"Mr. Bromley is hurt—fatally, they think—by a fall from the path into the lower canyon. Mr. Ballard has gone with the man who came to bring the news. Will you send Otto in the car to see if there is anything we can do?"
"Bromley? Oh, no, child; it can't be Bromley!" He had risen to his feet at her mention of the name, but now he sat down again as if the full tale of the years had smitten him suddenly. Then he gave his directions, brokenly, and with a curious thickening of the deep-toned, mellifluous voice: "Tell Otto to bring the small car around at—at once, and fetch me my coat. Of cou'se, my deah, I shall go myself"—this in response to her swift protest. "I'm quite well and able; just a little—a little sho'tness of breath. Fetch me my coat and the doctor-box, thah's a good girl. But—but I assure you it can't be—Bromley!"
XVI
THE RETURN OF THE OMEN
Loudon Bromley's principal wounding was a pretty seriously broken head, got, so said Luigi, the Tuscan river-watchman who had found and brought him in, by the fall from the steep hill path into the rocky canyon.
Ballard reached the camp at the heels of the Irish newsbearer shortly after the unconscious assistant had been carried up to the adobe headquarters; and being, like most engineers with field experience, a rough-and-ready amateur surgeon, he cleared the room of the throng of sympathising and utterly useless stone "buckies," and fell to work. But beyond cleansing the wound and telegraphing by way of Denver to Aspen for skilled help, there was little he could do.
The telegraphing promised nothing. Cutting out all the probable delays, and assuming the Aspen physician's willingness to undertake a perilous night gallop over a barely passable mountain trail, twelve hours at the very shortest must go to the covering of the forty miles.
Ballard counted the slow beats of the fluttering pulse and shook his head despairingly. Since he had lived thus long after the accident, Bromley might live a few hours longer. But it seemed much more likely that the flickering candle of life might go out with the next breath. Ballard was unashamed when the lights in the little bunk-room grew dim to his sight, and a lump came in his throat. Jealousy, if the sullen self-centring in the sentimental affair had grown to that, was quenched in the upwelling tide of honest grief. For back of the sex-selfishness, and far more deeply rooted, was the strong passion of brother-loyalty, reawakened now and eager to make amends—to be given a chance to make amends—for the momentary lapse into egoism.
To the Kentuckian in this hour of keen misery came an angel of comfort in the guise of his late host, the master of Castle 'Cadia. There was the stuttering staccato of a motor-car breasting the steep grade of the mesa hill, the drumming of the released engines at the door of the adobe, and the colonel entered, followed by Jerry Blacklock, who had taken the chauffeur's place behind the pilot wheel for the roundabout drive from Castle 'Cadia. In professional silence, and with no more than a nod to the watcher at the bedside, the first gentleman of Arcadia laid off his coat, opened a kit of surgeon's tools, and proceeded to save Bromley's life, for the time being, at least, by skilfully lifting the broken bone which was slowly pressing him to death.