During two years' service with New York's most fashionable physician the driver had never received a command like this, and he opened up his machine. A policeman warned him at Thirty-third Street and the car slowed down, at which Suydam leaned forward, crying, roughly:
"To hell with regulations! There's a man dying!"
The last word was jerked from him as he was snapped back into his seat. Regardless of admonitory shouts from patrolmen, the French car sang its growing song, while truck-drivers bellowed curses and pedestrians fled from crossings at the scream of its siren. A cross-town car blocked them, and the brakes screeched in agony, while Doctor Suydam was well-nigh catapulted into the street; then they were under way again, with the car leaping from speed to speed. It was the first time the driver had ever dared to disregard those upraised, white-gloved hands, and it filled his joy-riding soul with exultation. A street repair loomed ahead, whereupon, with a sickening skid, they swung into a side street; the gears clashed again, and an instant later they shot out upon Fifth Avenue. At the next corner they lay motionless in a blockade, while the motor shuddered; then they dodged through an opening where the mud-guards missed by an inch and were whirling west toward Broadway. At 109th Street a bicycle officer stared in amazement at the dwindling number beneath the rear axle, then ducked his head and began to pedal. He overhauled the speeding machine as it throbbed before the doors of Mercy Hospital, to be greeted by a grinning chauffeur who waved him toward the building and told of a doctor's urgency.
Inside, Doctor Suydam, pallid of face and shaking in a most unprofessional manner, was bending over a figure in riding-clothes, the figure of a tall, muscular man who lay silent, deaf to his words of greeting.
They told him all there was to tell in the deadly, impersonal way of hospitals, while he nodded swift comprehension. There had been a runaway—a woman on a big, white-eyed bay, that had taken fright at an automobile; a swift rush up the Driveway, a lunge over the neck of the pursuing horse, then a man wrenched from his saddle and dragged beneath cruel, murderous hoofs. The bay had gone down, and the woman was senseless when the ambulance arrived, but she had revived and had been hurried to her home. In the man's hand they had found the fragment of a bridle rein gripped with such desperation that they could not remove it until he regained consciousness. He had asked regarding the girl's safety, then sighed himself into oblivion again. They told Suydam that he would die.
With sick heart the listener cursed all high-spirited women and high-strung horses, declaring them to be works of the devil, like automobiles; then he went back to the side of his friend, where other hands less unsteady were at work.
"Poor lonely old Bob!" he murmured. "Not a soul to care except Marmion and me, and God knows whether she cares or not."
* * * * *
But Robert Austin did not die, although the attending surgeons said he would, said he should, in fact, unless all the teachings of their science were at fault. He even offended the traditions of the hospital by being removed to his own apartments in a week. There Suydam, who had watched him night and day, told him that Miss Moore had a broken shoulder and hence could not come to see him.
"Poor girl!" said Austin, faintly. "If I'd known more about horses I might have saved her."