"Yes, but ... how am I going to explain? If there is a tumor, as we think, I'll do my best to take it away; but, in order to do that, I have, of course, got to go inside of her skull right to the brain itself, and the trouble might be here, or here, or here." He touched her now profusion of curls at different cranial points. "That is the riddle which you and I must solve, and I have got to look to you for the key. The human brain is still a book of mystery to us. Some day, physicians will be able to read it with full understanding; but so far, we have, after thousands of years, barely learned how to open its covers and guess at the meaning of what lies hidden within."

Rose had edged close to Miss Merriman on the rough bench before the fire, and, with the older woman's arm about her, now sat, wide-eyed and wondering, while Donald talked. As he kept his gaze fixed on the glowing heart of the fire, he seemed, in time, to be musing aloud rather than consciously explaining.

"This much we have learned, however; that certain parts of the brain control all the different actions or functions of the body--I've called it a telegraph station once before...." he paused, and both thought of little Mike in his last home under the snow ... "with different keys, each sending its message over a separate wire. So you see that, if we can learn exactly what the message has been, I mean by that just how certain parts of the body have been affected--Miss Merriman would call them the 'localizing symptoms'--we can often tell almost exactly which key is being disarranged by the pressure of a foreign growth, such as a tumor. Do you think that you can understand that, Rose?"

She nodded slowly.

"That is the first, the great and most difficult thing for us to do. The rest depends, in part, upon the mechanical skill of the surgeon, but far more upon Fate, for there are certain kinds of growths which may be removed with a fair chance of success--it is only that, at present--and others ... but we won't consider the others. Lou is young, and in one way that is in our favor. If there is a tumor, there is less likelihood of infiltration," he added, glancing at the nurse.

Rose opened her lips as though to ask a question, and then decided not to, but her expression caused Donald to say, "Come child, don't look so frightened."

"But I didn't know ... it's so ... so terrible. How can any one live if his head is cut open like that?"

"It sounds desperate, doesn't it," he answered, lightly, "But with our anesthetics, which put the patient quietly to sleep, and our new, specially made instruments, the trained and careful surgeon can perform the operation quite easily--as far as the mechanical part goes, I mean. But, you can see how all-important it is for you to tell me just how Lou has been affected. I know what a good memory you have; make it count to-night."

With her breathing quickened, and eyes shining from pent-up excitement, Rose began. Simply and painstakingly she recounted everything which she had observed about the baby's strange behavior from that painful night when she had brought her from Judd's lonely cabin, through the long days in which she had steadily weakened and failed, to the time when the invisible hand of Death seemed to have begun to pluck at the thread of life itself.

Donald listened intently, without a word of interruption, until she suddenly broke off her recital with the words, "Oh, I can't think of anything more, truly I can't; and I'm so afraid ... afraid that it hasn't been enough to help."

Miss Merriman's encircling arm closed comfortingly about the girl, and she patted the head which turned and burrowed into her shoulder, but she said nothing, waiting for the man to speak. He mused for a moment, and then his words came with the crisp incisiveness of a lawyer in cross-examination.

"As she lost control of her legs and began to waver and stumble when she tried to walk, did she seem to turn, or fall, to one side more than to the other? Think!"

The anxiety deepened in Smiles' eyes; but she answered without hesitation, "No, I don't think so. It was more as though her little body was plumb tuckered out."

"And her hearing? Did that fail?"

"No, not until just toward the last, anyway. Even when she couldn't seem to answer me, somehow I was quite sure that she understood, when I spoke, or sang, to her. She would kinder smile, but, oh, it was such a pitiful smile that it 'most broke my heart."

"She seemed to understand, eh?" He paused, and the room was very still, except for Big Jerry's stentorian breathing. "Can you say quite certainly--don't be afraid to answer just exactly what you think--can you say, then, that, aside from the general weakness of all the powers of her little body and mind, the headache and occasional sickness, the most noticeable thing in all her strange behavior was that she wasn't able to talk clearly, and this increased until she wholly lost the power of speech which happened before she became as ... as I see her now?"

"Yes, doctor."

Donald turned abruptly to the nurse. "Barring the use of technical phraseology, and a possible expression of his own, probably valueless, conclusions, could any doctor, such as is likely to be practising in Fayville, have given me any more information, or told it better?"

"No, doctor."

At these unexpected words of praise the girl's smile appeared mistily for a moment, and then quivered away.

There was silence again in the cabin, while the man turned his thoughtful gaze back to the fire, which had now turned to glowing orange embers. A far-off look, alien to his keen, masterful face crept into it. Finally he seemed to shake off his new mood, and spoke with a queer laugh.

"I told you on the train that I was the victim of an uncanny premonition. I guess that Horatio was right about there being many things outside the ken of our limited philosophy. What psychic whisper from a world whose existence we men of 'common sense'"--he spoke the words sarcastically--"are loath to credit; what inspiration, born of the memory of that story of the case of the Bentley Moors' child in New York, which I told her in words of one syllable six months ago, was it that brought the light of truth to this girl's mind, when the village doctor utterly failed to catch so much as a glimmer of it?"

"Then you think, doctor ...?" began Miss Merriman.

"My diagnosis coincides with Smiles',--a tumorous growth on the brain, probably upon the third left frontal convolution ... right here," he said in explanation, as he touched his forehead between the left eyebrow and the hair. "Rose, you have done excellently. Now we, too, will do what we can, and we shall need your help in full measure to-night. I know that it is going to be bitterly hard for you, perhaps the hardest thing that you will ever be called upon to do in all your life; you've got to be a woman, and a brave one. I'd spare you if I could, but...."

"But I don't want to be spared, Donald," she interrupted, eagerly.

"I know, and I trust you more than I could any grown-up woman here in the mountains. It's hardly necessary to tell you again, that a nurse is a soldier, and must be not only brave, but obedient. If we decide to ... to go ahead I will be, not your friend, but your superior officer for a while, and, if my orders seem harsh and even cruel, you must not hesitate, or feel hurt. You understand that, don't you, dear?"

"Yes, doctor. I understand."

She spoke bravely, but her voice trembled a little.

"Good. Before I make my final examination, Miss Merriman and I have got to change our clothes. She will use your room and I the loft; but first let us bring Lou's bed out here by the fire."

It was done.

"Now," he continued, "while we are getting ready, there are a number of things which you have got to do, and you will have to work fast. First, make grandfather comfortable in his room, and build up this fire. Then heat up as much water as the big kettle will hold, and see that a smaller one is scoured absolutely clean. Start some water heating in that, too. Finally, undress Lou completely, and wrap her in a blanket. Can you remember all that?"

"Yes, Donald ... yes, doctor."

Donald smiled, and added, "One thing more. Partly fill a pillow-case with sand, or dirt, if it is possible to get any. Perhaps the ground in the wood-house isn't frozen so hard but that you can get it."

She nodded wonderingly.

In a quarter of an hour her duties were completed and Miss Merriman and Donald had appeared, clad in their spotless white garments of service. Rose, likewise, was in her play uniform, which was now considerably too small for her, and her appearance in it would have caused a smile if it had not been more provocative of tears.

Six months earlier the doctor and nurse, a.s.sisted by others of the most skilled and highly trained that the metropolis afforded, had prepared to perform the same desperate service in humanity's cause, within the perfectly appointed operating room of a modern city hospital. How different was the setting now!

In the rude, but homey room of the mountain cabin, lighted only by old-fashioned lamps and lanterns and the pulsating blaze of the fire in the cavernous fireplace, whose colorful gleam touched with gold the scoured copper of pot and kettle, the three workers, in the immaculate garments of a city sickroom, bent intently over the naked form of the nearly insensible child, to whose alabaster body the leaping flames imparted a simulated glow of warm tones.

The general examination was brief, and made in silence. Then Donald drew the covering over the little body as a sculptor might the cloth over his statue, and straightened up with a look in his gray eyes that was new to Rose.

He spoke in curt sentences. "Of course the case is far more desperate than our last, Miss Merriman. It's the proverbial 'one chance in a thousand.' On that single thread hangs the child's life."

Suddenly he startled Rose by giving a short, mirthless laugh, and, turning away, he began to speak in an undertone, as though unconscious of the presence of the other two, for, despite his previous calm, the thought of what was in prospect had keyed up his nerves to a pitch where they quivered like the E string of a violin.

"Good G.o.d, what a colossal nerve a man is sometimes called upon to have in this world. Of course she'll die in twenty-four hours if I don't operate; but only a fool--or a genius--would tackle this operation under such impossible conditions. Practically none of the things here that science says are necessary. 'A fool, or a genius.'"--He suddenly smote his hands together, and said, "I hope that I'm a fool for to-night. G.o.d takes care of them ... and drunkards. I wish I had a strong slug of Judd's white whiskey, it might steady my nerves.

"Where is Judd?" he snapped out, aloud, turning to Rose.

CHAPTER XXI.

A MODERN MIRACLE.

"I don't know. He was here when you came, but I saw him going up the mountain into the woods. But I'll answer for him; I'll take that chance, doctor. She is nearly as dear to me as she is to him, and I know that she is going to die, unless ... unless ..."

"I knew you'd say it. Well, we'll operate, Miss Merriman."

Donald's voice was calm, impersonal again, and his tone had a steely quality, as though his lancet or scalpel had become endowed with a voice, and spoken.

Silently, and with practised hands, the nurse began to unpack his bag and lay out upon a sheet, which she obtained from Rose and spread over the rough table, the many strange instruments, bottles, rolls of bandages and sponges in their sterile packages.

"Have you any baking soda--saleratus, Rose?"

She nodded.

"Good. Put about a teaspoonful in the smaller kettle, and boil these instruments for ten minutes, while we are making the final preparations. I want some hot water, too."

He turned away, and for a moment stood looking up at the calm heavens in which the stars made openings for the white eternity beyond to shine through. Something in the scene bore his thoughts back to that summer evening when the mountain man of G.o.d had tried so earnestly to minister to his own disease. s.n.a.t.c.hes of sentences re-echoed in his memory. Then he stepped back to Smiles' side and his voice was soft, as he said, "I suppose that, whenever a surgeon begins an operation like this one, he has an unformed prayer deep in his heart, though he may not realize to whom he prays. There was never more occasion for one than to-night, Rose. I know that the Great Healer is nearer to you than to me. Ask Him that my hand may not falter."

She nodded again, sweetly serious.

Once more his accustomed bluntness of manner returned, and he snapped, "Oh, why in the devil didn't I have sense enough to bring another a.s.sistant?"

"I am here, doctor," answered the girl.

"Yes, yes, I know." He regarded her with the old, searching look. Then, to the nurse, "It's only one of the many chances we have got to take. When you put the patient under the anaesthetic you will show Rose exactly how it is administered, for she will have to keep her unconscious without any further aid from you after I begin to operate. We have got to trust her, Miss Merriman," he added shortly, as he caught the expression of grave doubt which the nurse could not keep from appearing on her countenance. "See that she washes and sterilizes her hands thoroughly. That hot water, Rose. I want a basinful."

She supplied it, then departed to do the rest of his bidding, and for some moments was kept so busy that she did not realize what the other two were doing at the bedside, other than to note that Donald had raised the head of the bed by blocking up the legs with firelogs, and covered it with a rubber sheet such as she had never seen before.

When she did, however, return to the side of the little sufferer, whose face was far whiter than the clean, but coa.r.s.e, sheet which covered the emaciated body, a low cry of protest and grief was wrung from her lips. Already most of the lovely ringlets of spun gold, which had won for the baby Donald's characterization of "Little b.u.t.tercup," gleamed on the rough floor, and the ruthless but necessary sacrifice was being continued.

There were tears on her cheeks as she aided the doctor to scrub the shorn scalp, until the child moaned and turned her head from side to side.

"He is my commanding officer. He told me that I must always remember that, and obey," whispered Rose to herself, as Donald, in his abstraction, began to snap forth his orders in a manner and tone which, for a moment, made her shrink and quiver. His words were often unintelligible to her, until Miss Merriman, silent-footed and efficient, translated them into action, as, before the wide eyes of the mountain child, there began to unfold the swift drama of modern surgical science at its pinnacle, amid that fantastic setting.

Strange words, indeed, were those which now fell on her attentive ears, many of them far outside the bounds of her limited vocabulary; yet, stranger still, she soon began to grasp their meaning intuitively, and her quick native perception, keyed high by emergency, led her often to antic.i.p.ate the physician's wish, and act upon it. More than once she won a look of surprise from the older woman.

Donald's directions to Miss Merriman were curt and incisive; but soon he did not limit his speech to them. Rather he seemed to be uttering his thoughts aloud; the old habit of making a running explanation for the benefit of a clinic or the better understanding of an a.s.sistant was subconsciously a.s.serting itself, and it was to Rose as though she were listening to the outpouring of a fountain of knowledge, whose waters engulfed her mind and made it gasp, yet carried her along with them. It was all a dream, a weird, impossible nightmare to her; the familiar room began to a.s.sume a strange aspect, and the man's words came to her as do those heard in a sleeping vision--real, yet tinctured with unreality.

"In this case the elastic tourniquet will stop the blood flow as effectively as the Heidenhain backst.i.tch suture method, I think, Miss Merriman, and it will be much simpler. I'm glad I brought it. Have you the saline solution, and the gauze head-covering ready?"

"Yes, doctor."

"Then you may administer the ether--use the drop method, and don't forget to show her just how to regulate it.

"No blood-pressure machine," he muttered. "Oh, well, we've just got to trust to her being able to stand it, and ..."

"And to G.o.d," whispered Rose.

He glanced quickly up, as though he had already forgotten her presence, and added, gently, "Of course."

The small pad of gauze, which Miss Merriman laid over the baby's face, grew moist; a strange, pungent odor began to fill the room. As she bent over to watch intently what the nurse was doing, Rose suddenly found herself beginning to get dizzy.

"Stand up, Smiles," came the sharp command. "Here, hold this handkerchief over your mouth and nose. Now, take the bottle yourself ... so ... a drop on the pad ... now. Yes, that's right, just as Miss Merriman has been doing. Little Lou is wholly unconscious, we must keep her so.

"Remember, now your test is beginning, and I expect you not to fail me. A great deal depends on you, Rose. You are a soldier on the firing-line now, and you are going to keep up, whatever happens. It may be for half an hour, but you will keep up, for me, for Lou, whatever happens. Remember! Whatever happens!"

He looked fixedly into the unnaturally big eyes which were turned up to his like two glorious flowers, and she nodded. With a pang of regret he noticed how thin her face was, and how white,--so pale that the color had fled even from the sweet, sensitive lips which smiled ever so faintly at him, and then at the nurse, as the latter made the quiet suggestion that she try to keep her eyes always fixed on the pad of gauze, and not let them be drawn away from it if she could possibly help it.

But at first she could not, and so she saw the pitiful little head, stripped of its golden crown, first covered with a clinging veil of wet cloth, over which, from behind the ears to the top of the forehead, a circular band of rubber tubing was adjusted and drawn tight into the flesh--"to stop the blood, like I did for grandpappy when he cut his arm," she thought. Then the head was gently raised and settled into position on the sand-filled pillow, which cradled it firmly.

Only the gurgling breath of the mercifully unconscious baby, and the crackling of the fire, broke the silence as the surgeon adjusted and posed his patient's head, as an artist would his model's.

A piercing light flashed before the girl's eyes, and she saw that now Miss Merriman held a strange-looking black tube, which shed a circle of concentrated sunshine on the gauze-covered head. It was her first experience with a flashlight, and she marvelled at its power.

Now there came another dart of light, thin and fleeting, and she knew that a knife was poised in mid-air. Involuntarily she closed her eyes tight; a shudder ran through her. Donald's voice spoke impersonally, and steadied her.

"I shall expose the third left frontal convolution of the brain through the fronto-parietal bone, and, in making the osteoplastic flap, I intend to leave a wide working margin above the size of the opening which may actually be necessary in order to reach the growth. It has got to be fully exposed at once. I can't afford to delay, under the circ.u.mstances."

The gleam of the scalpel held her unwilling gaze with the fascination of horror; she drew her breath with a sound between a shudder and a sigh as it descended....

"I must keep my eyes on the ether pad," came the command from her whirling brain.

Many nights thereafter, Rose was to start up from troubled sleep with strange sounds and stranger words echoing in her brain--words like "bevelled trephines," "Hudson forceps," "elevators," "Horsley's wax," "rongeurs," "clips" and "sponges,"--but during the actual operation she was scarcely conscious of them, and her princ.i.p.al feeling was one of dumb rebellion which grew until she found herself almost hating this Donald, who could speak with such unconcern and apparent callousness, at such a time. As well as she could, she willed her swimming gaze to remain fixed on the pad which she must keep moist. The difficulty of the task had suddenly become increased, for the pad seemed to become an animate thing. Now it appeared to retreat into the distance, and again it came floating back until it seemed about to smother her. There was a droning note in her ears; the words spoken by the other two sounded mixed and indistinct.

Of only one sentence, repeated monotonously in Miss Merriman's clear voice, was she really conscious. "Rose, a drop of ether ... a drop of ether ... a drop of ether."

She wanted to speak, to ask them if the room were not frightfully hot; but she could not.

Rose had never fainted in her life, but she had once seen a neighbor swoon, and she realized vaguely that, as the minutes pa.s.sed, her consciousness was slowly slipping from her. The air was close and heavy with strange smells. She felt as though she were swaying like a pendulum. The old, familiar objects grew grotesquely large and hazy; the deep shadows in the corners multiplied, and began to dance a solemn minuet, advancing, retreating; advancing, retreating....

"Another drop of ether."

She took a fresh mental grasp on herself, and held Duty, like a visible thing, before her eyes.

Again that queer, far-away voice.

"Look, Miss Merriman. Can you see that neoplasm under the membrane? Ah ... now the flat dissector ... no, the blunter one ..."

The voice trailed away into nothing, and another recalled her failing senses, with the battle cry: "Rose, another drop of ether."

Then it began again, "Thank heaven, there is no infiltration, the growth is well localized and encapsulated. Steady, steady.... Ah, very pretty."

The word caught her flickering thoughts, and angered her. How could any one use it about anything so awful?

There was another misty moment. Then, "The operation is, in itself, a success, I think.... Now if the child's vitality ... I never did a better one ... another sponge ... excellent ... Are the sutures ready?... Quick, take the ether bottle, Miss Merriman!"

Suddenly the girl felt a painful grasp on her arm. Some one was shaking her roughly.

"Rose," came the same strange voice, "we need some more wood for the fire. Go out to the woodpile, and get some."