Jevons was glad to get away, but it was nearly daybreak when he returned with a surgeon from Vancouver. Shortly afterward the Westminster surgeon arrived, and the two doctors turned Clay out of the room. He paced up and down the corridor, tensely anxious. His own weakness, the ugly gash on his face—everything was forgotten except the danger in which his boy lay. After a while his head reeled, and he stopped and leaned on the rude banister, unconscious of the dizziness.
The first streaks of daylight were sifting into the room when Clay was permitted to enter. Aynsley lay in a stupor, but the doctors seemed satisfied.
“We got the bullet,” one of them reported; “but there’s still some cause for anxiety. However, we’ll do our best to pull him through. Now you’d better let me dress your face: it needs attention.”
Clay submitted to his treatment and then sat down wearily in a room below to wait for news.
CHAPTER XIV—FIGHTING FOR A LIFE
Aynsley lay in danger for a long time; and Clay never left the mill. At last, however, the boy began to recover slowly, but when he grew well enough to notice things the scream of the saws and the throb of the engines disturbed him. The light wooden building vibrated with the roar of the machinery; and when the machinery stopped the sound of the river gurgling about the log booms broke his sleep. He grumbled continually.
“How long does the doctor mean to keep me here?” he asked his father one day.
“I can’t say, but I understand that you can’t be moved just yet,” Clay answered. “Aren’t you comfortable?”
“Can you expect me to be, with the whole place jingling and shaking? If I’m to get better it must be away from the mill.”
“I’ll see what the doctor thinks; but there’s the difficulty that I don’t know where to take you. You wouldn’t be much quieter in Seattle. It’s curious, now I think of it, that I haven’t had a home for a good many years, though I didn’t seem to miss it until this thing happened.”