When Carrigan had left him, Bryant sat down on a discarded oil tin lying on the ground—­one of the square ten-gallon cans common about camps.  He gazed at the door of the hospital shack.  He could hear faint sounds from within, a footfall on the board floor, an indistinct word or murmur.  Behind him and farther down the street, in the big cook tents where the crews ate, was the rattle of pans and an occasional oath or burst of laughter.  There the cooks were peeling potatoes and mixing great pans of biscuit dough and exchanging jests, while here in the shack a fight was going on for a life.

Bryant saw again that unshaven, heavy-faced workman, with the terribly mangled arm, whom he had brought hither.  Poor devil!  Some oversight, some carelessness, some mistake on the part of himself or another; and if not a dead man, then one-armed for the rest of his days.  He, Bryant, could not consider these accidents with Pat Carrigan’s philosophic calm—­a calm acquired from decades of camp tragedies and disasters.  They harrowed his spirit.  Though they appeared inevitable where men delved or builded or flung forth great spans, they made the cost of constructive works seem too great.  They took the glamor from projects and left them hard, grim, uninspiring tasks.

Lee felt a weariness like that of age.  The strain under which he laboured, the sustained effort of driving this furrow through earth that was like iron, his unavailing endeavours to reclaim Ruth, afflictions such as this of the past hour, the uncertainty of everything—­all sapped his energy and shook his faith.  Yet before him there were weeks of the same, or worse.  He had put his hand to the plow; he could not turn back.

All at once the door of the shack opened.  Louise Graham came out, without hat, garbed in a great white surgical apron.  Her knees seemed about to give way.  Her eyes were half shut.  Her face was without colour, drawn, dazed.  With her from the interior came a reek of chloroform.

She had been the girl in there!  Bryant had guessed it, feared it.  He ran forward and put an arm about her shoulders and led her to the tin oil canister on which he urged her to be seated.

“No, I won’t faint,” she said, weakly.  He knelt beside her and supported her form.  “I just feel dizzy and a little sick,” she went on.  “Better in a moment.”  Lee observed her shudder.  Presently she murmured, “Stuck it out, anyway.  Dad says—­dad says, ’Never be a quitter.’  And I wasn’t one.”

CHAPTER XVIII

Rymer, a sandy-haired, blue-eyed young fellow, one of Bryant’s staff, walked out of the shack, pulling on his coat.  He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, at which he was sucking rapidly.  In spite of its dark lacquer of tan his face had a grayish tinge.

“Sick?” he asked of Bryant, jerking a nod toward Louise Graham.

“A bit.  Have Doc give you a little brandy in a glass.  And bring out her things, too.”