"I can't talk any more, and you mustn't.

Good-by." She felt her hand caught tight in both of his, but he could not speak to his hand clasp.

"At two!" was all he managed to say.
And so, in this far-off spot in the wilderness, the science of to-day, not long after two by the clock, had done what it might to remedy nature's unkindness, and to make Mary Gage as other women.

When the sun had dropped back of its shielding mountain wall, Mary Gage lay still asleep, her eyes bandaged, in her darkened room.

Whether at length she would awaken to darkness or to light, none could tell.
Allen Barnes only knew that, tried as never he had been in all his life before, he had done his surgeon's work unfalteringly.
"Doc," said Sim Gage tremblingly, when they met upon the gravel street in the straggling little camp, each white-faced from fatigue, "tell me how long before we'll know." "Three or four days at least.