Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill | Page 7

looking indeed.
"Poor lad!" Ruth heard the physician murmur. "He has had a hard fall-- and that's a nasty knock on his head."
The wound was upon the side of his head above the left ear and was now all clotted with blood. It was from this wound, in some moment of consciousness, that he had traced the word "Help" on his torn handkerchief, and fastened the latter, with the lamp of his motorcycle, to the dog's collar.
Here was the machine, bent and twisted enough, brought up the bank by two of the men.
"Dunno what you can do for the boy, Doctor," said one of them; "but it looks to me as though this contraption warn't scurcely wuth savin'."
"Oh, we'll bring the boy around all right," said Doctor Davison, who had felt Tom Cameron's pulse and now rose quickly. "Lift him carefully upon the stretcher. We will get him into bed before I do a thing to him. He's best as he is while we are moving him."
"It'll be a mighty long way to his house," grumbled one of the men.
"I believe yeou!" rejoined Jasper Parloe. "Three miles beyond Jabe Potter's mill."
"Pshaw!" exclaimed Doctor Davison, in his soft voice. "You know we'll not take him so far. My house is near enough. Surely you can carry him there."
"If you say the word, Doctor," said the fellow, more cheerfully, while old Parloe grunted.
They were more than half an hour in getting to the turn in the main road where she could observe the two green lights before the doctor's house. There the men put the stretcher down for a moment. Jasper Parloe grumblingly took his turn at carrying one end.
"I never did see the use of boys, noway," he growled. "They's only an aggravation and vexation of speret. And this here one is the aggravatingest and vexationingest of any I ever see."
"Don't be too hard on the boy, Jasper," said Doctor Davison, passing on ahead, so as to reach his house first.
Ruth remained behind, for the old gentleman walked too fast for her. Before the men picked up the stretcher again there was a movement and a murmur from the injured boy.
"Hullo!" said one of the men. "He's a-talkin', ain't he?"
"Jest mutterin'," said Parloe, who was at Tom's head. "'Tain't nothi
But Ruth heard the murmur of the unconscious boy, and the words startled her. They were:
"It was Jabe Potter-- he did it! It was Jabe Potter-- he did it!"
What did they mean? Or, was there no meaning at all to the muttering of the wounded boy? Ruth saw that Parloe was looking at her in his sly and disagreeable way, and she knew that he, too, had heard the words.
"It was Jabe Potter-- he did it!" Was it an accusation referring to the boy's present plight? And how could her Uncle Jabez-- the relative she had not as yet seen-- be the cause of Tom Cameron's injury? The spot where the boy was hurt must have been five miles from the Red Mill, and not even on the Osago Lake turnpike, on which highway she had been given to understand the Red Mill stood.
Not many moments more and the little procession was at the gateway, on either side of which burned the two green lamps.
Jasper Parloe, who had been relieved, shuffled off into the darkness. Reno after one pleading look into the face of the hesitating Ruth, followed the stretcher on which his master lay, in at the gate.
And Ruth Fielding, beginning again to feel most embarrassed and forsaken, was left alone where the two green eyes winked in the warm, moist darkness of the Spring night.
CHAPTER V
THE GIRL IN THE AUTOMOBILE
The men who had gone in with the unconscious boy and the stretcher hung about the doctor's door, which was some yards from the gateway. Everybody seemed to have forgotten the girl, a stranger in Cheslow, and for the first day of her life away from kind and indulgent friends.
It was only ten minutes walk to the railroad station, and Ruth remembered that it was a straight road. She arrived in the waiting room safely enough. Sam Curtis, the station master, descried her immediately and came out of his office with her bag.
"Well, and what happened? Is that boy really hurt?" he asked.
"He has a broken arm and his head is cut. I do not know how seriously, for Doctor Davison had not finished examining him when I-- I came away," she replied, bravely enough, and hiding the fact that she had been overlooked.
"They took him to the doctor's house, did they?" asked Sam.
"Yes, sir," said Ruth. "But--"
"Mr. Curtis, has there been anybody here for me?"
"For you, Miss?" the station master returned, somewhat surprised it seemed.
"Yes, sir. Anybody from Red Mill?"
Curtis smote one fist into his other palm, exclaiming:
"You don't mean to