In any crisis, the mind attacks a side issue. Phebe rose from her knees, took off the sodden thing which had been her hat, and carefully covered it over her saddle. Her face, underneath the streaks of mud, was very white, and her lips were unsteady. Then she pressed her hands over her eyes, bit her lips and gave her shoulders a little shake. That done, she knelt down in the mud once more and set herself to the task in hand, wondering meanwhile who and what her victim might be.
Obviously he was a gentleman. His firm, clean-cut lips alone would have settled that point to her satisfaction. Beyond that, she had no possible clue to his identity. The situation was a trying one. The nearest house was a mile away; the rain was still pelting heavily down upon them, and she, Phebe McAlister, was alone in the storm with a perfect stranger whom she had knocked from his bicycle, stunned and perhaps injured for life. To whom did he belong? What should she do with him? If he died, who would be responsible, not for the injury, but for making the funeral arrangements? For a moment, the unaccustomed tears rushed to her eyes, and, seen through their mist, her victim seemed to be expanding until he filled the whole landscape and surrounded her by dozens, all plastered with mud and begirt with whitened bones. Then she pulled herself together again. The stranger's arm was broken, his forehead bloody. She must see what she could do for him, then go for help.
There was a long interval when the noise of the rain was interrupted by little groans and exclamations from Phebe, while she tugged and shoved and pried at the man in the road. He was so very big, so very unconscious, so very determined to lie with his face buried in the mud and meet his end by suffocation. At last, she drew a long breath, mustered all her strength and gave him one pull which turned him completely over on his back. As she did so, his eyes opened dully and by degrees gathered expression. He looked up into her mud-stained face, down at his mud-stained clothes, around at the mud-stained skull which lay close to his side and grinned back at him encouragingly.
"What the deuce—" he faltered. Then once more he fainted away.
Twenty minutes later, Phebe was rushing away to the nearest house in search of help. There was but one house within reach, however, and fate willed that she should find that deserted. She hesitated whether she should ride on for two miles farther, or go back to her victim, and she decided upon the latter course. It seemed hours to her before she reached the top of the hill again. Then she stopped short, dismounted and stared down the slope in astonishment. Her victim had vanished from the scene. Only the skull remained to mark the spot where he had lain, two deep tracks in the soft mud to show the way by which he had gone.
"Well, Babe?" Allyn's voice hailed her, as she rode wearily up the drive, the water squelching in her shoes and her soaked skirt flapping dismally about her pedals. "Were you out in all that shower?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you go under cover?"
"There wasn't any cover to go under." Phebe's tone was not altogether amicable.
"But the mud? It's all over your face, and your wheel, and your hair."