“Captain,” said the poor fellow, while Bang supported him in his arms, “I shall do yet, sir; indeed I have no great pain.”
All this time the surgeon was cutting off his trowsers, and then, to be sure, a terrible spectacle presented itself. The foot and leg, blue and shrunk, were connected with the thigh by a band of muscle about two inches wide, and an inch thick; that fined away to a bunch of white tendons or sinews at the knee, which again swelled out as they melted into the muscles of the calf of the leg; but as for the knee bone, it was smashed to pieces, leaving white spikes protruding from the shattered limb above, as well as from the shank beneath. The doctor gave the poor fellow a large dose of laudanum in a glass of brandy, and then proceeded to amputate the limb, high up on the thigh. Bang stood the knife part of it very steadily, but the instant the saw rasped against the shattered bone he shuddered.
“I am going, Cringle—can’t stand that—sick as a dog”—and he was so faint that I had to relieve him in supporting the poor fellow. Wagtail had also to go on deck, but Paul Gelid remained firm as a rock. The limb was cut off, the arteries taken up very cleverly, and the surgeon was in the act of slacking the tourniquet a little, when the thread that fastened the largest, or femoral artery, suddenly gave way and a gush like the jet from a fire-engine took place. The poor fellow had just time to cry out, “Take that cold hand off my heart!” when his chest collapsed, his jaw fell, and in an instant his pulse stopped.
“Dead as Julius Caesar, Captain,” said Gelid, with his usual deliberation. Dead enough, thought I; and I was leaving the cabin to resume my post on deck, when I stumbled against something at the ladder foot.
“My, what is that?” grumbled I.
“It is me, sir,” said a small faint voice.
“You!—who are you?”
“Reefpoint, sir.”
“Bless me, boy, what are you doing here? Not hurt, I hope?”
“A little, sir—a graze from a splinter, sir—the same shot that struck poor Wiggins knocked it off, sir.”