Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,7

said.

On our knees we both looked in silence at what we could see of the Sheik, which was his head, still in its white headdress with its gold cords. A fold of reddened canvas lay over the rest of him, and my companion, gripping my wrist, said, ‘Leave it. Don’t look. What’s the point.’

I thought fleetingly of the policemen and the ambulancemen who would soon be forced to look, but I did as he asked. We made our way silently back to the standing section and began a new tunnel round to the other side of the horsebox.

It was there that we came to Jack and also Jimmy, both with pulses, though both were unconscious and pinned to the ground by the thick tent pole, which lay across Jack’s legs and Jimmy’s chest. We scarcely touched the pole ourselves, but the tremor of our movements brought Jack up to semi-consciousness and to groaning pain.

My companion said ‘Hell’ through his teeth, and I said, ‘I’ll stay here if you go and get something to keep the canvas off them,’ and he nodded and disappeared, the heavy material falling behind, closing me in.

Jimmy looked dreadful; eyes shut above the long nose, a thread of blood trickling from his mouth.

Jack went on groaning. I held up a bit of tent on my shoulders like Atlas, and presently my fellow tunneller returned, bringing two further helpers and a trestle table for a makeshift roof.

‘What do we do?’ the first tunneller said, irresolutely.

‘Lift the pole,’ I said. ‘It may hurt Jack… but it may be killing Jimmy.’

Everyone agreed. We slowly, carefully, took the weight off the two injured men and laid the pole on the ground. Jack lapsed into silence. Jimmy lay still like a log. But they were both shallowly breathing: I felt their wrists again, one after the other, with relief.

We stood the trestle table over them and gingerly crawled on, and came to a girl lying on her back with one arm up over her face. Her skirt had been ripped away, and the flesh on the outer side of her thigh had been torn open and was sagging away from the bone from hip to knee. I lifted the canvas away from her face and saw that she was to some extent conscious.

‘Hello,’ I said inadequately.

She looked at me vaguely. ‘What’s happening?’ she said.

‘There was an accident.’

‘Oh?’ She seemed sleepy, but when I touched her cheek it was icy.

‘We’ll get another table,’ the first tunneller said.

‘And a rug, if you can,’ I said. ‘She’s far too cold.’

He nodded and said ‘Shock,’ and they all went away as it needed the three of them to drag the tables through.

I looked at the girl’s leg. She was fairly plump, and inside the long widely-gaping wound one could easily identify the cream-coloured bubbly fat tissue and the dense red muscle, open like a jagged book to inspection. I’d never seen anything like it: and extraordinarily she wasn’t bleeding a great deal, certainly not as much as one would have expected.

The body shutting down, I thought. The effects of trauma, as deadly as injury itself.

There was little I could do for her, but I did have a penknife in my pocket incorporating a tiny pair of scissors. With a sigh I pulled up my jersey and cut and tore one side from my shirt, stopping a few inches below the collar and cutting across so that from in front it looked as if I had a whole shirt under my sweater; and I thought that my doing that was ridiculous, but all the same I did it.

Torn into two wide strips the shirt front made reasonable bandages. I slid both pieces under her leg and pulled the flesh back into position, tying her leg together round the bone like trussing a joint of meat. I looked anxiously several times at the girl’s face, but if she felt what I was doing it must have been remotely. She lay with her eyes open, her elbow bent over her head, and all she said at one point was, ‘Where is this?’ and later, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Oh… Is it…? Good.’

The tunnellers returned with a table and a travelling rug and also a towel.

‘I thought we might wrap that wound together, with this,’ said the first tunneller, ‘but I see you’ve done it.’

We put the towel round her leg anyway for extra protection, and then wrapped her in the rug and left her under her