The man chuckled. He did not cease work as he talked. He was using a damp cloth, with a pungent medicated smell. Dual odors familiar to every man who has ever been in hospital assailed MacRae's nostrils. Wherever that damp cloth touched a cut it burned. MacRae listened drowsily. He had not the strength or the wish to do anything else.
"Heart action's normal. Respiration and temperature, ditto," he heard above him. "Unconsciousness is merely natural reaction from shock, nerve strain, loss of blood. You can guess what sort of fight he must have made in those breakers. If you were a sawbones, Miss Gower, you wouldn't be uneasy. I'll stake my professional reputation on his injuries being superficial. Quite enough to knock a man out, I grant. But a physique of this sort can stand a tremendous amount of strain without serious effect. Hand me that adhesive, will you, please?"
There was an air of unreality about the whole proceeding in MacRae's mind. He wondered if he would presently wake up in his bunk opposite Steve and find that he had been dreaming. Yet those voices, and the hands that shifted him tenderly, and the pyjama coat that was slipped on him at last, were not the stuff of dreams. No, the lights of the Arrow, the smash of the collision, the tumbling seas which had flung him against the rocks, the dead weight of Steve's body in his bleeding arms, were not illusions.
He opened his eyes when they turned him on his back.
"Well, old man, how do you feel?" Betty's companion asked genially.
"All right," MacRae said briefly. He found that speech required effort. His mind worked clearly enough, but his tongue was uncertain, his voice low-pitched, husky. He turned his eyes on Betty. She tried to smile. But her lips quivered in the attempt. MacRae looked at her curiously. But he did not say anything. In the face of accomplished facts, words were rather futile.
He closed his eyes again, only to get a mental picture of the Arrow leaping at him out of the gloom, the thunder of the swells bursting against the foot of the cliffs, of Steve lying on that ledge alone. But nothing could harm Steve. Storm and cold and pain and loneliness were nothing to him, now.
He heard Betty speak.
"Can we do anything more?"