"He might wake if I moved." Her lips formed the words almost without sound. She could not bear him to cry to her again, in his agony, for the help that only the touch of her lips against his cheek had seemed able to give.
"He won't--yet. The medicine has taken effect." The doctor's face was almost as ghastly as her own; together they had fought death in the little room for thirty-six hours.
He helped her to her feet gently. John Lester slipped an arm about her, putting her into a chair. Her eyes asked the question that her lips could not frame.
"Good, as far as it goes," the doctor answered. "That the sleep has come at all is a big thing; now, we can only hope that it will last long enough to rest him. He wants it, poor little chap."
"You want it, too," her husband said gently. "Come and lie down while he sleeps."
"I won't leave him." She shrank back pitifully.
"You needn't, dear. Lie down on the sofa. I'll call you if he stirs. I promise, Jean."
She let him put her on the sofa, wrapping a rug about her, and taking off her slippers. The doctor went out, after whispering a few directions, and John Lester sat down beside his son.
He did not know much about the outside world since they had come racing home in the car on Thursday evening, to find Dick's broken body, mercifully unconscious, awaiting them. The car had turned back within five minutes, breaking speed records to bring a doctor from the nearest town, sixty miles away; and since that they had never left the boy's side. To the stupor of unconsciousness had succeeded delirium, when he had struggled with unseen enemies and urged on unseen horses, fighting blindly with pain that robbed him of all sense. The doctor, a young country practitioner, acknowledged his helplessness; the thing was beyond him, and until a surgeon and nurses could arrive from Perth he could only administer narcotics and opiates, that had until now been of little effect. There was injury to the head, that was certain; beyond that he feared that the spine was affected. The spear wound, once relieved of the terror that the barb might have been poisoned, was comparatively simple. But John Lester's face was old and haggard as he stared at his son.
Out in the bush, north of the run, infuriated men were scouring the ranges for the flying blacks, dealing out swift justice without waiting for black trackers and police, whose slower methods were little satisfaction to a district that clamoured for revenge. From fifty miles around men had come to help to hunt down the slayers, until Narrung resembled a huge camp when night brought the hunters home to the head station. In another room lay Merle, ill from shock and exhaustion. She had clung to Conqueror's mane until the grey horse came to a standstill at the gate of the home paddock. Downes and old Harry had found them there, and had had to use force to unclasp her fingers. But the Lesters knew nothing of these things. The world, for them, began and ended round Dick's bed.