“He that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of fearing death.”
——SHAKESPEARE
Among the first of the Long hierarchs to reach the hospital to which Jimmie O’Connor had rushed the fallen Kingfish were Dr. Vidrine, Justice Fournet, and Acting Lieutenant Governor Noe. As a matter of fact, O’Connor had not yet left the capitol’s porte-cochere when Fournet and Noe reached it.
“I heard Huey and Jimmie O’Connor talking before I saw them in the darkness there,” Justice Fournet relates. “Jimmie asked: ‘Where did he hit you?’ and Huey said: ‘Hell, man, take me to the hospital.’ I reached them just as they got into the car of a man—his name was Starns, I think—and I tried to get into the car with them, but it was just a two-door affair, and I could not get in. By that time Jimmie Noe had come down, so he and I managed to get to the hospital in another of the cars around there. They had Huey sort of strapped to a wheeled table, an operating table, I suppose, by the time we got there and found out what floor he was on.
“Dr. Vidrine was there, and starting to take off some of the Senator’s clothes; but I took out my pocket knife and said: ‘Here, cut it off.’ He slashed through the clothes and laid them back. I saw a very small bluish puncture on the right side of Huey’s abdomen, and it was not bloody. And I saw Dr. Vidrine lift up the right side of Huey’s back, but he did not lift it very far. Dr. Vidrine put us in a room with a nurse, then, and gave instructions to let no one else come in.
“Meanwhile other doctors were taking his blood pressure and pulse rate. Huey asked one of them what it was, and he told him. Naturally, I don’t remember the figures, but I do remember Huey saying: ‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’ and Vidrine or one of the others”—[it was Dr. Cecil Lorio]—“answered him, saying: ‘Well, not too bad, yet.’ Vidrine asked him what doctors he wanted called, and he said Sanderson from Shreveport, and Maes and Rives from New Orleans. While they were waiting for their arrival, Joe Bates came in. He was allowed to come there so he could tell Huey who had shot him. He said it was a young doctor named Weiss.
“‘What for?’ Huey asked. ‘I don’t even know him.’
“‘He’s a fanatic about you,’ Bates replied. ‘But he is friendly with a lot of others in the administration.’”
Pending the arrival of surgeons from New Orleans, some semblance of order was being restored about the hospital. Highway motorcycle officers unsnarled the traffic jam in the Sanitarium’s small parking lot, set up guarded barriers, and thereafter admitted to the grounds no one who did not have a special permit.
It was during this interlude, too, that Ty Campbell finally brought Murphy Roden from the capitol to the hospital for treatment.