"I don't believe the dog will miss the place," responded Doctor Davison.

Just then Reno leaped forward with a long-drawn whine. Ruth hurried with him, leaving the doctor to come on in the rear. Reno took the lead and the girl tried to keep pace with him.

It was not for many yards. Reno stopped at the brink of a steep bank beside the road. This bank fell away into the darkness, but through the trees, in the far distance, the girl could see several twinkling lights in a row. She knew that they were on the railroad, and that she was looking across the great swamp-meadow.

"Hullo!" shouted one man, loudly. "Something down there, old fellow?"

Reno answered with a short bark and began to scramble down the rough bank.

"Here's where somebody has gone down ahead of him," cried another of the searchers, holding his own lantern close to the ground. "See how the bank's all torn up? Bet his wheel hit that stone yonder in the dusk and threw him, wheel and all, into this gulley."

"Wait here, child," ordered Doctor Davison, quickly. "If he is in bad shape, boys, call me and I'll come down. Lift him carefully--"

"He's here, sir!" cried the first man to descend.

And then Reno lifted up his voice in a mournful howl.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" murmured Ruth. "I am afraid he is badly hurt."

"Come, come!" returned Doctor Davison. "Be a brave girl now. If he is badly hurt he'll need us both to keep our wits about us, you know."

"Ye needn't fret none, leetle gal," said Jasper Parloe's voice, behind her. "Ye couldn't kill that there Cameron boy, I tell ye! He is as sa.s.sy a young'un as there is in this county."

Doctor Davison turned as though to say something sharp to the mean old man; but just then the men below shouted up to him:

"He's. .h.i.t his head and his arm's twisted under him, Doctor. He isn't conscious, but doesn't seem much hurt otherwise."

"Can you bring him up?" queried the physician.

"That's what we mean to do," was the reply.

Ruth waited beside the old doctor, not without some apprehension. How would this Tom Cameron look? What kind of a boy was he? According to Jasper Parloe he was a very bad boy, indeed. She had heard that he was the son of a rich man. While the men were bringing the senseless body up the steep bank her mind ran riot with the possibilities that lay in store for her because of this accident to the dry-goods merchant's son.

And now the bearers were at the top of the bank, and she could see the limp form borne by them--a man holding the body under the arms and another by his feet. But, altogether, it looked really as though they carried a limp sack between them.

"Fust time I ever see that boy still," murmured Jasper Parloe.

"Cracky! He's pale; ain't he?" said another man.

Doctor Davison dropped on one knee beside the body as they laid it down. The lanterns were drawn together that their combined light might illuminate the spot. Ruth saw that the figure was that of a youth not much older than herself--lean, long limbed, well dressed, and with a face that, had it not been so pale, she would have thought very nice 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, pa.s.sing 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 nothin'"

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 embarra.s.sed 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.