“All the big liners carry doctors, sir. I was in communication with one only a few minutes ago. The Parisian of the Ocean Line.”
“Where is she?”
“About three hundred miles to the west of us on the Atlantic track, sir.”
“Three hundred miles away! Then how can we get a doctor from her?”
“Very simply, sir, I think, as you say it may not be necessary to amputate. Have Raynor brought in here and laid on my cot. I’ll raise the Parisian and get her doctor on the wire. Then I can flash a full description of the case and the doctor can flash back to us, through the Parisian’s operator, full directions how to proceed!”
“Jove, boy! You have got a head on your shoulders, after all. It sounds extraordinary, but why shouldn’t it be done?”
“It is worth trying, anyhow, sir,” said Jack, his face radiant at the idea that he might be the means of saving his poor chum’s arm. The captain hastened off to give the necessary orders, while Jack raised the Parisian once more.
In crisp, flashing sentences he sent, volleying through the air, an explanation of the case. By the time poor Raynor, white and unconscious, was carried to the bunk and laid out there, while the open-eyed sailors looked on, the Parisian’s doctor was standing by the side of the liner’s operator listening gravely to the symptoms of the case as they came pulsing through space.
The captain, with bandages, instruments, antiseptics and so forth, sat by Raynor’s side, anxiously awaiting Jack’s first bulletin.
“Anything coming yet?” he asked more than once as Jack sat alert, waiting for the first word from the doctor who was to treat a surgical case across three hundred miles of ocean.