“You’ve been hit hard, Chief. The ricochet has done you up for some time. The head will soon get well, but I’m far from sure about your eyes. You’ve got to have a specialist about them. You’re in the dark, and as for making you see, so am I. Your eyes and you are out of commission for some time, anyhow.”
He leaned over hastily, but softly and deftly undid the bandages over the eyes and took them off. “It’s seven in the morning, and the sun’s up, Chief, but it doesn’t do you much good, you see.”
The last two words were the purest accident, but it was a strange, mournful irony, and Rockwell flushed at the thought of it. He saw Ingolby’s face turn grey, and then become white as death itself.
“I see,” came from the bluish-white lips, as the stricken man made call on all the will and vital strength in him.
For a long minute Rockwell held the cold hand in the grasp of one who loves and grieves, but even so the physician and surgeon in him were uppermost, as they should be, in the hour when his friend was standing on the brink of despair, maybe of catastrophe irremediable. He did not say a word yet, however. In such moments the vocal are dumb and the blind see.
Ingolby heaved himself in the bed and threw up his arms, wresting them from Rockwell’s grasp.
“My God—oh, my God-blind!” he cried in agony. Rockwell drew the head with the sightless eyes to his shoulder.
For a moment he laid one hand on the heart, that, suddenly still, now went leaping under his fingers. “Steady,” he said firmly. “Steady. It may be only temporary. Keep your head up to the storm. We’ll have a specialist, and you must not get mired till then. Steady, Chief.”
“Chief! Chief!” murmured Ingolby. “Dear God, what a chief! I risked everything, and I’ve lost everything by my own vanity. Barbazon’s—the horseshoe—among the wolves, just to show I could do things better than any one else—as if I had the patent for setting the world right. And now—now—”
The thought of the bridge, of Marchand’s devilish design, shot into his mind, and once more he was shaken. “The bridge! Blind! Mother!” he called in a voice twisted in an agony which only those can feel to whom life’s purposes are even more than life itself. Then, with a moan, he became unconscious, and his head rolled over against Rockwell’s cheek. The damp of his brow was as the damp of death as Rockwell’s lips touched it.