Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's temple.
"So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly again. "So that's it! But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put up a tidy little battle, was he? Funny about that, too, but I could always do my best little jobs of man-handling when I was about half-over myself."
His pale eyes swept the floor; he pounced forward and recovered a sheaf of blue-prints from a corner.
"This, I take it," he muttered, "was what they was arguing about when we busted in. Steve, them's our bridge estimates—and there wa'n't no copies of 'em, either. It wouldn't take us more than two weeks to replace 'em neither—not more'n two precious, priceless weeks. I'm only hopin' now that when our other caller, who seems to want them more than we do, calls again, I'll be here myself to entertain him, with tea or somethin'. I'd plumb hate to seem so inhospitable as not to be home, twice hand-runnin', to visitors."
Fat Joe's round face was congested with murderous rage before he had finished, but Steve seemed hardly to have heard him at all. He had finally straightened out that sickeningly slack figure upon his own bunk. He was listening now to his heart, and at a jerk of his head Fat Joe joined him at the bedside. The latter's thick fingers were as delicate, as competent, as a skilled physician's might have been. He, too, listened and peeled back the unconscious man's eyelids. He shook his head, dubiously.
"Maybe that was a tidy little battle, while it lasted," he stated, "but it ain't deuce high alongside this fight we've got on our hands right now. For he's just as near over as I'd care to see a man, unless it was someone I'd a little prefer dead! It ain't that scratch on the head that's got him slippin', either." Joe paused and turned to address Garry Devereau's still white face itself. "You sat in an' backed my game like a gentleman born," he said, "and now I'm a-goin' to play yourn, blue chips and white and yello'. But this is goin' to be your last celebration, friend of mine, even if we do win through, or you'll be holdin' your next one where the company ain't so select and the climate nuthin' to compare with ourn!"
And while he talked he worked, for it was Fat Joe who gave the orders that night. He called for ammonia, for brandy, for a half-dozen drugs from the camp hospital chest; and each of them Steve brought in an automatic fashion that finally penetrated even Fat Joe's professional pleasure in the struggle.
"Friend of yourn?" he asked in an interval while they rested.
"A friend," Steve repeated with a tightening of his jaws, and Joe knew what that tone meant.
After that they fought on in silence, side by side—sometimes waiting, sometimes fighting, both of them, to hold that horribly racked man upon the bed. He fought them with every pound of strength in his emaciated body. He moaned up at them, screamed at them, cursed them frothingly, and Fat Joe hung on and cursed him back—cursed him and promised him profanely that he would not let him die. Steve's face was gray, sweat was pouring from Fat Joe's scarlet face when the life-tide ebbed lowest and there came a sudden cessation in that stream of babbled madness, Garry Devereau lay so quiet that an oath jerked huskily from Fat Joe's lips; but when he had listened at the motionless chest he lifted his head and smiled, seraphically.