“And that?”
“I guess you know it does as well as I do.”
“Well, Mary, I guess you’ve cracked one of them,” remarked Shonto, after his careful examination.
He stepped behind her and flattened one end of a strip of adhesive plaster at the middle of her back, then brought it around to her right side.
“Now get all the breath out of you,” he ordered. “Deflate your lungs as much as possible.”
Mary took a deep breath, and then obediently blew lustily through her white lips until her lungs were free of air. As her chest went down, Shonto put his strength on the plaster and brought it around the front of her body, binding her tight. He put on one more strip, then told her he could do nothing else for her—that the plasters would hold the rib in place while it was knitting, and that, at her age, nature would not complete this process until the end of about three weeks.
“Don’t let Charmian know anything about it,” cautioned Mary, coming from the tent again. “I’ll keep on pretending that I sprained my ankle. She’d worry if she knew I had a rib broken. And I could manage to walk back this way, couldn’t I, Doctor?”
“Yes, if you walked slowly and carefully you might get by.”
“That’s what I thought. In fact, I’ve had a broken rib before, and while it pained me a lot—especially in bed at night—I was able to move around. So make Charmian think my ankle is sprained and that I can’t walk a step. Then she’ll think it’s just as well for the rest of you to go on for a few days as to turn back—seeing that I can’t walk either way. As I said, however, I can walk, after a fashion, but I can’t crawl a single inch. You get the idea, don’t you? I don’t want to break up the expedition.”
“But, Mary,” he reminded her, “you have been against it from the start. It strikes me that now you have an excellent excuse to call it off.”