"Hush! He's coming to," interposed the banker. It was as though the quiet that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs.

Tynan's hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.

The first face he saw was that of the banker. In spite of the loss of blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his eyes. "Lucky for you you didn't lend me the money," he said feebly.

The banker shook his head. "I'm not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier. G.o.d knows, I'm not!"

Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan. "It's hard on you to have me brought here," he murmured as she took his hand.

"Not so hard as if they hadn't," she replied. "That's what a home's for--not just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping."

"It wasn't part of the bargain," he said weakly.

"It was my part of the bargain."

"Here's Kitty," said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish of a skirt at the door.

"Who are you calling 'Kitty'?" asked the girl indignantly, as they motioned her back from the bedside. "There's too many people here,"

she added abruptly to her mother. "We can take care of him"--she nodded towards the bed. "We don't want any help except--except from John Sibley, if he will stay, and you too," she added to the banker.

She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed. She felt she could not do so while all these people were in the room. She needed time to adjust herself to the situation. It was as though she was the authority in the household and took control even of her mother. Mrs. Tynan understood.

She had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and she was always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being "bossed" by the man she had lost.

"Yes, you'd all better go," Mrs. Tynan said. "He wants all the air he can get, and I can't make things ready with all of you in the room. Go outdoors for a while, anyway. It's summer and you'll not take cold! The Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will help him plenty." She motioned towards the banker and the gambling farmer.

In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier, who knew that upon the coming operation depended his life. He had been conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking, as he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes, that he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he had married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone. If he had to die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.

Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now. As she caught sight of his face for the first time--she had so far kept her head turned away--she became very pale. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself together. Going over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the coverlet.

"Courage, soldier," she said in the colloquialism her father often used, and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.

"You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan," he whispered, and smiled.

"Here comes the Young Doctor," said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened unceremoniously.

"Well, I have to make an excursion," Crozier said, "and I mayn't come back. If I don't, au revoir, Kitty."

"You are coming back all right," she answered firmly. "It'll take more than a horse-thief's bullet to kill you. You've got to come back. You're as tough as nails. And I'll hold your hand all through it--yes, I will!"

she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and told her to go to another room.

"I'm going to help you, doctor-man, if you please," she said, as he turned to the box of instruments which his a.s.sistant held.

"There's another--one of my colleagues--coming I hope," the Young Doctor replied.

"That's all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through. I said I'd hold his hand, and I'm going to do it," she added firmly.

"Very well; put on a big ap.r.o.n, and see that you go through with us if you start. No nonsense."

"There'll be no nonsense from me," she answered quietly.

"I want the bed in the middle of the room," the Young Doctor said, and the others gently moved it.

CHAPTER V. A STORY TO BE TOLD

A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every resource of character, skill, and brain came into play. That was when, having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken. The great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but he paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his subconscious self.

So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way. She had insisted on being allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as the operation was concerned she justified his faith in her. When the banker had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained, and she and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his fellow-anatomist, till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started again on a safe journey back to health. Then a thing, which would have been amusing if it had not been so deeply human, happened. She and John Sibley went out of the house together into the moonlit night, and the reaction seized them both at the same moment. She gave a gulp and burst into tears, and he, though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they sat on the stump of a tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two children.

"Never since I was a little runt--did I--never cried in thirty years--and here I am-leaking like a pail!" Thus spoke John Sibley in gasps and squeezing Kitty's hand all the time unconsciously, but spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to hold it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though far from precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her that; but if she had understanding she would realise after to-night what he had in his mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of his very vital palm, had her turn at explanation. "I wouldn't have broke down myself--it was all your fault," she said. "I saw it--yes--in your face as we left the house. I'm so glad it's over safe--no one belonging to him here, and not knowing if he'd wake up alive or not--I just was swamped."

He took up the misty excuse and explanation. "I had a feeling for him from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil--it's what does a man good! And going bung over a horserace--that's what got me too, where I was young and tender. Swatted that Burlingame every time--one eye, two eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened--called him an 'outrageous lawyer'--my, that last clip was a good one! You bet he's a sport--Crozier."

Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes. "He made the judge smile--I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap.

You couldn't have believed it, if you hadn't seen it--

"Here, let go my hand," she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.

It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken her hand--that he had taken her hand. She was conscious in a nice, sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the abstraction of her emotion.

"Oh, here, let it go quick!" she added--"and not because mother's coming, either," she added as the door opened and her mother came out--not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man in the moonlight at ten o'clock at night, but--good, practical soul--to bring them each a cup of beef-tea.

"Here, you two," she said as she hurried to them. "You need something after that business in there, and there isn't time to get supper ready.

It's as good for you as supper, anyway. I don't believe in underfeeding.

Nothing's too good to swallow."

She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.

"And when you've drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty," she added presently. "You've had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but there's always a reaction, and you'll pay for it. It wasn't fit work for a girl of your age; but I'm proud of your nerve, and I'm glad you showed the Young Doctor what you can do. You've got your father's brains and my grit," she added with a sigh of satisfaction. "Come along--bed now, Kitty. If you get too tired you'll have bad dreams."

Perhaps she was too tired. In any case she had dreams. Just as the great surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so Kitty Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights afterwards, saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the basin, disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man of men in her eyes, and saw the wound st.i.tched up--the last act of the business before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, "You'll do wherever you're put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan. You're a great girl. And now get some fresh air and forget all about it."

Forget all about it! So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a terrific experience like that! In truth, he knew only too well. Great surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than usual gift for such business. That is what the Young Doctor had; but he knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing "the wheels go round."

It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which toned down a little the colour of her face--the kind of difference of colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat. But in the daytime she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence. It gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain. He was not so blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was the central figure--a romance which had not vanished since the day he declared in the court-room that he was married, or had been married.

Kitty's eyes told their own story, and it made him uneasy and remorseful. Yet he could not remember when, even for an instant, he had played with her. She had always seemed part of a simple family life for which he and Jesse Bulrush and her mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were responsible. What a blessing Nurse Egan had been! Otherwise, all the nursing would have been performed by Kitty and her mother, and it might well have broken them down, for they were determined to nurse him themselves.

When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation was performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of the family; and as she had no other important case on at the time, fortunately she could give Crozier almost undivided attention. She had been at first disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no place for a girl, but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was not the girl ever to think of impropriety. She was primitive and she had rather a before-the-flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar strain in her. Her mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her had been awakened. Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the patient which a nurse must do--prepare his food, give him drink, adjust his pillows, bathe his face and hands, take his temperature; and on his part he tried hard to disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to avoid any hint by word or look that he saw anything save the actions of a kind heart. True, her views as to what was proper and improper might possibly be on a different plane from his own. For instance, he had seen girls of her station in the West kiss young men freely--men whom they had no thought of marrying; and that was not the custom of his own cla.s.s in his home-country.

As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how. He had a deep confidence in the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do ere he returned to a land which was not strange.

The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict against the man who had shot him--the trial was to come on soon, and once again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and once again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.

"I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial, Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full information about your past," the Young Doctor said.

Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of him and said: "Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my evidence in the Logan Trial." He raised himself on his elbow. "I owe you a great deal," he added feelingly, "and I can't repay you in cash or kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole story, and that is what I propose to do now."

"If you think--"