“Compound fracture, Andrea.” Gently his exploring fingers slid down the mangled leg, beneath the lip of the jack-boot, stopped suddenly as something gave way beneath his feather touch. “Oh, my God!” he murmured. “Another break, just above the ankle. This boy is in a bad way, Andrea.”
“He is indeed,” Andrea said gravely. “We can do nothing for him here?”
“Nothing. Just nothing. We’ll have to get him up first.” Mallory straightened, gazed up bleakly at the perpendicular face of the chimney. “Although how in the name of heaven–”
“I will take him up.” There was no suggestion in Andrea’s voice either of desperate resolve or consciousness of the almost incredible effort involved. It was simply a statement of. intention, the voice of a man who never questioned his abifity to do what he said he would. “If you will help me to raise him, to tie him to my back. . . .”
“With his broken leg loose, dangling from a piece of skin and torn muscle?” Mallory protested. “Stevens can’t take much more. He’ll die if we do this.”
“He’ll die if we don’t,” Andrea murmured.
Mallory stared down at Stevens for a long moment, then nodded heavily in the darkness.
“He’ll die if we don’t,” he echoed tiredly. “Yes, we have to do this.” He pushed outwards from the rock, slid half a dozen feet down the rope and jammed a foot in the crutch of the chimney just below Stevens’s body. He took a couple of turns of rope round his waist and looked up.
“Ready, Andrea?” he called softly.
“Ready.” Andrea stooped, hooked his great hands under Stevens’s armpits and lifted slowly, powerfully, as Mallory pushed from below. Twice, three times before they had him up, the boy moaned deep down in his tortured throat, the long, quavering “Aabs” of agony setting Mallory’s teeth on edge: and then his dangling, twisted leg had passed from Mallory’s reach and he was held close and cradled in Andrea’s encircling arm, the rain-lashed, bleeding mask of a face lolling grotesquely backwards, forlorn and lifeless with the dead pathos of a broken doll. Seconds later Mallory was up beside them, expertly lashing Stevens’s wrists together. He was swearing softly as his numbed hands looped and tightened the rope, softly, bitterly, continuously, but he was quite unaware of this: he was aware only of the broken head that lolled stupidly against his shoulder, of the welling, rain-thinned blood that filmed the upturned face, of the hair above the gashed temple emerging darkly fair as the dye washed slowly out. Inferior bloody boot-blacking, Mallory thought savagely: Jensen shall know of this–it could cost a man’s life. And then he became aware of his own thoughts and swore again, stifi more savagely and at ‘himself this time, for the utter triviality of what he was thinking.
With both hands free–Stevens’s bound arms were looped round his neck, his body lashed to his own–Andrea took less than thirty seconds to reach the top: if the dragging, one hundred and sixty pound deadweight on his back made any difference to Andrea’s climbing speed and power, Mallory couldn’t detect it. The man’s endurance was fantastic. Once, just once, as Andrea scrambled over the edge of the cliff, the broken leg caught on the rock, and the crucifying torture of it seared through the merciful shell of insensibility, forced a brief shriek of pain from his lips, a hoarse, bubbling whisper of sound all the more horrible for its muted agony. And then Andrea was standing upright and Mallory was behind him, cutting swiftly at the ropes that bound the two together.
“Straight into the rocks with him, Andrea, will you?” Mallory whispered. “Wait for us at the first open space you come to.” Andrea nodded slowly and without raising his head, his hooded eyes bent over the boy in his arms, like a man sunk in thought. Sunk in thought or listening, and all unawares Mallory, too, found himself looking and listening into the thin, lost moaning of the wind, and there was nothing there, only the lifting, dying threnody and the chill of the rain hardening to an ice-cold sleet. He shivered, without knowing why, and listened again; then he shook himself angrily, turned abruptly towards the cliff face and started reeling in the rope. He had it all up, lying round his feet in a limp and rain-sodden tangle when he remembered about the spike still secured to the foot of the chimney, the hundreds of feet of rope suspended from it.
He was too tired and cold and depressed even to feel exasperated with himself. The sight of Stevens and the knowledge of how it was with the boy had affected him more than he knew. Moodily, almost, he kicked the rope over the side again, slid down the chimney, untied the second rope and sent the spike spinning out into the darkness. Less than ten minutes later, the wetly-coiled ropes over his shoulder, he led Miller and Brown into the dark confusion of the rocks.
They found Stevens lying under the lee of a huge boulder, less than a hundred yards inland, in a tiny, cleared space barely the size of a billiard table. An oilskin was spread beneath him on the sodden, gravelly earth, a camouflage cape covered most of his body: it was bitterly cold now, but the rock broke the force of the wind, sheltered the boy from the driving sleet. Andrea looked up as the three men dropped into the hollow and lowered their gear to the ground; already, Mallory could see, Andrea had rolled the trouser up beyond the knee and cut the heavy jack-boot away from the mangled leg.
“Sufferin’ Christ!” The words, half-oath, half-prayer, were torn involuntarily from Miller: even in the deep gloom the shattered leg looked ghastly. Now he dropped on one knee and stooped low over it. “What a mess!” he murmured slowly. He looked up ovór his shoulder. “We’ve gotta do something about that leg, boss, and we’ve no damned time to lose. This kid’s a good candidate for the mortuary.”
“I know. We’ve got to save him, Dusty, we’ve just got to.” All at once this had become terribly important to Mallory. He dropped down on his knees. “Let’s have a look at him.”
Impatiently Miller waved him away.
“Leave this to me, boss.” There was a sureness, a sudden authority in his voice that held Mallory silent. “The medicine pack, quick–and undo that tent.”
“You sure you can handle this?” God knew, Mallory thought, he didn’t really doubt him–he was conscious only of gratitude, of a profound relief, but he felt he had to say something. “How are you going–”
“Look, boss,” Miller said quietly. “All my life I’ve worked with just three things–mines, tunnels and explosives. They’re kinda tricky things, boss. I’ve seen hundreds of busted arms and legs–and fixed most of them myself.” He grinned wryly in the darkness. “I was boss myself, then–just one of my privileges, I reckon.”
“Good enough!” Mallory clapped him on the shoulder. “He’s all yours, Dusty. But the tent!” Involuntarily he looked over his shoulder in the direction of the cliff. “I mean–”
“You got me wrong, boss.” Miller’s hands, steady and precise with the delicate certainty of a man who has spent a lifetime with high explosives, were busy with a swab and disinfectant. “I wasn’t fixin’ on settin’ up a base hospital. But we need tent-poles–splints for his legs.”
“Of course, of course. The poles. Never occurred to me for splints–and rye been thinking of nothing else for–”
“They’re not too important, boss.” Miller had the medicine pack open now, rapidly selecting the items he wanted with the aid of a hooded torch. “Morphine– that’s the first thing, or this kid’s goin’ to die of shock. And then shelter, warmth, dry clothin’–”
“Warmth! Dry clothing!” Mallory interrupted incredulously. He looked down at the unconscious boy, remembering how Stevens had lost them the stove and all the fuel, and his mouth twisted in bitterness. His own executioner. . . . “Where in God’s name are we going to find thorn?”
“I don’t know, boss,” Miller said simply. “But we gotta find them. And not just to lessen shock. With a leg like this and soaked to the skin, he’s bound to get pneumonia. And then as much sulfa as that bloody great hole in his leg will take–one touch of sepsis in the state this kid’s in. . .” His voice trailed away into silence.
Mallory rose to his feet.
“I reckon you’re the boss.” It was a very creditable imitation of the American’s drawl, and Miller looked up quickly, surprise melting into a tired smile, then looked away again. Mallory could hear the chatter of his teeth as he bent over Stevens, and sensed rather than saw that he was shivering violently, continuously, but oblivious to it all in his complete concentration on the job in hand. Miller’s clothes, Mallory remembered again, were completely saturated: not for the first time, Mallory wondered how he had managed to get himself into such a state with a waterproof covering him.