"What's the matter with your neck?" said the girl, suddenly.
Cass looked down, blushing to find that the collar of his smart "duck"
sailor shirt was torn open. But something more than his white, soft,
girlish skin was exposed; the shirt front was dyed quite red with blood
from a slight cut on the shoulder. He remembered to have felt a scratch
while struggling with Hornsby.
The girl's soft eyes sparkled. "Let ME," she said, vivaciously. "Do! I'm
good at wounds. Come over here. No--stay there. I'll come over to you."
She did, bestriding the back of the middle seat and dropping at his
side. The magnetic fingers again touched his; he felt her warm breath on
his neck as she bent toward him.
"It's nothing," he said, hastily, more agitated by the treatment than
the wound.
"Give me your flask," she responded, without heeding. A stinging
sensation as she bathed the edges of the cut with the spirit brought him
back to common sense again. "There," she said, skillfully extemporizing
a bandage from her handkerchief and a compress from his cravat. "Now,
button your coat over your chest, so, and don't take cold." She insisted
upon buttoning it for him; greater even than the feminine delight in a
man's strength is the ministration to his weakness. Yet, when this was
finished, she drew a little away from him in some embarrassment--an
embarrassment she wondered at, as his skin was finer, his touch gentler,
his clothes cleaner, and--not to put too fine a point upon it--he
exhaled an atmosphere much sweeter than belonged to most of the men her
boyish habits had brought her in contact with--not excepting her own
father.
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