“Hah!” said Joses, with a loud expiration of his breath, “them’s like the pinchers a doctor chap once used to pull out a big aching tooth of mine, and he nearly pulled my head off as well.”
“No; they were different to these, Joses,” said the Doctor, quietly, as he took up a knife. “Feel faint, Bart?”
The lad blushed now. He had been turning pale.
“Well, I did feel a little sick, sir. It was the sight of that knife. It has all gone now.”
“That’s right, my boy. Always try and master such feelings as these. Now I must try and make him understand what I want to do. Give me that piece of stick, Bart, it will do to imitate the arrow.”
Bart handed the piece of wood, which the Doctor shortened, and then, suiting the action to his words, he spoke to the chief:
“The arrow entered here,” he said, pointing to a wound a little above the Indian’s wrist, “and pierced right up through the muscles, to bury itself in the bone just here.”
As he spoke, he pushed the stick up outside the arm along the course that the arrow had taken, and holding the end about where he considered the head of the arrow to be.
For answer the Indian gave two sharp nods, and said something in his own tongue which no one understood.
“Then,” continued the Doctor, “you, or somebody else, in trying to extract the arrow, have broken it off, and it is here in the arm, at least six inches and the head.”