He little realized that he had but reached the second stage in the journey that was to prepare him in a way he could not understand to be the “Beloved Physician,” one destined to save many who, like him, had met death face to face and trembled before the thought of separation from those they loved.
A faint light seemed to shine in the blackness of the night that had closed about him when the resolve came to go away from the city into the still woods--where he had felt the keenest joy in “mere living” on brief hunting-trips to the Adirondacks. His dear wife should be spared seeing the terrible, hopeless fight, and he should before the end have a bit of that free life for which his tired spirit longed. And so, though it meant separation, perhaps forever, from those he loved best, he prepared to go to Paul Smith’s hunting-lodge, which was forty-two miles from the nearest railroad in the heart of a still country of mountain lakes and vast, untroubled forest.
It took three days for the sick man to make the journey. His friend Lou Livingston, who accompanied him, tried in vain to persuade him to give up going to such a rough, remote place. A mattress and pillows were arranged in the two-horse stage, in which they had to travel the forty-two miles of rough mountain road to the hunting-lodge, and the sick man was made as comfortable as possible; but when at sunset he caught sight of the house through the pines he was too weak with fever and the jolting of the long trip to stand or walk. A hearty, mountain guide picked him up as if he had been an infant, carried him up to his room, and, as he laid him on his bed, remarked comfortingly:
“That’s nothing, Doctor! You don’t weigh no more than a dried lambskin.”
The invalid might well have been depressed by these words, but the magic of the country had already begun its work. He ate a hearty meal with the keenest relish he had known in weeks and fell asleep like a tired child.
“When I thought I had come to the end, it proved but the turn in the road,” said Dr. Trudeau. “I went to the mountains to die--I found there the beginning of a new life.”
As the weeks passed and left him not losing ground, but actually gaining day by day, the truth gradually dawned upon him that fresh air and rest were doing what doctors despaired of.