“Where’d you get him?”
“About five miles below on the main road. One of the horses almost stepped on him. He was right in the path, but he was all sprinkled over with snow.”
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“Pretty near, I guess. We’ve pumped whisky into him, but he ain’t shown a sign of life.”
“Who is he?”
“Search me. I ain’t seen him good myself yet. Just as we got him the lantern went out.”
There was a sofa in the hall and they laid their burden there, the crowd edging in on them, horrified, interested, hungrily peering. Rose could see their bent, expressive backs and the craning napes of their necks. Then a sharp order from the doctor drove them back, sheepish, tramping on one another’s toes, bunched against the wall and still avidly staring. As their ranks broke, the young girl had a sudden, vivid glimpse of the man, his head and part of his chest uncovered. Her heart gave a leap of pity and she made a movement from the doorway, then stopped. The lost traveler, that an hour before had almost assumed the features of a friend, was a complete stranger that she had never seen before.
He looked like a dead man. His face, the chin up, the lips parted under the fringe of a brown mustache, was marble white, and showed a gray shadow in the cheek. The hair on his forehead, thawed by the heat, was lying in damp half-curled semicircles, dark against the pallid skin. There was a ring on the hand that still hung limp on the floor. The doctor, muttering to himself, pulled open the shirt and was feeling the heart, when Perley, who had flown into the bar for more whisky, emerged, a glass in his hand. As his eye fell upon the man, he stopped, stared, and then exclaimed in loud-voiced amaze:
“My God—why, it’s Dominick Ryan! Look here, Governor”—to Cannon who was standing by his daughter in the parlor doorway, “come and see for yourself. If this ain’t young Ryan I’m a Dutchman!”
Cannon pushed between the intervening men and bent over the prostrate figure.