CHAPTER XVII.
RECONCILIATION AND REVELATION.
It was Ephraim who first recovered himself.
Leaping from his horse, he flung both bridles to any hand would catch them and with a strength and agility due eighteen rather than eighty years, he lifted his unconscious “Little Captain” in his arms and ordered:
“Ambulance! St. Luke’s hospital!”
Then he tenderly laid Jessica’s bleeding cheek against his shoulder, and with shaking hand did his utmost to stanch the flow of blood. For a moment he did not even weep, then the tears coursed down his bronzed face till they blinded him.
The whole party had gathered at a small distance, silent, stunned, unbelieving that such a dreadful thing could have happened, and to her the most unselfish, most innocent of them all.
“She gave her life to save the girl who hated her!” sobbed Rosalie Thorne, and again turned her eyes away.
“Look—look—at Helen! She seems—as if she were marble!” whispered another, feeling that even that subdued murmur were sacrilege.
The clang of an ambulance bell broke in on that silence and, as he had done once before, poor old Ephraim mounted the steps at its rear and followed his darling to her fate.
He had not heart for hope left in him. Girls could not twice escape such peril and live. His “Little Captain” was done for, she would see her beloved home no more; and again, as he had often felt, he realized that her coming east at all had been a grievous mistake. Then a strange feeling of exultation that he should be the only one of her “boys” who had followed her to the death rose within him and when he realized it, frightened him.