I didn't understand what she meant, but I saw that I was needed somewhere and I broke into a run myself. She guided me to Barney's stand. Behind it, on the ground, lay a man, with a beautiful woman--Katherine Thurston it was--dabbling his head with a wet handkerchief while Barney poured something out of a bottle into a tin dipper. (Barney could be guaranteed to keep some of the joy of life with him under the most desolating of conditions.)
"If you'll give him a sup of this, Mr. Hilton," he said confidentially, as I came up, "'tis all the poor cratur will need. A wooden leg is the divil for kneeling down, and I couldn't be asking a lady like that to handle the shtuff, ye understand."
I took the dipper and knelt down beside the fallen man,--and at once I recognized him as the rustic whom I had seen, looking dazed and bewildered, outside of Barker's office a few hours before. He opened his eyes, looked about vacantly, and made a feeble effort to rise.
"Drink this, and you will feel better," I said. (A sniff had convinced me that Barney's prescription wasn't half bad.) He drank it and coughed.
"He's coming around all right," I said. "What happened? Faint?"
Barney rubbed his chin dubiously. "I'm thinking he had his wits about him all right when he made out to faint jist at the time the ladies was coming by. If it wa'n't for the sinse he showed in that, I'd say he was a bit looney."
"Why?"
"He came down the street like a drunk man, but he wasn't drunk, begging the ladies' pardon, I could see that with me eyes shut. When he came by my bit of a stand he took hould of it with both hands and leaned across to look at me like I was his ould brother. 'He's dead,' he says. 'Who's dead,' says I. 'He's dead,' says he again. 'He's escaped.' And with that he fell to the ground, and if the ladies hadn't come out that minute from yon door, and yourself came running, it's meself that would have had to go down on me wooden knee that don't bend, to lift his head off the stones."
I spoke to the man, trying to learn his name and address. He was not unconscious but he seemed dazed or distrustful, and I could get nothing from him. By this time quite a group of people had gathered about us,--indeed, I wondered that they had not come before, but as a matter of fact the man had fallen only a few seconds before I came upon the scene. (Miss Thurston and Jean had been up to my office, it appeared, and had been coming away at that moment.)
The few words that Barney repeated from the man's dazed remarks before he fell, and the fact that I had seen him in the Phœnix Building of course made me feel that I wanted to keep him under my own surveillance until I could find out what, if anything, he knew of Barker. I therefore hurried a boy off to call a carriage, and when it came I helped the old man in and drove to the St. James Hospital.