“I want you to come out to Duck Flats to see an old man who seems to be dying, but as I was coming for you I nearly drove over another man, a dead-beat apparently, and I brought him along with me. You will have to look after him first, for he seems in a bad way, I can tell you.”
“I’ll be out in three minutes,” growled the doctor, in no very pleased tone, then he banged the window, and Edgar was left to wait through an interminable three minutes, which seemed to him to be at least half an hour, so impatient was he about the condition of the man in the wagon.
Then the door opened, and the doctor bustled out, as neat and trim of appearance as if he had been sitting up waiting for patients to come, instead of having been in bed sound asleep less than five minutes before.
“Now, then, what is wrong?” he said, bustling round to the end of the wagon, and peering at the figure which lay wrapped in the brown topcoat. “You are right, he does look in need of some attention. We shall have to carry him indoors. My word, but he is a fine lump of a man, though he is only a bag of bones. How did you manage to get him into the wagon, if he was senseless when you picked him up?”
“I dragged him up somehow. I could not have done it if the horse had not stood, as it were, planted in the ground and had taken root there. As it was, I had my work cut out, for the poor fellow is bigger than I am,” panted Edgar, as he and the doctor lifted the man from the wagon and carried him indoors to the light.
“Well, I never!” exclaimed the doctor, in a tone of pure amazement, as he surveyed his new patient by the light of the lamp.
“Is he dead?” asked Edgar, in a tone of deep disappointment, for it seemed too bad to have had to work so hard and then not be able to save the man after all.
“Dead! Good gracious, I hope not!” cried the doctor, beginning to work at the poor fellow in feverish haste. “Why, man, it is Tom Ellis himself, the owner of Duck Flats, and there are women and children there who will love you all your life for what you have done to-night!”
CHAPTER XXXIV
The End
It was more than a week later before Tom Ellis was well enough to be carried to his home at Duck Flats, and by that time everyone knew all that there was to be known of his wonderful escape from death.