Although this lone woman's extremity was great, yet of her association with Paul Lavelle she had learned to order her wits in the presence of disaster.
"If the next minute seems to be the last, just keep on fighting—hammering ahead," he had said to her so many times.
She remembered how he had given strychnine to McGovern to stimulate heart action—the oil he had put on the poor fellow's burns. She ran aft and in a drawer in the medicine chest which she looted of bandages and lint she discovered by accident a bottle of brandy. When she returned to Paul he was just opening his eyes again. He shook his head at the liquor when he had taken but a sip of it.
"Some starch and water," he whispered, "or glycerine. There's some aft——"
Emily found a bottle of glycerine. A few minutes after he had swallowed a mouthful of it he nodded that he felt easier.
"Steam—afraid it got inside," he whispered. "Tried—remember keep my mouth shut. Steam's bad to swallow. Water injector—on the boiler—blew out. Hit me somewhere in the middle. Happened all in a second."
He fainted while Emily was drawing the boot off his left leg which he had indicated hurt him most. The limb was scalded from the knee down. His arms and the backs of his hands, too, were blistered. His face was grimed with ashes and soot, but when Emily washed it she found it free of burn or hurt. The while her loving hands swathed him and soothed his wounds she crooned like a wild thing over its whelp.
When he revived she was holding his head in her lap just as she had in the Cambodia's boat. His eyelids lifted to her kisses. He put up a hand and touched her cheek and she patted it. He smiled at the reassurance that it was not a dream. Many, many times he had awakened to put out his hand like that—to touch that face and met only emptiness.
The jade ring which he had put on Emily's finger drew his glance and held it for a second.
"'Man has many reckonings with man, but only one with God,'" he repeated. "'Only one with God.'"