Steve strove to keep a steady tone. The appeal was heartrending.
"Don't you fret that way, ma'm," he cried earnestly. "If those things happen you reckon are going to, I'll see that no harm, I can help, comes to him. He's just a bright little ray of light, and I guess God didn't set him on this earth to leave him helpless in such a country as this."
A world of relief in the mother's eyes thanked him.
"I—I—" she began, and the man promptly broke in.
"You needn't try to thank me ..." Steve's manner was gravely kind. "Maybe when you've told me things I'll be able to locate your husband. And maybe he isn't dead."
The woman's eyes denied him hopelessly.
"He's dead—sure," she said. "Whatever's happened he's—dead. Say, listen, I'd best try and tell you all from the start," she went on, with renewed energy. "It's the only way. And it's a straight story without much shame in it. My husband, Marcel Brand, is a Dane, with French blood in his veins. He's a great chemist, who learned everything the Germans could teach him. He absorbed their knowledge, but not their ways. He was a good and great man, whose whole idea of life was to care for his wife and child, and expend all his knowledge to help the world of suffering humanity. It was for that reason that seven years ago he realized all he possessed, and, taking Cy Allshore as a partner, came up here."
"To help suffering humanity?"
Incredulity found expression almost before Steve was aware of it.
"Yes, I know. It sounds crazy," the sick woman went on. "But it isn't. Nothing Marcel ever did was crazy. All his life he has been studying drugs, and his studies have taken him into all sorts of crazy corners of the world. Thibet, Siberia, Brazil, Tropical Africa, India, and now—Unaga. It was he who discovered Adresol, that wonderful, priceless drug, which if it could only be obtained in sufficient quantities would be the greatest boon to humanity for—as he used to say himself—all time. Oh, I can't tell you about that," she exclaimed wearily, "guess it would need someone cleverer than I. But it's that brought us here, and kept us here for seven years. And maybe we'd have spent years more. You see, Marcel was years hunting over the world for the stuff growing in quantities. It was a chance story about these Indians he'd listened to that brought him here first, and when he discovered they were using the stuff, he believed it was the hand of Providence guiding him. With the use of it he found the Indians hibernated each winter, and yet remained healthy, robust creatures, retaining their faculties unimpaired, and living to an extreme old age."