CHAPTER XXIX
Gordon stood with his mouth open, the brute sense struck out of him by the dead silence. Then he said—
"Get up! Why don't you get up?" hardly knowing what he was saying.
He got no answer, and a horrible idea began to take shape in his mind. Though so hot a moment ago, he shivered and his teeth began to chatter. He looked around him for a moment in the dazed way of a man awakening from a nightmare, and then stepped up on tiptoe to where the General lay.
Raising his head he looked at him, and found it hard to believe that what he vaguely feared had happened. There was no sign of injury anywhere. The eyes were open, and they looked fixedly at him with so fierce a stare that they seemed to jump out of their sockets.
"Stunned—that's all—stunned by the fall," he thought, and seeing a bottle of brandy on the shelf of the desk he got up and poured a little into the medicine glass, and then, kneeling and lifting the General's head again, he forced the liquor through the tightly compressed lips.
It ran out as it went in, and, with gathering fear and fumbling fingers, Gordon unbuttoned the General's frock coat and laid a trembling hand over his heart. At one moment he thought he felt a beat, but at the next he knew it was only the throb of his own pulse.
At that the world seemed for a moment to be blotted out, and when he came to himself again he was holding the General in his arms and calling to him—
"General! General! Speak to me! For God's sake speak to me."
In the torrent of his remorse he was kissing the General's forehead, and crying over his face, but there was no response.