Dr. Bennett was plainly worried and at a loss what to do to relieve the torture Ewing’s daughter was so clearly experiencing. He turned to Ewing. “Roy, to tell you the truth, it don’t seem like I can find out what’s the matter with Mary. When she had that first attack, I thought she had appendicitis, but she ain’t got no fever to speak of, so it can’t be her appendix that’s botherin’ her. Looks like t’ me she’s got some sort of bleedin’ inside, but I can’t tell.”
Ewing and his wife looked anxiously first at their daughter, then interrogatively and pleadingly at the old physician as he watched the sufferer in her contortions of pain and agony. Mary, married two months and her husband working in Atlanta, had lived with her parents after a short honeymoon. She had her mother’s beauty—that is, the delicate, patrician, statuesque charm that had been her mother’s when Roy Ewing had courted and won her two decades ago in Charleston, South Carolina. It was not the harsh-lined, blonde beauty of Georgia but the fragile old-world, French loveliness of that spot in South Carolina where French tradition and customs and features had not yet been barbarized by the infusion of that Anglo-Saxon blood which is the boast of the South. She lay there, a pitiful sight. Her face was pale, covered with cold, clammy perspiration; all blood had fled from it. She breathed with great difficulty in short and laboured respiratory efforts. Her pulse was failing, very rapid and thready; at times it was barely perceptible. She had been seized with the attack around seven o’clock, when she began vomiting. Now she appeared to be so weakened with the pain she had endured that a state of coma was obviously fast approaching. At least it seemed so. Dr. Bennett tried to revive her, but with little success. The absence of fever puzzled him. He feared an internal hæmorrhage—all signs pointed to such a condition—yet he did not know. Roy Ewing and his wife were among his closest friends. He would have tried an operation had they not been. That he feared to risk with their daughter. Yet, what could he do? Mary was obviously so weak that he knew she could not be moved to Atlanta, three hundred miles away. Nor would a physician be able to get to Central City in time to operate.
“I’m puzzled, Roy, mighty puzzled,” he said, turning to Ewing. “I might as well tell you the truth. Looks like t’ me she c’n hardly last till mornin’.” It was gall and wormwood for him to admit his impotency, but he did it.
“Dr. Bennett, you’ve got to do somethin’! You’ve got to! You’ve got to!”
It was Mrs. Ewing who cried out in her agony—the piteous cry of a mother who sees her first-born dying before her eyes. Her face was as blanched as Mary’s—every drop of blood seemed to have been drained from it. She looked pleadingly at him, chill terror gripping her heart as she realized from his words that her Mary, who had been so happy and well that morning, was about to die.
“If you—all wasn’t such good friends of mine, I’d try it anyhow,” Dr. Bennett answered her, his voice as agonized as hers. “But I’m skeered to op’rate or do anythin’ that might hasten her on.”
Ewing walked over to the doctor, grasped the older man’s shoulders so fiercely that he winced in pain.
“By God,” he shouted at Dr. Bennett, “you’ve got to operate! I can’t see my little Mary die right here befo’ my eyes! Go ahead and do what you think best. It’ll be better’n seein’ her die while we stand here doin’ nothin’!”.
“Roy,” Dr. Bennett groaned, “you know there ain’t anythin’ I wouldn’t do for you—’cept this.” He waved his hand vaguely towards the bed. As he did so, he looked with keen appraisement at Ewing in the dim light. He seemed to be debating in his mind whether or not he dared take a very long chance. If the chance would not be more disastrous. If Mary’s life might not be better lost than that! Ewing almost stopped breathing as he saw the momentary indecision in the physician’s face. Mrs. Ewing saw none of this by-play, for she had sunk down on the bed, where her body was shaken with the sobs she could not restrain.
“There’s jus’ one chance t’ save her,” Dr. Bennett hesitatingly began. Ewing leaned forward in his eagerness.