struggle in which her face blackened, and she was still. Martin peered, incredulous. Slowly the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knew the child was gone.
In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to Martin. He had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to another, quite cheerfully, "Well, fifty-seven has just passed out." Now he raged with desire to do the impossible. She couldn't be dead. He'd do something— All the while he was groaning, "I should've operated—I should have." So insistent was the thought that for a time he did not realize that Mrs. Novak was clamoring, "She is dead? Dead?"
He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.
"You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell us, so we could call the priest!"
He crawled past her lamentations and the man's sorrow, and drove home, empty of heart.
"I shall never practise medicine again," he reflected.
"I'm through," he said to Leora. "I'm no good. I should of operated. I can't face people, when they know about it. I'm through. I'll go get a lab job—Dawson Hunziker or some place."
Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, "You're the most conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you're the only doctor that ever lost a patient? I know you did everything you could." But he went about next day torturing himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer whined at supper, "Henry Novak and his woman was in town to-day. They say you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn't you give your mind to it and manage to cure her somehow? Ought to tried. Kind of too bad, because the Novaks have a lot of influence with all these Pole and Hunky farmers."
After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove to Leopolis.
From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam Winter of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician of Crynssen County, and to this sage he was fleeing. As he drove he mocked furiously his melodramatic Race with Death, and he came wearily into the dust-whirling Main Street. Dr. Winter's office was above a grocery, in a long "block" of bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice—of tin. The
