“Dey!” he cried, his great rough voice echoing through the dreadful hush of the room.
Bond opened his mouth to protest; then shrank back to the wall, staring in heavy wonder.
“Dey!” called the Fighter again, an agony of command in his tone. “Dey! Come back!”
It was not the wail of a weak nature vainly summoning the Lost to return. Rather it was the sharp, fierce call of the officer who by sheer force of accepted rulership rallies his stricken men. Sublimely imperious, backed by a will of chilled steel and by a mentality that had never been successfully balked, the Fighter’s voice resounded again and again in that harsh, domineering order:
“Dey! Come back!”
Calling upon his seemingly dead love to re-enter the frail flesh she was even now quitting, Conover threw into his appeal all the vast strength that was his and the immeasurably enforced power of his despair and adoration. He held the white hands gripped tight to his chest; his face close to the silent girl’s; his light eyes blazing into hers; his every faculty bent with superhuman pressure upon drawing an answering sign from the lifeless form.
“It is madness!” muttered the doctor; infected nevertheless by the dominant magnetism that played about the Fighter and that vibrated through every tone of his imperative voice. “It is madness. She is dead, or—”
Conover did not heed nor hear. He had no consciousness for anything save this supreme battle of his whole life. Vaguely he knew that the innate mastership within him which for years had subdued strong men to his will had been as nothing to the nameless power that love was now enabling him to put forth.
From the threshold of death,—yes, from the grave itself,—she should come at his call; this little, silent wisp of humanity that meant life and heaven to him.
The red-haired man was fighting.