"By Mad Harry an' Thank-the-Lord!"
"Ay, sir."
Dolly screamed—now: "It hurt-th! Oh, oh, it hurt-th!"
"An' haste, lad!"
"Ay, sir."
There was no doctor in Ragged Run Harbor; there was a doctor at Afternoon Arm, however—across Anxious Bight. Terry West avoided the rotten ice of the Bight and took the 'longshore trail by way of Mad Harry and Thank-the-Lord. At noon he was past Mad Harry, his little legs wearing well and his breath coming easily through his expanded nostrils. He had not paused; and at four o'clock—still on a dogtrot—he had hauled down the chimney smoke of Thank-the-Lord and was bearing up for Afternoon Arm.
Early dusk caught him shortcutting the doubtful ice of Thank-the-Lord Cove; and half an hour later, midway of the passage to Afternoon Arm, with two miles left to accomplish—dusk falling thick and cold, then, a frosty wind blowing—Creep Head of the Arm looming black and solid—he dropped through the ice and vanished.
Returning from a professional call at Tumble Tickle in clean, sunlit weather, with nothing more tedious than eighteen miles of wilderness trail and rough floe ice behind him, Doctor Rolfe was chagrined to discover himself fagged out. He had come heartily down the trail from Tumble Tickle, but on the ice in the shank of the day—there had been eleven miles of the floe—he had lagged and complained under what was indubitably the weight of his sixty-three years. He was slightly perturbed. He had been fagged out before, to be sure. A man cannot practice medicine out of a Newfoundland outport harbor for thirty-seven years and not know what it means to stomach a physical exhaustion. It was not that. What perturbed Doctor Rolfe was the singular coincidence of a touch of melancholy with the ominous complaint of his lean old legs.
And presently there was a more disquieting revelation. In the drear, frosty dusk, when he rounded Creep Head, opened the lights of Afternoon Arm, and caught the warm, yellow gleam of the lamp in the surgery window, his expectation ran all at once to his supper and his bed. He was hungry—that was true. Sleepy? No; he was not sleepy. Yet he wanted to go to bed. Why? He wanted to go to bed in the way that old men want to go to bed—less to sleep than just to sigh and stretch out and rest. And this anxious wish for bed—just to stretch out and rest—held its definite implication. It was more than symptomatic—it was shocking.
"That's age!"