Linda, who had been standing perfectly still during this conversation, was startled by the use of the name "Doc." Was it possible that this man was a physician? If so, wouldn't he perhaps be above the level of the others—and might she not expect, if not sympathy, at least fair play from him? But "Slats" instantly shattered her hopes with his explanation.
"This is the 'Doc,' Linda," he said. "We call him that because he fixes up all our aches and cuts for us. In a profession like our'n, it ain't safe to meddle with 'saw-bones' and hospitals. They keep records."
Linda smiled at the idea of calling robbery a "profession," but she made no comment.
"So long as you'll be with us fer a while," continued her captor, "I'll interduce you to everybody. That there cook is 'Beefy.' Ain't he a good ad for his own cookin'?"
Linda nodded; she could hardly be expected to laugh at such a poor joke under the circumstances.
"You can go over and wash—there's water in Susie's tent—if you want to, while the 'Doc' fixes Susie up. Then we'll eat."
Glad to be alone for a moment, Linda stepped across to the tent which the man had indicated, hidden behind some pine trees a few yards away. Guiding herself by her flash-light, she found the entrance, and dropped down on a cot inside.
Letting the light go off, she sat, dry-eyed and utterly hopeless, staring into the darkness. What terrible fate was hanging over her, she dared not imagine. Would they torture her, perhaps, if her father refused to raise the ransom, and called the police to his aid?
In these last few hours she had learned to realize how infinitely crueler human-beings were than the elements of nature. The ice and snow, the cold winds of Canada, or the vast, trackless depths of the Atlantic could never bring about such untold agony as these fiends in human form. She almost wished that she had gone down, like Bess Hulbert, in the ocean, before she had lived to learn how evil men could be.
A call from the mess-tent, as she supposed the larger one to be, aroused her from her unhappy meditations, and she hastily turned on the light and washed from a pitcher of water on a soap-box in Susie's tent.