“Keep quiet and don’t be talking,” answered the surgeon, who, proud of his success, had been carefully watching his patient. “He’ll do now, gentlemen,” he added, looking up at my uncle and me. “We’ll put him to bed, and by to-morrow morning he’ll be as blithe as a lark, barring a stiff neck.”
Chapter Four.
My first day on board.
I sat up with Larry for the greater part of the night, after the surgeon had left him. He groaned sometimes as if in pain, and talked at one time of the scrimmage with the O’Sullivans, and at another of his fiddle, which he feared had been broken. I accordingly, to pacify him, went down and got it, and managed to produce some few notes, which had the desired effect. The major after some time came in to relieve me, for we could not trust any of the people at the inn, who would to a certainty have been dosing our patient with whisky, under the belief that they were doing him a kindness, but at the risk of producing a fever.
In the morning Mr O’Shea came in.
“I thought you said that the boy would be all to rights by this time,” I observed.
“Shure that was somewhat hyperbolical,” he answered, with a wink. “You can’t expect a man with a broken neck, and a gash as big as my thumb at the back of it, to come round in a few hours.”
We couldn’t complain, for certainly the worthy surgeon had been the means of saving Larry’s life; but the incident detained us three whole days, before he was fit to mount his pony and accompany us to Cork. Before leaving my uncle called on Doctor Murphy, who, to his great amusement, he found had no intention of calling him out, but merely expected to receive a fee for pronouncing a living man a dead one. Though my uncle might have declined to pay the amount demanded, he handed it to the doctor, and wished him good morning.