It was further than she thought. We were more than three quarters of an hour returning with the superintendent. It took twenty minutes more to wake the crew at the power house and get the electricity turned on. Then we drove slowly up the main concrete road now lighted on each side by clusters of three ground glass globes in fluted columns fifty feet apart. Although it was finished the road was still cluttered with heaps of sand and debris.
Galt all this time was fast asleep, his head resting on Mrs. Galt’s shoulder. We could scarcely wake him when we tried. He seemed drunk with weariness. As we helped him out he opened his eyes once and startled us by saying to the superintendent: “Fire that watchman ... down below,” as if he had been conscious of everything that happened. His eyes closed again, he tottered, and we caught him. The superintendent supported him on one side, I on the other, and so he entered, dragging his feet.
Natalie knew more about the house than anyone else. She led the way to the apartment that was Galt’s, and then left us to place the servants and show them their way around. I helped Mrs. Galt undress him and get him to bed. I was amazed to see how thin and shrunken his body was. He was inert, like a child asleep. Mrs. Galt, very pale, was strong and deft.
“We must have a doctor at once,” she said. “I thought of bringing one and then didn’t because he minds so awfully to have a doctor in.”
Still we were not really alarmed.
The telephone system had been installed. Natalie knew that. She knew also where the big switchboard was. I telephoned the family physician to meet us at the Hoboken ferry and then Natalie and I set out to fetch him, a drive of nearly seventy miles there and back.
“We ought to do it in two hours,” she said, as we coasted freely,—very freely,—down the lighted cement road and plunged through the gates into darkness.
“The doctor must be in his right mind when we deliver him.”
I meant it lightly. Her reckless driving was a household topic and she was incorrigible. But she answered me thoughtfully.