Page:Argosy, volume 44, December 1903-March 1904.djvu/671
it when I grabbed the fly-wheel. It's on the floor somewhere probably; but, if you don't mind, could I have something for my hands? They hurt pretty badly."
Indeed, the air was full of black, swimming dots before my eyes, and iridescent cylinders had very little interest for me just then.
He almost snapped at me.
"Wait! If it's lost—but it couldn't be! Ah, the light at last. Now we can see something."
Still he was hunting, and now the men were helping him. I looked on dully.
Then an unreasonable anger seized me at their neglect—their indifference to my very real agony. I leaned forward, and, in spite of the added pain the raw flesh of my hand gave me, I took hold of Lawrence's collar and started to shake him.
He felt curiously light—rather like a piece of cork, in fact. I picked him up from the ground as you would a kitten and held him at arm's length.
Then suddenly I realized that what I was doing was somewhat unusual, and let go of his collar. He lit on his feet like a cat.
I expected anger, but he only said impatiently, "Don't do that—help me hunt, can't you?" quite as if it were an ordinary incident.
The queerness of it all came over me in full force; I felt as if I were in a dream.
I stooped down and helped him search. But it was no use. The little cylinder of stellarite seemed to have disappeared.
Suddenly Lawrence rose to his feet, his face, whose multitudinous wrinkles had a moment before been twitching with mingled triumph and despair, wiped clean of emotion, like a blank slate from which all significance has been erased.
"Come, Mr. Dunbar," he said quietly, "it is quite time those hands of yours were seen to. You, Johnson, Duquirke, go on hunting. But I'm afraid it's no use, boys. That vat of acid is too near."
"You think
"I'm afraid it rolled in," he said.
I was silent, dimly conscious that I stood, as it were, just inside the ring of some great catastrophe whose influence, barely reaching me, had this little wrinkled man in the grip of its vortex.
I followed him to a small office, opening off the laboratory; fitted up much like a doctor's, it was, with its cabinet of shining instruments. He explained its convenience while he bound up my hands with all the skilled gentleness of an experienced surgeon.
"Accidents are always on view in such a place as mine out there," he observed, with a nod of his head toward the laboratory.
"I wish you'd tell me what I've done," I said at last when the thing was over.
I felt no weakness, nor any desire for rest, which was odd, seeing the excitement I had been through and my recent illness.
"Two things, then, to be brief," he replied, smiling rather sadly, I thought. "You've accidentally stumbled on a magnificent fact, and you've at the same time destroyed, I fear, all results that might have flowed from that fact."
I stared at him, puzzled.
"You lifted me just now like a feather," he said abruptly. "You think, possibly, that I don't weigh much—I'm not a giant. Duquirke," he called, "come here a minute, will you, please?"
Duquirke appeared, a very mountain of a man, all muscle, too. I am up to the six-foot mark myself, and fairly broad in the shoulders, but this fellow could better me by three good inches in any direction.
"You can't use your hands, of course," said Lawrence to me; "but just stoop down and stretch out your arm, will you? Now, Duquirke, just seat yourself on his arm. That's it. Oh, don't be afraid—he can hold you all right. Ah, I thought so!"
We had both obeyed him, I in some doubt, the Canadian with stolid indifference. But' what was my amazement to find that this great big man weighed really comparatively nothing.
I rose, still with my arm outstretched, with perfect ease, and there the fellow sat, perched precariously, his