“Turn him over, turn him over!” commanded the man with the lantern. “Run to my house and ask the wife for everything to tie up an artery—bandages, too!”
He knelt down in the red stream. Digging his fingers into the gaping, red mouth of the wound, he clutched upon the severed artery with a skill at once brutal and sure. The gushes ceased, almost entirely.
Adam’s face, already deathly white, had been turned upward.
“Saints preserve us!” said one of the citizens. “It’s the bosom friend of the Governor!”
“Then we know where to take him, if he doesn’t die in spite of me,” said the skilful surgeon who had pounced upon the wound. “Look to the other man and see if he too, is bleeding.”
One of the other men had already loosened the collar about old Halberd’s neck. Another came to assist him.
“He’s bleeding a little, from the back of his head,” said he. “O Lord! He’s dead!”
The doctor’s wife came running to the place herself, with her husband’s case in which he had a score of cunning tools and the needs of his craft.
The good woman pushed the men aside and with an assurance and a courage almost totally unknown in her sex, at the time, in such a case as this, bent down above the wounded man and lent to her husband the nimble fingers and the quick comprehension without which he might easily have failed to prevent that deadly loss of blood.
As it was, Rust was at the door of death. The turn he had made, when Halberd called out in alarm, had saved him from inevitable death. The steel driven so viciously into his neck, would have severed the jugular vein completely had he turned the fraction of a second less soon than he did, or an inch less far.