“You want me to rouse him violently, if I can. What if it cost him his life?” Lang asked quietly.
“Even at the risk of his life,” said Floyd with a sort of energetic coldness.
Lang looked curiously at the speaker, who looked back unblinking.
“No physician would attempt such a thing,” he said. “I want to give this man a thorough examination. The room’s too full. Clear it out.”
They went out obediently, and Lang sat down behind the closed door and studied the unconscious figure afresh. It was not at all his special sort of case; Long of Chicago would really have been the man, but he knew well enough how to make his diagnosis.
He tested carefully the knee jerk, the ankle clonus, all the reflexes, finding nothing out of the way; he took the pulse more carefully, listened to the breathing, and then bared the body and went over the whole surface of the skin. Several ribs had been broken within a few months, he noted, and knitted rather badly; and he discovered a large, fresh burn on the left arm, which he dressed. But these injuries could not account for this prolonged coma, and he could find no trace of others.
A tiny clot of blood on the brain surface might produce these symptoms, but only the X-ray could discover it. It might be a purely nervous case; a neurasthenia, a brain shock, such as is called shell shock in war. He felt doubtful for he had made no special study of these puzzling maladies.
And he wondered all at once why these men wished the patient to be brought to speech, even at the risk of his life.
He was aroused from his deep thought by a gust of cold wind and mist driving through the porthole. He went to close it, and saw at once that the wind must have changed—or the steamer moved. With his hand on the steel-ringed glass he paused, startled, for he could hear the thrash and beat of the propeller astern, throbbing swiftly, and he felt the vibration of the engines under his feet.
Perhaps they were heading landward, to put him ashore; but he felt a deadly certainty that it was not so. He tried the door. It was locked on the outside. He beat on the panels—louder—kicked the door and shouted. But it was fully five minutes before the door was unfastened and Carroll appeared.