Baird straightened, energetic, as always when action was demanded.... If only he had a lantern!... He remembered that he had matches, and struck one. The breeze, faint though it was, snuffed it out. He tried another with the same result. His next effort was a torch, a letter twisted so as to burn as long as possible.
It served his purpose, a flickering revelation of a mass of wreckage thrust against the shelving bank of the creek—until the flame crept to his fingers and he was forced to drop the charred paper. He sprang up and went back to the road, not to get help, that did not occur to him, but to get down to the thing below as soon as possible. There might be life lingering beneath that mass of wreckage.
Baird encountered a snake fence and an almost impassable mat of briers, but even in the darkness he felt sure of his direction, certain of it when he slid down into mud and water. He stood still, trying to determine just where the wrecked machine lay; to his left? His olfactory nerves helped him, and his hand soon touched a bit of the wreckage, an upflung wheel, then the rear of the car. Baird was trying to discover all he could first by feeling. He had a note-book in his pocket with which to make a brief bonfire, but he was saving that. If only he had a lantern!
It was the smell of a reeking wick that suggested a possibility. In 1905, an automobile was not equipped with electricity; its tail light was a lantern. Baird's hand had encountered it, its glass shattered, but the metal lamp intact and still warm. He lighted the wick; though inadequately equipped, he could find his way about now.
The machine lay against a rock, half-overturned, and with nose buried in the soft earth of the bank. Baird made his way forward on its other side. Engine, wheel and seat were jammed against the rock and half-buried in the earth, but by climbing over the rock he reached the top of the pile, and could throw the light on the confused mass.
For a moment he knelt motionless above the thing he saw, weakened by a wave of physical inability; it was not the Mine Banks alone that had claimed a Westmore.... Then he made certain that the body below was without pulse or heartbeat, and that his utmost strength could not move the mass that rested on it. The end must have come as instantaneously to one brother as it had to the other.
It was of Judith, Baird was thinking as he prepared to go back. He must take the word to Westmore.... And by some means, he must prevent travelers on the Post-Road from plunging into this death-trap. He felt a little dizzy and sick.
Baird held the light up, trying to see the bank above. He kept it upheld, staring at what it revealed—a woman's crumpled body flung against the soft loamy earth, a white blot against a black background. Even before he reached her, Baird knew who she was, and the thought was quicker than his forward plunge: "It was Garvin she loved, and Edward knew it. It was that had 'preyed' on his mind."
Baird's first terror, when his hands discovered warmth in her body, was that it was deceptive—life might be gone ... or it might be passing fast, was his fear when he found that her heart was beating; it beat so faintly against his hand. He brushed the hair from her face and brought the light close, but Ann's eyes remained closed, her lips colorless, her skin bluey-white; life was merely flickering.
Something infinitely painful rose up in Baird and choked him, a hurt greater than anything he had ever known, a profounder sense of desolation than he had had when his father lay dying. He wanted to hold her against his breast.