“Hold the candle nearer, boy, nearer still. That’s right. You won’t singe his hair. If you do it won’t matter, for I must clip it off short. Humph! some one has given him a pretty topper with a thick stick, and he must have fallen with his head on the edge of a step. Terrible cuts?”
“But will they kill him, sir?” I faltered, feeling quite sick at the sight of the wounds.
“We won’t let them, my man. Come, hold up, you mustn’t, let that turn you faint.”
“I—I won’t, sir,” I said.
“That’s right, my man. Nothing like a little will and determination. We men must leave fainting to the girls. That’s right; basin and sponge and towel. We’ll soon put him straight. Now that case out of my pocket. That’s well. Hold the candle nearer. No snuffers? Well, use your fingers. Dirty trick, but handy—fingery, I ought to say.”
He kept on talking—half-playfully, while with his bright scissors he clipped the hair away close from Revitts’ forehead, and then, cutting up some plaister in strips, he rapidly bandaged the cuts, after bringing the edges of the wounds together with a few stitches from a needle and some silk.
“Poor fellow! he has got a sad knocking about,” the doctor said kindly, for now the annoyance at being called out of bed was over he was deeply interested in his case. “I wonder some of his fellow-constables did not take him to the hospital. Where did you find him?”
I told him how I was astonished by finding Revitts at my bedside.
“Ah yes, I see,” he said. “Hurt and half-insensible, and nature intervenes. Education says, Take him to the hospital; instinct bids him, animal-like, creep to his hole to die.”
“To die, sir?” I cried, catching his hand.