"But now," he added, wincing with pain, "let's cut out all this sort of thing. I believe I got to get to a doctor."
"I'll tell you," said Wid Gardner, "I'll hitch up and take you down to the doctor at the big dam, twenty-five miles below. He's taking care of all the laborers down there—they're always getting into accidents; dynamite, you know. He's got to be a good doctor. I'll take you down."
"Wid," said Sim, "I wish't you would. I don't believe I'll go back home first. She'll be all right there alone, won't she?"
Wid still smiled at him understandingly. "Jealousest man I ever did see! Well, have it your own way. It'll take just so much time anyway—if we get back by nine or ten o'clock to-night we'll be lucky. She'll have to begin sometime to get used to things."
CHAPTER XI
THE COMPANY DOCTOR
The Two Forks, below their junction, make a mighty stream which has burst through a mountain range. Across this narrow gorge which it has rent for itself in time immemorial, the insect, Man, industrious and persevering, has cast a great pile of rock and concrete, a hundred feet high, for that good folk some hundreds of miles away one day may bless the Company for electric lighting. In this labor toiled many man-insects of divers breeds and races, many of them returned soldiers, much as did the slaves of Pharaoh in earlier times. The work was on one of the new government projects revived after the war, in large part to offer employment to the returning men of the late Army.
But Pharaoh had not dynamite or rack-rock or TNT; so that in the total it were safer for an insect to have labored in Pharaoh's time. The Company doctor—himself a returned major—stationed there by reason of the eccentricities of dynamite, rack-rock and other high explosives, was much given to the sport of the angle, and disposed to be irritable when called from the allurements of the stream to attend some laboring man who had undertaken to attach a fuse by means of his teeth, or some such simple process. That is to say, Doctor Allen Barnes was irritable until he had reeled up his line and climbed the bank below the dam site, and betaken himself to the side of the last hospital cot where lay the last victim of dynamic and dynamitical industry. After that he was apt to forget angling and become an absorbed surgeon, and a very able one.
But on this particular day, when word came to him at the stream side that a stranger not of the force had arrived in town with a "bum leg"—so reported the messenger, Foreman Flaherty—Doctor Barnes was wroth exceedingly, for at that moment he was fast in a noble trout that was far out in the white water, and giving him, as he himself would have phrased it, the time of his life.