Malgré les brisants—et l’orage
Il atteint la côte....
Had she not sung that herself?
Pauvre P’tit Gas!
Pauvre P’tit Gas!
She roused with a shiver. “Preston Wynne!” she muttered, her teeth chattering. “What is he doing here?”
The Salvières doctor, who had been there all the time, it appeared, had taken possession of Preston Wynne, and Garrassime was pulling her gently away. He was not dead then? “Pauvre P’tit Gas!”
The others, for whom there was no hope, were being piled like cord-wood in the other room of the “Station,” where the life-savers on duty watched all night; but she passed this new horror with scarce a glance—quite passive now, leaning a little against Garrassime as he led her away; while Régis and Jean, the doctor and the abbé, tirelessly pursued their energetic ministrations.
At last a faint tinge of color began to underly the lividity of Preston’s face, his eyelids moved ever so slightly; in a short while he feebly tried to resist the ordeal of resuscitation he was passing through—the agonies of rebirth—under those skilled fingers. Then the young doctor, sweat dripping from his forehead, paused in his exhausting work just long enough to murmur, hoarsely: “He will live, I think, but I fear he is badly hurt.”
They did not question him—standing ready to help when the medical man should take up his task again. Salvières was watching intently the spasmodic changes of expression upon Preston’s drawn white features.
“A little more brandy, please,” the doctor said; and the abbé held out the flask and raised the patient’s head with deft precaution. This time he swallowed a few drops voluntarily, it seemed, and the doctor, bending his ear to the blue lips until it almost touched them, heard the words, “Is it you?”
“Who do you want?” he asked, slowly and very distinctly; but Preston’s mouth closed tight with a queer, distressed droop.