see.
"Heavens above! look at that man!" she cried, her words sounding as from
a great distance in Morgan's dulling ears.
Morgan saw her start toward him, running. He tried to step forward to
meet her, but only his body moved in accord with his will. The earth
seemed to rise and embrace him, letting him down softly, as the arms of
a friend.
It was a new pain that brought Morgan to his senses, the pain of
returning life to his half-dead arms. Somebody was standing beside him
holding these members raised to let the blood drain out of them, chafing
them, and there was a smell of camphor and strong spirits in the place.
"The rope wouldn't 'a' slipped _down_, if they was tryin' to hang him,
anyhow," somebody said with conclusive finality.
"Looks like they lassoed him and drug him," another said, full of the
awe that hushes the human voice when one stands beside the dead.
"Whoever done it ought to be skinned alive!" a woman declared, and
Morgan thanked her in his heart for her sympathy, although there was a
weight of such absolute weakness on his eyes that he could not open them
to see her face.
There was a dim sound of something being stirred in a glass, and the
nerve-waking scent of more ardent spirits.
"If this don't fetch him to," said the voice of the first speaker, the
deep pectoral tone of a seasoned man, "you jump your horse and go for
the doctor, Fred."
Morgan shook his head to throw that obstinate weight from his eyes, or
thought he shook it, but it was only the shadow of a movement. Slight as
it was it brought an exclamation of relief in another voice, a woman's
voice, also, tuned in the music of youth.
"Oh! he moved!" she said. And she was the one who stood beside him,
holding aloft and chafing his blood-gorged arm.
"Blamed if he didn't! Here--try a little of this, son."
Morgan was gathering headway out of the fog so rapidly now that he began
to feel ashamed of this helpless situation in which so many kind hands
were ministering to him as if he were a sick horse. He made a more
determined effort to open his eyes, succeeding this time, although it
seemed to call for as much strength to lift his lids as to shoulder a
sack of wheat. He saw a large hand holding a spoon hovering near his
mouth, and the outline of big shoulders in a red shirt. Morgan swallowed
what was offered him, to feel it go tingling through his nerves with
vivifying warmth, like a message of cheer over a telegraph wire. Th
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