An American Suffragette | Page 2

spiel about bumper crops; always gives you the glad hand, but nothing
in it. You'd never take him for Mrs. Ramsey's brother, would you?
She's a looker, all right. So is Dr. Earl, one of these big, handsome,
powerful-looking men that makes folks ask who he is."
"What's all the hullabaloo about, anyhow?" asked the Chicago man.

"Where have you been that you don't know about Earl?" answered
Bedford. "Why, I thought everybody in the country had heard of him.
He's the chap that raises the dead, you know; just takes 'em by the hand,
makes a few passes, and says, 'Say, it's time to wake up, old fellow,'
and the dead one sits up and asks for beefsteak. He's the man that saved
Hall, the copper mines king, over in Paris. Hall was finished, all done
but putting him in a box, when in comes Dr. Earl. 'Let him alone,' he
says. 'He's tired out. When he finishes this nap he'll be just as good as
new.' But you know how impetuous the French are, and they were
going to have poor old Hall done for, sure enough, when this Earl man
stands them off, and promises to bring Hall 'round in six hours. And he
does it after the whole bunch of them have parleyed over him and
waved looking-glasses across his mouth, and found him as dead as
Rameses."
There was a general buzz among the newspaper men, and one of them,
older and more dignified in manner than the others, said quietly,
"Bedford, you ought not to hand out that kind of fiction, even in your
unreliable journal."
Bedford winked slyly at the Chicagoan. "It was my only hope," he said
in a rapid aside. "That's Tourney. He was over there at the time, and
he'll tell us all about it trying to put me right."
"If you don't like my story you can give us the straight steer yourself,
Tourney," he said, and, nothing loath, the older man told how Hall had
been suddenly stricken with appendicitis in such severe form that an
operation was necessary at once. Upon this the French surgeons agreed,
but his heart action was so bad that they dared not administer an
anæsthetic, and one of them, who was a noted hypnotist, expressed a
doubt whether he would be able to rouse the patient from a hypnosis
sufficiently profound to enable them to perform the operation.
"This Frenchman," Tourney went on, warming to his subject, "had seen
Earl do some wonderful things and he knew he was in Paris and where
he was stopping. He put the case to Hall, and seeing that it was all day
with him unless something was done, he told them to send for Earl and
they got him there on the double-quick. I was waiting in the hall when

he went into the operating room and I stayed there until he came out,
and as I had done him one or two good turns he told me about it before
he realized that I was a newspaper man. When he saw me last I was
coaching Harvard students with more money than brains. That has
nothing to do with it, except to show that he isn't one of these 'for
publication only' wonder workers."
"Hurry up," said the Chicagoan, "he'll be here in a few minutes, and if
he's one of these human clams you are the hope of the press. What did
he tell you?"
"He agreed with the others in the main points, but he said if Hall was
willing to take the chance, he believed he could pull him through by a
system he had seen used in India. Then he cleared them all out, and
when they came back Hall was comatose. The appendix was removed
in record time, and the wound cleansed. Just before Earl finished, one
of the Frenchmen noticed that the patient was not breathing, apparently,
and exclaimed that he was dead. Dr. Earl pointed out the fact that the
blood showed no signs of other than a normal condition, such as would
be found in a patient under hypnosis. His idea, as I got it, was that the
patient must be kept unconscious long enough for the body to regain its
functions and get over the strain of the operation. He told them if he
were more familiar with Hall's constitution, he would be inclined to
prolong his condition of suspended animation, but under the
circumstances he would restore him to consciousness in three hours.
"One or two of them got excited and swore the man was dead, and
according to a lot of tests he was, but the rest, knowing he would have
died anyhow, were willing to wait, and at the end of the time Earl