“No! no! NO!” shrilled Hester in an unearthly tone that made him start. “You must go home! you! you! and say nothing! tell nobody! O God of mercy, it has come at last! Don’t touch him!” her voice rising into a husky shriek. For, parting the boughs, March passed to the head of the prostrate man, and stooped to raise him. His quick eye had perceived that he was well dressed and no common tramp in figure, also that he had lain, not fallen, where he was found. In bending to take hold of him, he detected, even in the intensity of his excitement, the peculiar, heavy, close odor of drugs that had hung in the air on the Fourth of July night. In company with a policeman, our young artist had once visited a Chinese “opium dive” in New York, and he recognized the smell now.
Homer was beside him, and lent intelligent aid.
“Now,” he drawled, without the slightest evidence of alarm, “I mos’ly lif’s him up so-fashion!”
The action brought the features into a rift of moonlight.
“Great Heavens!” broke from March in a low tone of horror and dismay. “It is Mr. Wayt!”
Laying him on the turf he went back to Hester and seized the bar of her chair.
“You must go home! You must not see him, my poor child! It is your father, and he is very ill—unconscious. Not a moment is to be lost. I must go for a doctor immediately!”
“Let go!”
Beside herself with fury, she actually struck at the hand grasping the propeller; her eyes flashed fire; her accents, hardly louder than a wheezing whisper, were jerky gasps, painful to hear.
“Let go, I say! and do you go to your safe, decent home, as I told you! Tony and I are used to this sort of thing!”