"Murphy! Murphy! Is that you? Are you hurt?" he shouted.
No answer, no sound. He put his shoulder to the door and, bracing himself, pushed with all his strength against it, but it held firm. Stepping back he swung a kick against a lower panel. The wood broke and splintered. He dropped to his knees and tore the split pieces out with his hands.
Through the hole in the panel he saw the key "Slim" Gray had tossed back into the room over the transom. Reaching his arm through the opening he picked it up and, opening the door, rushed into the room.
The twisted, broken, beaten figure of Murphy lay on the floor near the foot of the bed. The awfulness of the sight turned John sick and with a choking cry of pity and despair he dropped to his knees beside it.
"Murphy! Murphy!" he cried. "What have they done to you? Can you hear me? Speak to me, Murphy, speak to me."
The head of the "bashed" youth rolled limply from side to side and he groaned unconsciously. John shut his eyes to close from vision the swollen, lacerated face of his friend. Fury surged through him as he jumped to his feet. He knew intuitively that Murphy was the victim of "Gink" Cummings' brutality. He wanted to kill Cummings with his hands.
Sobbing, he ran from the room and dashed to the nearest telephone. He called the receiving hospital, telling the attendant to rush the ambulance at top speed. He waited at the street entrance to the rooming house until the ambulance arrived, its shrill siren whistle clearing a pathway for it through the traffic. Slowly, gently, they lifted Murphy from the floor and, placing him on a stretcher, carried him down the stairs to the ambulance. A morbid crowd, attracted by the sight of the ambulance, thronged the sidewalk.
John sat beside the stretcher with the white-clad attendant as the ambulance sped up Third street to Hill and turning to the right stopped with a creaking of brakes in front of the hospital door. He waited anxiously for the surgeons to make their examination. Two detectives hurried from central station to the hospital and getting what information John had, dashed out to a waiting automobile.
In his anxiety as he waited for the verdict of the surgeons he only gave the detectives Murphy's name and the address of the rooming house. They were gone before he could tell them he knew Murphy had been "bashed" by the "Gink's" men.
"He's in bad shape," the chief surgeon told him. "Skull fracture; arms, jaw, ribs and nose broken; internal injuries; cuts and bruises; lost a lot of blood."