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To lose oneself in that trackless wilderness...! A demon of anxiety prodded him on: he must learn Quain's fate, or go mad. Once on the mainland it were a matter of facility to find his way to the village of Shampton, telephone Tanglewood and charter a "team" to convey him thither. He shut his teeth on his determination and set his face to the east.
There was a sitting-room and a bedroom, and on the round table in the centre of the sitting-room was a copy of the most modern edition of Quain's 'Dictionary of Medicine, edited by Murray, Harold, and Bosanquet, bound in half-morocco; the volume was open at the article 'Anæsthetics, and Hugo will always remember that the page was sixty-two.
"Thank you," returned Amber, controlling himself sufficiently to wait until he should be conducted to his room before opening the note. It was not, he observed later, superscribed in a feminine hand. Could it be from Quain's friend Labertouche? Who else?... Amber lifted his shoulders resignedly. "I wish Quain had minded his own business," he said ungratefully; "I can take care of myself.
And accepting Quain's snort for an affirmative he strolled off in the direction indicated, hugging his gun in the crook of his arm. Fifty yards or so away he found the ducks, side by side in a little hollow. "Fine fat birds," he adjudged them sagely, weighing each in his hand ere dropping it into his lean game-bag. "This makes up for a lot of cold and waiting."
"I wish you wouldn't," he begged in boyish embarrassment. "I'm not a notability, really; Quain's been talking too much. I'll get even with him, though." "That sounds so modest that I almost believe I've made a mistake about your identity. But I've no doubt you're right; Mr. Quain does exaggerate in praise of his friends.
He laid out his large Quain's Dictionary of Medicine in the forefront of the table so as to impress the casual patient that he had ever the best authorities at his elbow. Then he cleared all the little instruments out of his pocket-case the scissors, the forceps, the bistouries, the lancets and he laid them all out beside the stethoscope, to make as good a show as possible.
Along the centre of the side-board, arranged with suspicious neatness, as though seldom disturbed, stood a line of solemn books, Holden's Osteology, Quain's Anatomy, Kirkes' Physiology, and Huxley's Invertebrata, together with a disarticulated human skull.
"If any one who may not just like an actual dissection, will look at one of Quain's 'Plates of the Bones, Muscles, and Nerves of the Human Body, he will see that, growing as it were out of the walls of the stomach, there are, in our wonderful human machine, great bunches of nerves, called, by the medicals, the 'great ganglionic system, and he will observe that these nerves are in intimate and inseparable connection with the spinal cord, and the brain.
Doggott disappeared to prepare the meal, but within five minutes a second gun-shot sounded startlingly near at hand. The Virginian's appearance at the door was coincident with a clear hail of "Aho-oy, Amber!" unmistakably Quain's voice, raised at a distance of not over two hundred yards. Amber's answering cry quavered with joy.
He asked me down for the shooting owns a country place across the bay: Tanglewood." "A very able man; I wish I might have met him.... What of yourself? What have you been doing these three years? Have you married?" "I've been too busy to think of that.... I mean, till lately." "Ah?" Amber flushed boyishly. "There was a girl at Quain's a guest.... But she left before I dared speak.
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