“Hello, Barney, wass willst du?”

“Morgen, doctor.  Die Frau ist ja awful sick.  All night she been having an awful pain in de belly.”

“How long she been this way?  Wie lang, eh?”

“I dunno, maybe two days.”

“Why didn’t you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep?  Here it is two o’clock!  So spat—­warum, eh?”

“Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening.  I t’ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse.”

“Any fever?”

“Vell ja, I t’ink she got fever.”

“Which side is the pain on?”

“Huh?”

“Das Schmertz—­die Weh—­which side is it on?  Here?”

“So.  Right here it is.”

“Any rigidity there?”

“Huh?”

“Is it rigid—­stiff—­I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?”

“I dunno.  She ain’t said yet.”

“What she been eating?”

“Vell, I t’ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter.  Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell.  I vish you come.”

“Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time.  Look here, Barney, you better install a ’phone—­telephone haben.  Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor.”

The door closing.  Barney’s wagon—­the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling.  Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, “Hello, Gus, this is the doctor.  Say, uh, send me up a team.  Guess snow’s too thick for a machine.  Going eight miles south.  All right.  Huh?  The hell I will!  Don’t you go back to sleep.  Huh?  Well, that’s all right now, you didn’t wait so very darn long.  All right, Gus; shoot her along.  By!”

His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough.  She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking.  On a slip of paper laid on the bureau—­she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab—­he wrote his destination.  He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him.  He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on—­jungle—­going——­