A Dog with a Bad Name | Page 9

centre,
drinking in every sound and marking every movement, but not
attempting again to challenge the resentment of his school-fellows by
attempting to enter the awe-struck circle.
It seemed an age before help came. The crowd stood round silent and
motionless, with their eyes fixed on the poor lifeless head which rested
on Mr Freshfield's knee; straining their eyes for one sign of animation,
yearning still more for the arrival of the doctor.
Mr Freshfield did not dare to lift the form, or even beyond gently
raising the head, to move it in any way. How anxiously all watched as,

when the water arrived, he softly sponged the brow and held the glass
to the white lips!
Alas! the dark lashes still drooped over those closed eyes, and as each
moment passed Bolsover felt that it stood in the shadow of death.
At last there was a stir, as the sound of wheels approached in the lane.
And presently the figure of the doctor, accompanied by Mr Frampton,
was seen running across the meadow.
As they reached the outskirts of the crowd, Jeffreys laid his hand on the
doctor's arm with an appealing gesture.
"I did not mean--" he began.
But the doctor passed on through the path which the crowd opened for
him to the fallen boy's side.
It was a moment of terrible suspense as he knelt and touched the boy's
wrist, and applied his ear to his chest. Then in a hurried whisper he
asked two questions of Mr Freshfield, then again bent over the
inanimate form.
They could tell by the look on his face as he looked up that there was
hope--for there was life!
"He's not dead!" they heard him whisper to Mr Frampton.
Still they stood round, silent and motionless. The relief itself was
terrible. He was not dead, but would those deep-fringed eyes ever open
again?
The doctor whispered again to Mr Frampton and Mr Freshfield, and the
two passed their hands under the prostrate form to lift it. But before
they could do so the doctor, who never took his eyes off the boy's face,
held up his hand suddenly, and said "No! Better have a hurdle,"
pointing to one which lay not far off on the grass.
A dozen boys darted for it, and a dozen more laid their coats upon it to

make a bed. Once more, amid terrible suspense, they saw the helpless
form raised gently and deposited on the hurdle. A sigh of relief escaped
when the operation was over, and the sad burden, supported at each
corner by the two masters, Scarfe and Farfield, began to move slowly
towards the school.
"Slowly, and do not keep step. Above all things avoid a jolt," said the
doctor, keeping the boy's hand in his own.
The crowd opened to let them pass, and then followed in mournful
procession.
As the bearers passed on, Jeffreys, who all this time had been forgotten,
but who had never once turned his face from where Forrester lay,
stepped quickly forward as though to assist in carrying the litter.
His sudden movement, and the startling gesture that accompanied it,
disconcerted the bearers, and caused them for a moment to quicken
their step, thus imparting an unmistakable shock to the precious burden.
The doctor uttered an exclamation of vexation and ordered a halt.
"Stand back, sir!" he cried angrily, waving Jeffreys back; "a jolt like
that may be fatal!"
An authority still more potent than that of the doctor was at hand to
prevent a recurrence of the danger. Jeffreys was flung out of reach of
the litter by twenty angry hands and hounded out of the procession.
He did not attempt to rejoin it. For a moment he stood and watched it as
it passed slowly on. A cold sweat stood on his brow, and every breath
was a gasp. Then he turned slowly back to the spot where Forrester had
fallen, and threw himself on the ground in a paroxysm of rage and
misery. It was late and growing dark as he re-entered the school. There
was a strange, weird silence about the place that contrasted startlingly
with the usual evening clamour. The boys were mostly in their studies
or collected in whispering groups in the schoolrooms.
As Jeffreys entered, one or two small boys near the door hissed him

and ran away. Others who met him in the passage and on the stairs
glared at him with looks of mingled horror and aversion, which would
have frozen any ordinary fellow.
Jeffreys, however, did not appear to heed it, still less to avoid it.
Entering the Sixth Form room, he found most of his colleagues
gathered, discussing the tragedy of the day in the dim light of the bay
window. So engrossed were they that