"Three minutes!" warned Frank Barrington at the door. He knew Kenny much too well to trust him further.

And Kenny made a wry face and departed--with torture in his throat.

His voice had failed him utterly.

A sleety dawn was graying at the windows.

"Bed!" commanded Barrington briefly.

"Doctor Cole has found another shack. He's waiting for you."

"And you?"

"I'll sleep to-morrow."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

IN THE SPAN OF A DAY

Kenny slept heavily until three that afternoon. Don wakened him.

"My sister is here," he said.

"Joan!"

Don stared a little at his quick, astonished warmth.

"She wired Doctor Cole," he said, "and went to the farm. He brought her back with him at noon."

"The heart of her! I might have known. And Brian?"

Brian, it seemed, was wakeful and nervous, his pain intense. The pressure symptoms had not advanced.

"Head's better," Don finished. "They've watched him like a hawk. But they're letting up a bit now--"

"And Dr. Barrington?"

"Asleep downstairs."

"Here?"

"Yes. We found another cot. The car's in Grogan's shed."

From the quarry below came the rumble of a blast.

"Would you think--" he demanded, but the futility of his protest made him dumb.

"The world keeps on going," said Kenny. He dressed hurriedly.

"Women," commented Don gloomily, following him down the stairs, "are queer. My sister wept all over me. As if I hadn't had enough shocks--"

He caught his breath and stumbled. In the room below Barrington stirred.

"Quiet, Don!" warned Kenny, sensing the tears of heartbreak that quivered on his lashes. He read the boy's hot heart with a renewed shock of understanding; they were namelessly akin.

Cold sunlight lay upon the cl.u.s.ter of shacks. The wind that bore the rumble of the quarry upward was sharp and gusty and laden with stinging particles of grit. A group of Italian women, chattering and gesticulating in, apparently, unheeded unison, lingered near the shack where Brian lay, agonizingly conscious of nerve and body, irritably weary of the inevitable doctor at his bedside. Kenny charged them with a look of indignation and shooed them to retreat in maledictory Italian.

Inside Joan was busy at the stove.

Kenny caught her hands, protesting, praising, thanking in a breath, and Don, regarding them with a look of frank and bitter comprehension, moved off toward the window with all a boy's disgust. In the span of a day he had learned and suffered over-much. Grogan's world of drills and noise down there was heartless and insistent. . . . It went on and on, puffing, drilling, sorting rattling stone. Up here in the shack was the lunacy of heart-things apart from him. The thought filled him with jealous anger. And upstairs-- He wheeled and glared, fighting down the agony in his throat. Kenny was moving toward the stairway.

"Mr. O'Neill," barked Don, "Dr. Barrington particularly said you--you were not to go up there. He said that Brian's got to have the--the quiet kind around--"

Joan's quick stare of reproach brought the color to his face.

"I--I beg your pardon, Mr. O'Neill," he blurted. "He said--he said he must have quiet."

"It's all right," said Kenny ruefully. "Quite all right. You've been up?" he added quietly.

Don dug his toe into the floor and a hot flush suffused his forehead.

"To tell you the truth," he said with some annoyance, "Doctor Barrington wouldn't let me in. He seems to be able to manage a good many things at once."

"Ah!" said Kenny.

"We must find still another cot," said Joan, pouring coffee at the stove.

So in the dark hours of nervous unrestraint that marked for Don and Kenny that lagging period of terror and suspense, Joan stepped to the helm and steered. And there was need of steering.

Chaos would have reigned without it.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

A FACE

Vagueness lay for Brian in that shack room where the noise of forest trees mourned always at the window. Only pain was sharp . . .

colossal, rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back, his consciousness foresaw that horrific catastrophe of noise and belching terror, and waited, unable to sense any of its details save the single one of personal tragedy and pain. There were cramped minutes when the rafters of the peaked roof seemed pressing down upon him . . . and minutes of a diffused reaching out when the world, torn by internal explosion, seemed flying away from him in fragments, even walls receding from his cot which stayed, by a miracle, alone upon a wind-swept moor.

Intervals were an eternity. Familiarity with the detail of the room engendered frantic loathing. His brain conned over the faded colors in the rag rug and encountered the unchangeable, bayonet-like crack in the mirror with nervous fury. No peace came with the darkness. Each familiar thing persisted, looming clearer to his tired mind by the very effort his straining eyes made to reach it. There was the table clogged with doctors' litter . . . and there the other cot where Frank pretended to sleep and kept his vigil . . . there the chair . . . and there the dab of yellow in the rug that the sun struck into faded gayety in the morning . . . and there the crack across the mirror, the wriggling, distorted, foolish crack that seemed alive for all its sameness. And there was always the noise of wind which became a corollary of his pain, pulsing with it, never quiet, an overtone that tragically would not yield.

Into the blur of wind and weakness and pain came two miracles--a red geranium peering out of the dusk of the room like a glowing coal, unfamiliar and therefore a delight--a bit of velvet laughter in the drab that caught his whole attention . . . the other a face. The face came first in a cloud of flower-spotted purple that he knew clearly was in some way related to the hypodermic needle Frank had plunged into his arm while the sunset still lay painted on the window. . . . It took form in the purple like a pansy--that face--grew sweet and vivid and very real. Mercifully its loveliness was changeable, losing its pansy purples and gaining glints of gold . . . becoming less a pansy . . .

more a face flower-like with compa.s.sion.

"And now?" wondered Brian when the face came again.