"Doctor!" came a cry from within.
"Well?" he answered eagerly, stepping to the door.
"I thought I caught a breath!"
The doctor's keen eyes glinted as he knelt beside the prostrate figure.
Nine, ten, eleven times the weight of the life-saver was brought forward and released. At the twelfth, there was a slight respiration.
"Did you see, Doctor?" he cried, pausing in his work.
"What the mischief are you stopping for?" was the doctor's impatient answer. Then he added, "You're doing splendidly, Murchison; just keep it up!"
Five more minutes passed without a single sign. Both men had begun to feel that possibly they had been mistaken, when there was a definite flutter of an eyelid. The surfman would have given a triumphant shout but for the doctor's rebuke a moment or two before.
Quietly the old Scotchman began to promote circulation by rubbing the legs upward, so as to drive the venous blood to the heart and thus try to start its action. Almost ten minutes elapsed before the doctor's patience was rewarded with the faint throb of a heart-beat, then another. It was soft and irregular at first, but gradually the blood began to move through the arteries and in a few minutes a pulse could be felt. The lips lost a little of their blue color and breathing began.
"He's got a grand heart!" said the old doctor, ten minutes later, as the pulse-beats began to come with regularity. "I hardly believed that we could bring him round. It's a good thing it was this chap and not the other. We could never have saved yon man if he had been half as long submerged."