“Where’s Dr. Benton?” demanded one Englishman of the other.
“I’ll run and fetch him,” replied the man hurrying away.
In the meantime, Mr. Kalisch and the Englishman were kneeling beside little Arthur, who had turned as white as a corpse and very blue about the lips. The moments dragged slowly and everybody stood anxiously by in deep silence. Presently the man who had gone in search of the doctor returned.
“I can’t find him,” he said, “or the ship’s surgeon, either. By Jove, what are we going to do, Bobbie?”
“Mr. Kalisch is a doctor,” put in Billie.
Mr. Kalisch was already feeling the boy’s heart and pulse.
“His pulse is very faint,” he said.
The two men exchanged frightened glances.
Mr. Kalisch drew from his inner pocket a small medicine case and took out a phial filled with white liquid, with which he moistened the child’s lips.
“Arthur,” he said in a voice that seemed somehow to come from another sphere, “Arthur, are you asleep?”