A Chariot of Fire

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

The car followed the guidance of his shaking finger, and, like a conscious creature, swung to a startling stop.

There were lights in the quarryman's cottage, and shadows stirred against drawn shades. Jacob Dryver tumbled out and ran. He did not speak, nor by a gesture thank his Beverly "neighbor." Chester slowly unbuttoned his rubber coat and got at his watch. The Aurora had covered the distance—in dark and fog, over seventeen miles—in fifty-six minutes. Now, Jacob, dashing in, had left the door open, and Chester, as he put his watch back into its pocket, heard that which sent the blood driving through his arteries as the power had driven the pumps of the car. The sound that he heard was the fretful moan of a hurt child.

As he had admitted, he was a Christian—sometimes; and he said, "Oh, thank God!" with all his generous heart. Indeed, as he did so, he took off his heavy cap and bared his head.

Then he heard the sobbing of a shaken man close beside him.

"Sir! Oh, sir! The God of Everlastin' bless you, sir. Won't you come and look at him?"

Batty lay quietly; he had put his little fingers in his father's hand; he did not notice the stranger. The boy's mother, painfully poised on one elbow in the position that mothers take when they watch sick children, lay upon the other side of the bed. She was a large woman, with a plain, good face. She had on a polka-dotted, blue cotton wrapper which nobody called a negligée. Her mute, maternal eyes went to the face of the visitor and reverted to the child.

There was a physician in the room—a very young, to the trained eye an inexperienced, man; in fact, the medical situation was unpromising and complicated. It took Chester but a few moments to gauge it, and to perceive that his mission to this afflicted household had not ended with a lost night's sleep and an automobile record.

The local doctor, it seemed, was away from home when Batty's accident befell; the Gloucester surgeon was ill; some one had proposed the hospital, but the mother had the prejudices of her class. A neighbor had suggested this young man—a new-comer to the town—one of the flotsam practitioners who drift and disappear. Recommended upon the ground that he had successfully prescribed headache pills to a Swedish cook, this stranger had received into his unskilled hands the emergency of a dangerously wounded lad. The accident, in fact, was more serious than Chester had supposed. He had now been told that the child was crushed by an automobile racing through Annisquam Willows the day before.

The boy, it was plain, was sorely hurt, and ignorant suffering lay at the mercy of ignorant treatment, in the hopeless and helpless subjection to medical etiquette which costs so many lives.

"Dryver," said Chester, quietly, "you need a surgeon here at once. Your physician is quite willing to consult with any one you may call." He shot one stern glance at the young doctor, who quavered a frightened assent. "I know a distinguished surgeon—he is a friend of mine; it was he who saved my boy in that accident I told you of, this summer. He is not far away; he is at a hotel on Eastern Point. I can have him here in twenty—well, say twenty-five minutes. Of course, we must wait for him to dress."