"Lucky escape!" Tom shouted, turning his blazing face once to look back at the party in his car.
"Oh! More than luck, Tommy!" returned Ruth, earnestly.
"It was providential," declared Helen, shrinking into her seat again and beginning to tremble, now that the danger was past.
"Good hunting!" exclaimed the girl from the ranch. "Think of charging a wildcat with one of these smoke wagons! My! wouldn"t it make Bashful Ike"s eyes bulge out? I reckon he wouldn"t believe we had such hunting here in the East--eh?" and her laugh broke the spell of fear that had clutched them all.
"That critter beats the biggest bobcat I ever heard of," remarked Jerry Sheming. "Why! a catamount isn"t in it with that black beast."
"Where"d it go?" asked Tom, quite taken up with the running of the car.
"Back to the ravine," said Ruth. "Oh! I hope it will do no damage before it is caught."
Just now the four young friends had something more immediate to think about. This Jerry Sheming had been "playing "possum." Suddenly they found that he lay back in the tonneau, quite insensible.
"Oh, oh!" gasped Helen. "What shall we do? He is--Oh, Ruth! he isn"t _dead_?"
"Of a strained leg?" demanded Jane Ann, in some disgust.
"But he looks so white," said Helen, plaintively.
"He"s just knocked out. It"s hurt him lots more than he let on," declared the girl from Silver Ranch, who had seen many a man suffer in silence until he lost the grip on himself--as this youth had.
In half an hour the car stopped before Dr. Davison"s gate--the gate with the green lamps. Jerry Sheming had come to his senses long since and seemed more troubled by the fact that he had fainted than by the injury to his leg.
Ruth, by a few searching questions, had learned something of his story, too. He had not been a pa.s.senger on the train in which Jane Ann was riding when the wreck occurred. Indeed, he hadn"t owned carfare between stations, as he expressed it.
"I was hoofin" it from Cheslow to Grading. I heard of a job up at Grading--and I needed that job," Jerry had observed, drily.
This was enough to tell Ruth Fielding what was needed. When Dr. Davison asked where the young fellow belonged, Ruth broke in with:
"He"s going to the mill with me. You come after us, Doctor, if you think he ought to go to bed before his leg is treated."
"What do you reckon your folks will say, Miss?" groaned the injured youth.
And even Helen and Tom looked surprised.
"Aunt Alvirah will nurse you," laughed Ruth. "As for Uncle Jabez----"
"It will do Uncle Jabez good," put in Dr. Davison, confidently. "That"s right, Ruthie. You take him along to your house. I"ll come right out behind you and will be there almost before Tom, here, and your uncle"s Ben can get our patient to bed."
It had already been arranged that Jane Ann should go on to Outlook, the Camerons" home. She would remain there with the twins for the few days intervening before the young folk went back to school--the girls to Briarwood, and Tom to Seven Oaks, the military academy he had entered when his sister and Ruth went to their boarding school.
"How you will ever get your baggage--and in what shape--we can only guess," Tom said to the Western girl, grinning over his shoulder as the car flew on toward the Red Mill. "Guess you"ll have to bid a fond farewell to all the glad rags you brought with you, and put on some of Ruth"s, or Helen"s."
"I"d look nice; wouldn"t I?" she scoffed, tossing her head. "If I don"t get my trunks I"ll sue the railroad company."
The car arrived before the gate of the cottage. There was the basket of beans just where Ruth and Helen had left them. And Aunt Alvirah came hobbling to the door again, murmuring, "Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!"
and quite amazed when she saw Ben come running to help Tom Cameron into the house with the youth from the railroad wreck.
"Though, landy"s sake! I don"t know what your Uncle Jabez will say when he comes back from town and finds this boy in the best bed," grumbled Aunt Alvirah, after a bit, when she and Ruth were left alone with Jerry Sheming, and the others had gone on in the car, hurrying so as not to be late for luncheon at Outlook.
CHAPTER III
UNCLE JABEZ HAS TWO OPINIONS
Dr. Davison came, found that Jerry"s leg was not broken, left liniment, some quieting medicine to use if the patient could not sleep, and went away. Still Uncle Jabez had not returned from town.
Dinner had been a farce. Ben, the hired man, was fed as usual; but Ruth and Aunt Alvirah did not feel like eating; and, considering his fever, it was just as well, the doctor said, if the patient did not eat until later.
Jerry Sheming was a fellow of infinite pluck. The pain he had endured during his rough ride in the automobile must have been terrific. Yet he was only ashamed, now, that he had fainted.
"First time I ever heard of a Sheming fainting--or yet a Tilton, Miss," he told Ruth.
"I don"t believe you belong near here?" suggested Ruth, who sat beside him, for he seemed restless. "I don"t remember hearing either of those names around the Red Mill."
"No. I--I lived away west of here," replied Jerry, slowly. "Oh, a long ways."
"Not as far as Montana? That is where Jane Ann comes from."
"The girl I helped through the car window?" he asked, quickly.
"Yes. Miss Hicks."
"I did not mean really West," he said. "But it"s quite some miles. I had been walking two days--and I"m some walker," he added, with a smile.
"Looking for work, you said?" questioned Ruth, diffident about showing her interest in the young fellow, yet deeply curious.
"Yes. I"ve got to support myself some way."
"Haven"t you any folks at all, Mr. Jerry?"
"I ain"t a "mister,"" said the youth. "I"m not so much older than you and your friends."
"You seem a lot older," laughed Ruth, tossing back her hair.
"That"s because I have been working most of my life--and I guess livin" in the woods all the time makes a chap seem old."
"And you"ve lived in the woods?"
"With my uncle. I can"t remember anybody else belongin" to me--not very well. Pete Tilton is _his_ name. He"s been a guide and hunter all his life. And of late years he got so queer--before they took him away----"
"Took him away?" interrupted Ruth, "What do you mean by that?"
"Why, I"ll tell you," said Jerry, slowly. "He got wild towards the last.
It was something about his money and papers that he lost. He kep" "em in a box somewhere. There was a landslide at the west end of the island."