After settling the score, we walked up the street, which was still filled with people, and were just about to enter the park when a crowd forming on the sidewalk on the block beyond attracted our attention.
“’Tis a bit av a fracas, maybe,” said O’Toole. “Let’s have a look at it and take a hand—if necessary.”
We made our way quickly along the pavement and forced ourselves through the crowd of gaping people.
A man was lying in the centre of the crowd, and his head was pillowed in a woman’s lap. His pale face was upturned, and the woman wiped away the blood that flowed from a gash in his forehead upon her clean white handkerchief.
“Stand back, please, and give him air,” she cried, and her voice made me jump and start forward. Every nerve in me seemed to throb at the sound. But the people only crowded closer. I could not see the woman’s face, for her back was turned toward me, but I recognized her voice quick enough. Taking a brace against the huge form of O’Toole, I shoved with all my strength against the crowd, and together we managed to force a gap of a few paces in extent about the fallen man. The next instant an ambulance came driving up at full speed. Several officers leaped out and tore their way through the jam of curious people to the injured man’s side. They raised him quickly, bore him to the wagon, and drove rapidly away.
“Knocked down and run over,” some one said in a low tone, as I turned to where the woman now stood with a policeman beside her.
“Who was it?” the officer asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“I have no name,” she answered, quietly, and was gone in the crowd before the policeman thought to detain her.