"Courage, lad!" he repeated. "A little pain, and we'll have it, safe
as a wasp in an apple."
The Corsicans under his orders had withdrawn to a little distance and
stood about us in a ring. While he probed and Nat's poor body
writhed feebly in my arms, I lifted my eyes once with a shudder, and
met the Princess Camilla's. She was watching, and without a tremor,
her face grave as a child's.
With a short grunt of triumph, my father caught away his hand, dipped
it swiftly into the pan of water beside him, and held the bullet
aloft between thumb and forefinger. The Corsicans broke into quick
guttural cries, as men hailing a miracle. As Nat's head fell back
limp against my shoulder I saw the Princess turn and walk away alone.
Her followers dispersed by degrees, but not, I should say, until
every man had explained to every other his own theory of the wound
and the operation, and how my father had come to find the bullet so
unerringly, each theorist tapping his own chest and back, or his
interlocutor's, sometimes a couple tapping each other with vigour,
neither listening, both jabbering at full pitch of the voice with
prodigious elisions of consonants and equally prodigious drawlings of
the vowels.
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