But Nell seized him by the arm, shaking it urgently and pointing to what she had written.
“You want this key found at once? Where is the coffin—in the shed?”
To this also she signified yes. Then, stepping to the door, the doctor issued the order that the railway track was to be searched up and down, as far as a girl would be likely to throw, for the key of the shed.
There was instant activity now, and every one set to work on the search, saving the man in charge of the engine, Jim, who acted as interpreter to Mrs. Trip, and Sam Peters, who had to serve as the doctor’s assistant.
The broken wrist was set first. The doctor half hoped the pain of the setting would cause Nell to faint, so that he might put the jaw-bone back into its place before she recovered from her swoon.
But consciousness never left her, though no sound, save a sob, broke from her when the fractured wrist-bones grated together, and were bound up in splints made from a broken starch-box. The doctor winced himself, when handling the dislocated jaw; but it would have been cruel kindness to delay the doing of what was so necessary to be done, and in three minutes it was over.
“There, there; I shall not have to hurt you any more,” he said soothingly, turning his head away from the sight of the suffering in Nell’s eyes, and grumbling at Sam Peters, who was wiping his tears away on his coat-sleeve, and sniffing like a schoolboy who has just been caned.
Nell shut her eyes for a few minutes, as if to blot out the memory of the torture she had just passed through; but she opened them with a start two minutes later, when there was a knock at the office door, and some one in a sibilant whisper announced to the doctor that the key had been found.
“Yes, it is all right; I will see to things. There is no need for you to worry about anything. I am going to wrap you in these blankets; and then you can rest until we are ready to take you back to Bratley,” he said, with authority in his voice, for there was a touch of wildness in her eyes, which gave a hint of possible delirium later, resulting from the strain and the pain she had endured.
Rolling her in blankets, which Mrs. Trip and Jim had brought from the house, and slipping a comfortable pillow under her head in place of his own jacket, the doctor left her to rest on the floor, watched over by Sam Peters.