.  She had removed the pressure and with it any true pathological cause of the theft impulse.

She drew a bandage about the sleeping eyes.  She made Patten bring his own saddle-blanket; it was fixed across the entrance of the anteroom of the King’s Palace, darkening it.  Then she went to the ledge just outside and stood there, staring with wide eyes across the little meadow with its flowers and birds and water, down the slope of the mountain, to the miles of desert.  She had now but to await the awakening.

CHAPTER XXII

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

When Norton stirred and would have opened his eyes but for the bandage drawn over them, she was at his side.  She had been kneeling there for a long time, waiting.  Her hand was on his where it had crept softly from his wrist.

“You must lie very still,” she commanded gently.  “I am with you and everything is all right.  There was . . . an accident.  No, don’t try to move the cloth; please, Roderick.”  She pushed his hand back down to his side.  “We are in the King’s Palace, just you and I, and everything is all right.”

He was feverish, and she soothed him; sick, and she mothered him and nursed him; troubled, uncertain, perplexed, and she comforted him.  At the first she went no further than saying that there had been an accident; that already she had sent to San Juan for all that was needed to make him comfortable; that Mr. Engle had been instructed to speed a man to the railroad for further necessities; that now for his own sake, for her sake, he must just lie very still . . . try not even to think.