Still I didn't say anything about my wrist. Aunt Mary and I scrambled up the bank, and Brown, Jimmy, and the carter went back and forth for our things. The latter had been going away from Le Beausset, not towards it when the accident happened, but he agreed to turn round and take our luggage on his cart to the village. He made room for Aunt Mary too, sitting on bags and portmanteaus like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, and the rest of us walked, about a mile.
Le Beausset proved to be a tiny place, and at the solitary inn there was but one small bedroom to let, the rest being taken by some rough, selfish-looking commercial travellers, who were having an early dinner in a hot and smelly salle à manger, with every breath of air religiously excluded.
I thought that without being fussy I might draw the general attention to myself. I announced a wrist, and demanded a surgeon lest I had cracked a bone. Brown vanished like a pantomine demon, but returned almost immediately with a long face, and the intelligence that Le Beausset had neither surgeon nor resident doctor. There was no vehicle, not even a bicycle, to be had for love or money at this time of day, but he would make all haste to Toulon and send back a competent man. The worst of it was there might be delay, as it was about ten miles to Toulon. Halfway between Le Beausset and the big town was a small one called Ollioules, and there, it appeared, one could take an electric tram into Toulon; but it was a long way for a doctor to come, and it might be several hours before he could arrive.
"Then I'll go to Toulon with you," said I. "I don't feel as if I could stand much waiting; the walk will take my mind off the pain, and I can have my wrist attended to the minute I get there."
Instantly Aunt Mary burst into a cataract of objections, and I only dammed the flood (quite in the proper sense of the word, because, like Marjorie Fleming, I was "most unusual calm; I did not give a single damn") by suggesting that, once in Toulon, I might send back a comfortable carriage and engage rooms in a good hotel for us all for the night.
"Well, I can't and won't stay here alone, that's flat," pronounced my dear aunt; and despite all her lectures against "liberty, fraternity, and equality" in my treatment of poor Brown, she was willing to let me go unchaperoned save by him, for the sake of retaining Jimmy Payne's protecting presence herself. As for Jimmy, it was easy to see that he didn't like the idea at all; but he had jarred himself a good deal in his eccentric fall, and evidently funked another tramp. He had limped ostentatiously every step of the way to Le Beausset. Brown was afraid that I wasn't up to the walk, but I assured him it would be much less uncomfortable than indefinite waiting, and I think he saw by my face that I was right. After all our delay it was only half-past five when we set off, and would scarcely have been thoroughly dark if it hadn't been for the clouds which had been boiling up from the west all over the sky.
I had no idea what kind of a walk we were in for when we started, neither had Brown, for he had never been over exactly this part of the world either walking or driving, but only in the train. We hadn't been gone long when we plunged downwards into a deep and winding mountain gorge, the kind of cut-throat place where you'd expect brigands to grow on blackberry bushes. Oh, but it was dark, with only now and then a fitful gleam of moonlight cutting its way through a rent in the inky clouds! Hardly had the word "brigands" crept into my mind with an accompaniment of heart-beats something like the plink! plink! plink! villain entrance-music on the stage, when two indistinct forms loomed out of the blackness before us. A perpendicular wall of rock shot up from the road on one side, and on the other, in some unseen depth below, roared a torrent, which drowned my voice when I whispered to Brown, so I clutched his coat-sleeve instead of speaking.
The two men were chattering loudly in Italian. "Ah, Italian brigands, worse and worse!" thought I; but Brown said "Good-evening" to them boldly, and they answered as mildly as a pair of lambs, falling behind to let us pass on. I skipped along, expecting at any instant to feel a knife in my back, but the blade did not penetrate any part more vital than my imagination, though the pair hung on our footsteps till we emerged from the mountain defile into the town of Ollioules.
I never knew what an attractive object an electric tram could be, until I saw one there awaiting our convenience, glittering with hospitable light. We jumped in, and were flashed into Toulon in no time, stopping close to the best hotel. We found that they could accommodate our party, but Brown quite took the upper hand; wouldn't allow me to stop and talk, had me swept off to a very nice room, and said that not only would he see about a surgeon for me, but would arrange for a carriage to drive back for Aunt Mary and Jimmy.
Till we got into the electric car at Ollioules I hadn't noticed in the dark that Brown was carrying anything. But he put down on the car seat quite a heavy bag of mine and a sort of big dressing-case of his own, which is his only baggage on the automobile. "Why did you lug all that?" I exclaimed. "Oh, I thought you might need something before the others arrived," said he, "and I didn't like to trouble them to look after mine." Wasn't he thoughtful? And I was glad to have my bag-without waiting. But just think of the state of that poor fellow's muscles!