Summer came on.  The snow disappeared, save on the far peaks of the Rockies to the east.  The days lengthened till there was no darkness, the sun dipping at midnight, due north, for a few minutes beneath the horizon.  Linday never let up on Strang.  He studied his walk, his body movements, stripped him again and again and for the thousandth time made him flex all his muscles.  Massage was given him without end, until Linday declared that Tom Daw, Bill, and the brother were properly qualified for Turkish bath and osteopathic hospital attendants.  But Linday was not yet satisfied.  He put Strang through his whole repertoire of physical feats, searching him the while for hidden weaknesses.  He put him on his back again for a week, opened up his leg, played a deft trick or two with the smaller veins, scraped a spot of bone no larger than a coffee grain till naught but a surface of healthy pink remained to be sewed over with the living flesh.

“Let me tell him,” Madge begged.

“Not yet,” was the answer.  “You will tell him only when I am ready.”

July passed, and August neared its end, when he ordered Strang out on trail to get a moose.  Linday kept at his heels, watching him, studying him.  He was slender, a cat in the strength of his muscles, and he walked as Linday had seen no man walk, effortlessly, with all his body, seeming to lift the legs with supple muscles clear to the shoulders.  But it was without heaviness, so easy that it invested him with a peculiar grace, so easy that to the eye the speed was deceptive.  It was the killing pace of which Tom Daw had complained.  Linday toiled behind, sweating and panting; from time to time, when the ground favoured, making short runs to keep up.  At the end of ten miles he called a halt and threw himself down on the moss.

“Enough!” he cried.  “I can’t keep up with you.”

He mopped his heated face, and Strang sat down on a spruce log, smiling at the doctor, and, with the camaraderie of a pantheist, at all the landscape.

“Any twinges, or hurts, or aches, or hints of aches?” Linday demanded.

Strang shook his curly head and stretched his lithe body, living and joying in every fibre of it.

“You’ll do, Strang.  For a winter or two you may expect to feel the cold and damp in the old wounds.  But that will pass, and perhaps you may escape it altogether.”

“God, Doctor, you have performed miracles with me.  I don’t know how to thank you.  I don’t even know your name.”

“Which doesn’t matter.  I’ve pulled you through, and that’s the main thing.”

“But it’s a name men must know out in the world,” Strang persisted.  “I’ll wager I’d recognise it if I heard it.”

“I think you would,” was Linday’s answer.  “But it’s beside the matter.  I want one final test, and then I’m done with you.  Over the divide at the head of this creek is a tributary of the Big Windy.  Daw tells me that last year you went over, down to the middle fork, and back again, in three days.  He said you nearly killed him, too.  You are to wait here and camp to-night.  I’ll send Daw along with the camp outfit.  Then it’s up to you to go to the middle fork and back in the same time as last year.”