"Somebody struck me——Oh, yes—they shot me. I don't know—I don't know why," and a low moan escaped from him.
The Shanghai woman begged him to lie down again, but he shook his head. He looked at his hands. They were wet with blood. Then he began to examine his shirt for something with which to bind his brow. It was sleeveless; the arms had been ripped out of the pits; the body of it was in ribbands.
"If I had something—to tie——" Lavelle began, and then called Chang.
"I have nothing" said Elsie, conscious for the first time that she had escaped from the Cambodia in only a black satin kimono and the flimsy silken nightdress which it covered. Even as she spoke Emily struggled up from the bottom of the boat to the fore-and-aft seat against which her head had been resting. With a splendid unconsciousness of self she opened the long tan coat—the one in which Lavelle had first beheld her—raised an outer black skirt and with a swift movement ripped off the deep hem of the night robe which it hid.
Lavelle was facing away from her, but he opened his eyes at that moment to see the strange man seated in front of him start up, with a smile of strange curiousness in his dark face. Emily saw this smile, too, with disgust, and hesitated in her purpose. Then she leaned toward Lavelle and said quickly:
"If you will bend back your head—a little."
He leaned toward her obediently and she bandaged the wound with an efficiency that brought nods of approval from Elsie and Chang, both ignorant of this woman's latent powers of hardy usefulness and physical capacity—the heritage of a pioneer stock that had torn a world out of a wilderness.
"I thank you," said Lavelle simply and he faced her. "Just as soon as I get this blood pressure out of my head I will—things will be all right." She saw his jaw muscles flex with the pain which tore at him, and his thoughts were of the kindness and the bigness of heart that would let this woman touch him. She felt his eyes sweep over her from her slippered bare feet to the crown of her head, but there was something impersonal in his glance which cooled the resentment which flushed to her cheeks. It was not like the glance of the bearded man down between the thwarts.
It was this man speaking loudly and in a strange foreign accent, which she had unmarked before, that turned Lavelle away from her.
"We cannot be lying here idly like this," he was saying to Lavelle. He stood up as he spoke and threw a leg over the after thwart.