The other remained looking at the injured man soberly.

“Guess he’s hurted pretty bad,” he remarked again.

“You bet,” said the first.  “Gee!”

Allbright’s sister came with the camphor-bottle, which she kept in a sort of folk-lore fashion, as her mother had used to do in the country.  Allbright brought the whiskey, of which he kept a small supply in the house in case of dire need, and stood over Carroll with that and a teaspoon, with a vague idea of trying to insinuate a few drops into his mouth.

The two policemen clamped heavily down-stairs, agreeing that they would remain until the doctor came, and see if it was to be the hospital after all.

“Guess he’s hurted pretty bad,” remarked the handsome policeman for the third time.

The doctor came quickly, almost on a run.  He lived within a block, and had not a large practice.  He was attended by a large throng of boys, for the three had served as a nucleus for many more.  He turned around to them with an imperative gesture as he entered the house door.

“Now you scatter,” said he.  He was a fair man, but he had at once an appeal of good-fellowship and a certain force of character.  Besides, there were the two policemen hovering near.  The boys withdrew and remained watching in the dark shadows cast by an opposite house.  In case the injured man was carried to the hospital, and the ambulance should come, they could not afford to miss that.  They had not so many pleasures in life.

The doctor mounted the stairs; he had been there before, for Allbright’s sister was more or less of an invalid, and he at once abetted Allbright’s purpose of the few drops of stimulant on the teaspoon, which the patient swallowed with a pathetic, gulping passiveness like a baby’s.

“He swallows all right,” remarked Allbright’s sister, in an agitated voice.  She stood aloof, waving the camphor-bottle; her eyes were dilated, and her face had a pale, gaping look.

“You go out in the other room and stay there,” said the doctor to her, with the authority which a hysterical woman defers to and adores.

Allbright’s sister was a very good woman, but she had sometimes imagined, then directly driven the imagination from her with a spiritual scourge like a monk of old, what might have happened if the doctor were not already married.

Carroll’s forehead was dripping with camphor, and there was danger should he open his eyes.  The doctor wiped the pale forehead gently and spoke to him.

“Well, you had quite a hard fall, sir,” he said, in a loud, cheerful voice, and directly Carroll answered, like a somnambulist: 

“Yes, quite a fall.”

Then he seemed to lapse again into unconsciousness.  The doctor and Allbright remained working over him, but it was within fifteen minutes before the time when the last train for Banbridge was due to leave New York that he made the first absolutely conscious motion.