Not until they had swathed the girl in cooling bandages did any one speak. Then, as they drew the sheet tenderly over her, they became conscious of one another. As Bill looked up through blistered eyelids, exposing a cruelly scorched face, his lips broke into a painful smile.
“Doctor,” The Lily said, “now you had better care for this patient.”
She put her firm, white fingers out, brushed the miner’s singed hair back from his brow, and said: “I’ve forgotten your name, but––I want to say––you’re a man!”
CHAPTER VI
MY LADY OF THE HORSE
“It serves you right for bein’ so anxious to help one of them dance-hall women; not but what I’d probably ’a’ done it myself,” was the croaking, querulous consolation offered by Bells Park as he sat beside the plainly suffering and heavily bandaged Bill that night, or rather in the early hours of the morning, in the cabin on the Cross. “They ain’t no good except for young fools to gallop around with over a floor.”
He poured some more olive oil over the bandages, and relented enough to add: “All but The Lily, and she don’t dance with none of ’em. She’s all right, she is. Mighty peart looker, too. None purtier than Dorothy Presby, though.”
Dick, looking up from where he sat with his tired chin resting on his tired hands and elbows, thought of the gruff Bully Presby with some interest.