“I guess I can,” she replied, not unamiably.  “You look as though you need it, and a wash, too.  There’s a basin and a pail of water on that bench.”

But when she came out later to call him to breakfast she found him sitting on the bench and the pail overturned on the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he said, dully, “I tried to lift it, but I’m about all in.”

“You’d better come in.  I’ve made some coffee.”

He could not rise.  He could not even raise his hands.

She called her husband from where he was chopping wood off in the trees, and together they got him into the house.  It was days before he so much as spoke again.

So it happened that the search went on.  Wilkins from the east of the range, and Bassett from the west, hunted at first with furious energy, then spasmodically, then not at all, while Dick lay in a mountain cabin, on the bed made of young trees, and for the second time in his life watched a woman moving in a lean-to kitchen, and was fed by a woman’s hand.

He forced himself to think of this small panorama of life that moved before him, rather than of himself.  The woman was young, and pretty in a slovenly way.  The man was much older, and silent.  He was of better class than the woman, and underlying his assumption of crudity there were occasional outcroppings of some cultural background.  Not then, nor at any subsequent time, did he learn the story, if story there was.  He began to see them, however, not so much pioneers as refugees.  The cabin was, he thought, a haven to the man and a prison to the woman.

But they were uniformly kind to him, and for weeks he stayed there, slowly readjusting.  In his early convalescence he would sit paring potatoes or watching a cooking pot for her.  As he gained in strength he cut a little firewood.  Always he sought something to keep him from thinking.

Two incidents always stood out afterwards in his memory of the cabin.  One was the first time he saw himself in a mirror.  He knew by that time that Bassett’s story had been true, and that he was ten years older than he remembered himself to be.  He thought he was in a measure prepared.  But he saw in the glass a man whose face was lined and whose hair was streaked with gray.  The fact that his beard had grown added to the terrible maturity of the reflection he saw, and he sent the mirror clattering to the ground.

The other incident was later, and when he was fairly strong again.  The man was caught under a tree he was felling, and badly hurt.  During the hour or so that followed, getting the tree cut away, and moving the injured man to the cabin on a wood sledge, Dick had the feeling of helplessness of any layman in an accident.  He was solicitous but clumsy.  But when they had got the patient into his bed, quite automatically he found himself making an investigation and pronouncing a verdict.

Later he was to realize that this was the first peak of submerged memory, rising above the flood.  At the time all he felt was a great certainty.  He must act quickly or the man would not live.  And that night, with such instruments as he could extemporize, he operated.  There was no time to send to a town.