Some twenty minutes later he returned to the cottage. Musgrave and old Wardle met him on the threshold, and the former, with a significant gesture enjoining silence, softly closed the door. With the light of a strange exultation showing in his haggard face and bloodshot eyes, he proceeded to acquaint them with all that had happened. They listened with eager curiosity.
“Whew!—some shave, all right,” remarked the doctor. “Here, Ellis! Let’s fix up that ear of yours. You’re bleeding like the deuce, and that tunic of yours is soaked.” And, as Benton removed the handkerchief. “Why, man, it’s clipped the lobe clean away! Come on in, then, but be as quiet as you can—I’ve put her on the bed in the other room. I’ve given her a strong morphine injection to ease the pain. It’ll keep her quiet for a time.”
He turned, with his hand on the doorknob, but Ellis caught him by the arm.
“Charley,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “That girl saved me. Is she—is there any—”
“No,” answered the doctor quietly. “That slug’s gone slap through the right lung and out under the shoulder. She’s done for, though she may live for a few hours. Must have been an awful high-pressure gun that he used.”
“It sure was,” said the Sergeant. “It was one of those German ‘Lugers.’ You’ll see it still clutched in his fist when you go down there.”
“Eh, laad!” said the kindly old postmaster, who originally hailed from Yorkshire. “But she’s rare an’ weak ... an’ th’ doctor don’t think as ’er’ll last th’ night out. It’s nobbut o’ a deposition she were able to gie us, th’ poor lass, for ’er could scarcelins speak, an’ I had’na th’ heart to worrit ’er. She says as ’ow ’er name’s Elsie Baxter, an’ that yon man o’ ’ers as she calls ’Arry—shot at yo’ but ’it ’er, instead, accidental, when she got betune ye. She wouldn’t tell me where ’er coom fra’, tho’, or what ’is other name be. Fair frightened, ’er is, ’bout ’im bein’ ketched, an’ ’er keeps on a-cryin’ out ’is name real pitiful-like, an’ sayin’ as ’e did’na mean to shoot ’er. I ’ad ’Arry Langley, from th’ ’otel, in there, an’ ’im an’ th’ doctor’s witnessed it. Did yo’ say yo’ gaffled ’un, laad?”
The Sergeant, with his brooding mind still obsessed with the memory of his recent conflict, regarded his questioner absently, with a livid, scowling face.
“Eyah!” he snarled darkly, with an ugly oath, and with grimly unconscious humor imitating the other’s dialect: “A gaffled ’un, all right, Dad!—nobbled ’un proper. A knaws ’un’s name, too, an’ all ’bout ’un!”
Quickly and deftly, the doctor dressed the Sergeant’s torn ear, bandaging the wound with an antiseptic pad against it. Whilst this was in progress, they conversed in low tones.