A Dog with a Bad Name | Page 9

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 they never noticed his entrance, and it was not till after standing a minute listening to their talk he broke in, in his loud tones--
"Is Forrester dead?"
The sound of his voice, so harsh and unexpected, had the effect of an explosion in their midst.
They recoiled from it, startled and half-scared. Then, quickly perceiving the intruder, they turned upon him with a howl.
But this time the Cad did not retreat before them. He held up his hand to stop them with a gesture almost of authority.
"Don't!" he exclaimed. "I'll go. But tell me, some one, is he dead?"
His big form loomed out in the twilight a head taller than any of his companions, and there was something in his tone and attitude that held them back.
"You will be sorry to hear," said Scarfe, one of the first to recover his self-control, and with a double-edge of bitterness in his voice, "that he was alive an hour ago."
Jeffreys gave a gasp, and held up his hand again.
"Is there hope for him, then?"
"Not with you in the school, you murderer!" exclaimed Farfield, advancing on the Cad, and striking him on