For Thayor to welcome Sperry with a warm grasp of the hand and an outburst of—"Oh! I\'m glad you are here; it seems like a special Providence," was so strange and unusual a performance that it is no wonder Alice, moving toward the buckboard to add her own greeting to her husband\'s, was lost in astonishment even when the cause of the outburst became clear to her.

Her husband\'s mental attitude toward the doctor, if the truth be told, was one of the things that had never ceased to trouble her. Polite as he was to everybody, he had been so particularly polite to Sperry that it always aroused her suspicions. She knew he had sent for him purely to oblige her and to help her over the chasm which divided Big Shanty from Newport, but what other reasons her husband had for inviting him to share his hospitality at the camp, she was not so familiar with. It therefore came as a distinct surprise when she heard him repeat with increased warmth in his manner:

"Yes, a special Providence, my dear Dr. Sperry"—nor did the real cause of the doctor\'s welcome set her mind at rest.

"This way, doctor," continued Thayor, dragging Sperry with him. "Blakeman will bring your bag. One of our men is badly hurt; I was on my way to him when I heard you driving up. He\'s only a few rods away—hurry!"

The little man lay on his back on the floor of the lower shanty where the men had carried him. The chain cinching down a heavy sapling binding a load of shingles had snapped, and the wiry little Frenchman—Gaston Le Boeuf—who was standing on top of the load, had been shot into the air and landed in a ditch with his right forearm splintered in two. The pain was intense, both bones of the forearm—the ulnar and radius—being shattered transversely, the ulnar poking through the flesh in an ugly blue wound.

When Thayor and the doctor reached him, the Clown was holding the broken arm taut—he had to keep up a steady pull, for with the slightest release the knotty sinews and muscles would cause the broken forearm to fly back at right angles. Although this had happened a dozen times while they were bringing him in, the wiry little man did not utter a groan. He lay there white, in a cold sweat, the corners of his black eyes crinkling over his bad luck. He had known what pain was before. Once on Bog River his skinning knife had slipped while he was dressing out a deer, and the keen blade had gone through his knotty calf, severing the nerve; yet he had walked nearly a dozen miles back to Morrison\'s.

As Sperry entered, the circle of lumber jacks about the wounded man widened, then closed again about him, watching the doctor who soon had the broken arm in an improvised splint.

The man from the city rarely gets very close to a backwoods people unless he possesses sincerity, democracy, and an inborn love of the woods—three virtues without which a man may remain always a stranger in the wilderness.

The New York doctor possessed none of these qualities; moreover, he was pitifully unadaptable outside of the artificial world in which he posed. So much so that at first sight of the trapper and the Clown—two men whom Thayor had pointed out to him as being his most reliable assistants next to Holcomb—his only thought had been how Sam Thayor could have such eccentric boors on the place. He noticed, too, with irritation and astonishment, that none of the men raised their hats until Alice and Margaret arrived on the scene; then not a man among them remained covered.

What he did not notice, however, was the way the men around him were, to use the Clown\'s expression, "sizin\' him up," as they did all city men and this before he had been ten minutes among them, with the result that the trapper had concluded that he looked like a man who was afraid of spoiling his clothes; that Holcomb and the Clown thought him sadly lacking in Sam Thayor\'s frank simplicity; while the others stood about waiting for some word or gesture on which to hang their opinions.

But all this was changed now. With his ready skill Sperry had become, by the turn of his hand, so to speak, the Medicine Man of the tribe. They were even ready to let down their social barriers and extend to him all their friendship—a friendship he could have relied on for the rest of his days.

"Dunno as I ever see a neater job," remarked a big fellow—a former doubter—peering over the shoulders of the crowd, intent on the doctor\'s handling of the wounded arm.

"Yes—yes—" drawled the Clown. "Goll! seems \'ough he knowed jest whar to take hold."

"There," said Sperry, as he gave a final adjustment to the improvised bandage. "You had better get him to bed."

"By gar, Doc\'," grunted the little man between his teeth, "what you goin\' to do now, hein! I feel lot bettaire I tink eff I tak a drink." He had not even asked for a drop of water before, nor had he spoken a word.

"He may have it," said Sperry, in the voice he used at consultations.

The Clown poured a tin cup full of whiskey and the little man drained it to the last drop.

"He\'ll suffer," said Sperry, turning to the trapper, "when the arm begins to swell under the bandage."

"Broke bad, Doc\'?" asked the trapper.

"Yes, a compound fracture; but he\'ll be all right, my man, in a few weeks." Sperry opened a thin leather case, which he took from his bag, extracted a phial, and shook two whitish gray pills into the trapper\'s palm. "Give him one in an hour, and another to-night if he can\'t sleep," he said. He went over to the patient, felt his pulse, then with a nod to the rest, he started toward the door.

"Hold on, Doc\'!" came from half a dozen in the group of lumber jacks; "won\'t ye take a leetle somethin\' \'fore ye go?"

Sperry shook his head and smiled. "No, thank you," he said, half amused. "I seldom take anything before luncheon."

"But, say—we\'d like to fix it with ye—what\'s the damage, Doc\'?" and half a dozen rough hands went into their trousers pockets. But Sperry only waved his hand in an embarrassed way in protest, and added:

"Of course not—what I have done for one of you men, I would do for anybody. I shall see him in the morning"—and he strode out of the shanty.

By this time the little Frenchman\'s eyes were closed, and he was breathing heavily—he was dead drunk.

"Goll! warn\'t that an awful hooker ye give him, Freme?" asked the trapper. He turned to the sufferer, now that the doctor had disappeared, and drew an extra blanket tenderly over him.

"Wall, he ain\'t no home\'path," replied the Clown with a grin; "\'sides,
I presume likely he needed all he could git down him."

* * * * *

The days that followed were full of joy to Alice. Never had Thayor seen her in so merry a mood. Le Boeuf\'s broken arm had somehow changed Thayor\'s attitude toward his guest—so much so that the man\'s personality no longer jarred on him. He concluded that whatever suspicions he had had—and they were never definite—were groundless. Alice was simply bored in New York and Sperry amused her. That was the secret of his success with his women patients; she was bored here, and again Sperry amused her! Why not, then, give her all the pleasure she wanted? With this result fixed in his mind, his attitude to the "Exquisite" changed. He even sought out ways in which his guest\'s stay could be made happy.

"You must see the trout pond, doctor," he would say. "Ah! you don\'t believe we\'ve got one—but we have; you must show it to the doctor, my dear"—at which her eyes would seek her friend\'s, only to be met with an answering look and the words:

"Delighted, my dear Mrs. Thayor," as he dropped a second lump of sugar in his cup. Whereupon the two would disappear for the day, it being nearly dusk before they returned again to camp; Alice bounding into the living room radiant from her walk, her arms full of wild flowers.

There came a day, however, when Sperry, with one of his sudden resolves, preferred the daughter\'s company to the wife\'s. What had influenced his decision he must have confided to Alice—that is, his version of it—for when he asked Margaret to come for a walk, and had received the girl\'s answer, "I\'m afraid we haven\'t time for a walk before luncheon," Alice had replied: "Of course you have. The walk will do you good."

What really determined him to seek Margaret\'s companionship was a desire to fathom her heart. She was her father\'s confidante, and as such might be dangerous, or useful. To have refused him Margaret knew would only have made matters worse. Much as she disliked him, she was grateful to him for having set the little Frenchman\'s arm; so she ran into the house and returned in a moment, her fresh young face shaded by a brim of straw covered with moss roses.

"What a pretty hat!" exclaimed Sperry, as they crossed the compound to the trail leading down to the brook. "Oh, you young New York girls know just what is and what is not becoming."

"Do you think so?" returned Margaret vaguely, not knowing just what answer to make. "It was my own idea."

Sperry looked at the young girl, fresh and trim in her youth, and a memory rushed over him of his Paris days. Margaret reminded him of Lucille, he thought to himself, all except the eyes—Lucille\'s eyes were black.

"Yes, it\'s adorable," he replied, drinking in the fresh beauty of the young girl. "You are very pretty, my dear—just like your mother." This line of attack had always succeeded in sounding the hearts of the young girls he had known.

The girl blushed—the freedom of his tone troubled, and then half frightened her. So much so that she walked on in silence, wishing she had not come. Then again it was the first time she had been entirely alone with him, and the feeling was not altogether a pleasant one. There was, too, a certain familiarity in his voice and manner which she would have resented in a younger man but which, somehow, she had to submit to.

She stopped abruptly as they came to a steep rock.

"Please go on ahead," she said with an appealing look in her brown eyes, as he put out his hand to help her down. "I can get down very well myself."

"Come, be sensible, little girl," he returned; "we must not have another accident to-day. Pretty ankles are as hard to mend as broken arms."

Again the colour mounted to her cheeks; no one had ever spoken to her in this way before.

"Please don\'t," she returned, her voice trembling.

"Don\'t what, may I ask?" he laughed.

"Please don\'t call me \'little girl\'; I—I don\'t like it," she returned, not knowing what else to say and still uneasy—outraged, really, if she had understood her feelings. She sat down quickly, and as he turned to look at the torrent below, slid down the rock in safety. Sperry\'s b............