By that time Dr. Maes and his associate, Dr. Rives, were already en route to Baton Rouge by automobile. They had been called at once by Seymour Weiss, who then jumped into his new Cadillac with Bob Maestri--the latter lived at the Roosevelt--and together they ruined the engine of the car by driving at top speed to Baton Rouge. At that time no one yet had given out any reasonably authoritative word as to whether Long was the victim of a major or minor injury; whether the prognosis was hopeful or a matter of doubt; whether his condition could be described as undetermined, satisfactory, or critical. But so widespread was public interest in the Kingfish, who had challenged Roosevelt, and who only a month before had said the New Deal was at least cognizant of a plot to murder him, that newspapers in many distant cities lost no time in dispatching special correspondents and photographers to Baton Rouge to cover the day’s top news story. The fight to save the Kingfish’s life was just beginning. 10 ---- SEPTEMBER 8-9: MIDNIGHT “_He that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of fearing death._” ----SHAKESPEARE Among the first of the Long hierarchs to reach the hospital to which Jimmie O’Connor had rushed the fallen Kingfish were Dr. Vidrine, Justice Fournet, and Acting Lieutenant Governor Noe. As a matter of fact, O’Connor had not yet left the capitol’s porte-cochere when Fournet and Noe reached it. “I heard Huey and Jimmie O’Connor talking before I saw them in the darkness there,” Justice Fournet relates. “Jimmie asked: ‘Where did he hit you?’ and Huey said: ‘Hell, man, take me to the hospital.’ I reached them just as they got into the car of a man--his name was Starns, I think--and I tried to get into the car with them, but it was just a two-door affair, and I could not get in. By that time Jimmie Noe had come down, so he and I managed to get to the hospital in another of the cars around there. They had Huey sort of strapped to a wheeled table, an operating table, I suppose, by the time we got there and found out what floor he was on. “Dr. Vidrine was there, and starting to take off some of the Senator’s clothes; but I took out my pocket knife and said: ‘Here, cut it off.’ He slashed through the clothes and laid them back. I saw a very small bluish puncture on the right side of Huey’s abdomen, and it was not bloody. And I saw Dr. Vidrine lift up the right side of Huey’s back, but he did not lift it very far. Dr. Vidrine put us in a room with a nurse, then, and gave instructions to let no one else come in.