“It’s a question of point of view.” The doctor’s reply came without encouragement.
“How?”
There was a curious blankness in Jim’s monosyllable.
The doctor’s quick eyes snapped as he looked up into the other’s face, and all his professional attitude seemed to fall from him.
“If I’d a golden throne among the fool angels, who don’t know better than to sit around doping over their harps,” he cried, without a shadow of a smile, “I reckon I’d feel like weepin’ hot tears over news as bad as human news can be. But, seeing they don’t keep my size in haloes lying around up there, I’d say it’s—the best. That poor kid’s going to pull round in no time at all,” he went on, with quiet confidence. “She’s young, and she’s strong. She’s full of physical health. It’s nursing she needs, and your good sister don’t need showing a thing that way. But she’s had a bad shake-up. I mean mentally. I can’t figure how bad it’s been. It sort of seems she came darn near ending everything—whether by design or accident, God alone knows. But I want to tell you the same as I’ve told him,” he went on, indicating Lightning. “There’s some feller around who needs lynching.”
His final pronouncement encountered a profound silence. Then it was Jim who spoke. And his words came haltingly.
“Then—it—was so?”
The eyes of the doctor flashed. His face flushed, and the whole of his diminutive body seemed to bristle.
“Man!” he cried fiercely. “I’ve told you folk I’m no sort of darned angel. I’ve lived too long in a profession where you see most of what’s rotten in human nature to hug swell notions to myself. But if I’d a shadow of right to protect that poor, innocent kid, I’d get right out after some guy with a whole arsenal of shooting machinery, and I wouldn’t quit his trail till I’d shot him to death, if it was the last crazy act of a foolish life.”