The man sank back resignedly. “Well—” he began, and then a wave of remembrance flashed across his face, a look of horror. We bent forward instinctively, hanging on his words.
“Where’s the ship?” he cried. “What’s happened to the Alaska? I saw her disappear. For God’s sake tell me I didn’t—” The red flush in his face grew deeper, his breath grew labored, and the watching physician, stepping beside his bared arm, brought something concealed in his hand against it once, twice. “Oh!” said the man shrinking. “What—” and then without another word he became unconscious.
I jumped up in excitement. “Couldn’t you have,—” I began, but Forrester stopped me.
“I let him say all that was safe. Wait three hours, and he will probably be all right.” He smiled somewhat exultantly. “The high frequency did it. Somehow it seems to rearrange the disordered parts by the electric flow.”
“Why do you think the high frequency current did the work when all other methods failed?” asked Tom, as we descended the stairs.
Forrester pulled at his chin with an air of abstraction. “I don’t really know,” he answered frankly. “The action is almost as if some electrical matter in the patient had been jarred by an electrical shock, and when the high frequency got control, it put things back into shape. Readjusted the parts, as it were. I don’t believe at all that the shock of seeing the battleship go down did the whole mischief. There was something else, something decidedly out of the common, mixed up in the case.”
As we waited, I telephoned the office, and found the chief still there.
“Victory is in sight,” I said. “Save as many columns as you can.”
“You can have all you want,” came back over the wire.
I asked for a desk, and began to write. I sketched the scene in the War Department, quoted the entire message from the man who was trying to stop all war, reviewed briefly what was known of the ship and of her disappearance, and told of our search down the coast, and of the finding of the man upstairs. Hour after hour went by as I wrote, and no call came. Dorothy and Tom sat reading. At last I brought my story down to the point where I wished to introduce the story of the man. There I stopped, and with idle pen sat and watched the beautiful head below the shaded light. If a man could only sit and see that “Picture of a woman reading” every night! I found myself figuring costs of living more zealously than ever before. A knock broke in on my thoughts.