ding a
couple more batteries, and I was just wondering if it'd be all right to
take 'em from that gasolene unit-car. We could put 'em back afterwards."
"Yes; take 'em wherever you can find 'em," said the superintendent, who
was thinking pointedly of other things just then; and the permission
given, he started his motor and drove away.
XXV
BLOOD AND IRON
Ten o'clock in the Saturday forenoon marked the time of Superintendent
Kittredge's flying visit to his chief's headquarters-on-the-field at the
head of Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount, blinking dizzily,
and with his head bandaged and throbbing as if the premier company of
all the African tom-tom symphonists were making free with it, was
letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and prop him with them, so that
the drum-beating clamor might be minimized to some bearable degree.
"You are feeling better now?" suggested the volunteer nurse, going to
adjust the window-curtains for the better comfort of the blinking and
aching eyes.
The victim of the hook-and-ladder squad's mascot answered qualitatively.
"I feel as if I had been having an argument with a battering-ram and had
come off second-best. I've been out of my head, haven't I?"
"A little, yes; but that was to be expected. You were pretty badly
hurt."
"Have I been talking?"
"Not very much--nothing intelligible." The little lady had drawn her
chair to the window and was busying herself with the never-finished
embroidery.
"What hit me--was it the truck?"
"No; some of the people in the street said it was a dog; a coach-dog
running and jumping at the heads of the fire-horses. In falling you
struck your head against the iron grating of a sewer inlet."
"Umph!" said Blount, and the face-wrinkling which was meant to be a
sardonic smile turned itself into a painful grin. "Shot to death by a
dog! Blenkinsop or some of the others ought to have run that for a
head-line." Then, with a twist of the hot eyeballs: "This isn't my room.
Where am I?"
"You are in the spare room of our suite. Your father had you brought
here so that we could take care of you properly. But you mustn't talk
too much; it's the doctor's orders."
Blount lay for a long time watching her as she passed the needle in and
out through the bit of snowy linen stretched upon the tiny
embroidery-ring. She had fine eyes, he admitted; eyes with the little
downward curve in brow and lid at the outer corners--the curve of
|