“Mr. Ralston? How do you know it was Mr. Ralston? And where is he?” Miss Hansford asked, and Elithe replied, “I saw him. He threw the revolver away and went into the woods. Come quick; I am sure somebody is hurt. I heard a groan. There, it comes again.”
She was leading the way to the clump of thick bushes, or stunted trees, where, when a boy, Jack Percy had waited while Paul carried the melon to Miss Hansford and had dreamed that he was dead. Here he was lying now, his hand grasping his valise, his face turned on one side, and the blood trickling from a bullet hole above his temple. Several of the cottagers had heard the report and were out to ascertain its cause, so that it was quite a little crowd of people which met around the spot, Miss Hansford the most excited of them all. Pushing Elithe back so violently that she nearly fell to the ground, she stooped over the prostrate man and said in a choking voice, “It’s Jack Percy; but he is not dead; he must not die. Take him to my cottage.”
As the men stood for a moment paralyzed and did not offer to touch him, she lifted his head herself and with her handkerchief tried to stanch the blood which gushed from the wound and saturated his hair.
“Somebody go for a doctor—quick,” she said. “Tell him it’s a case of life and death.”
Elithe heard and started like a deer across the field to the nearest doctor, whom she found just leaving his house for a walk.
“Quick! Quick!” she said, seizing him by the arm. “Mr. Ralston has shot Mr. Percy. He is in auntie’s cottage. Run!”
“Bless my soul! Shot Jack Percy! I didn’t think it would come to that. What won’t young blood do?” the doctor exclaimed, trying to keep up with Elithe, whom he questioned as to what she saw, and which she told him readily, with no thought of the consequences.
She was too frightened and too excited to think of anything but the dying man, whose face she had not seen as it lay in the deep shadow of the trees. They had put him upon the lounge in Miss Hansford’s front room, where he was breathing heavily and moaning occasionally as if in pain.
“Jack! Jack! Mr. Percy!” Miss Hansford kept saying, trying to rouse him to consciousness, but she might as well have talked to a block of wood.
The news had spread like wild fire, bringing a crowd of people asking who it was and how it was, but receiving no satisfactory answer. A second doctor, who chanced to be passing, had been summoned, and with the first one was examining the patient. Outside the cottage was the murmur of eager, subdued voices and inside terrible excitement as one after another tried to get a sight of the sufferer. Miss Hansford was now calm and resolute, issuing her orders like a general and ministering to Jack as tenderly as if he had not always been her detestation.