“Isn’t that just like the loose ends that are let go in all public works!” he criticised. “Here is a fine, hard-surfaced highway, the main county outlet to the north, with a concrete bridge over the river that probably cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars, and right here they’ve left that old wooden trap that a man wouldn’t dare drive a ‘Henry’ over faster than a cow could walk!”
Larry turned and looked the “trap” over with a mechanical eye. It was all that Purdick had said it was. “I’d hate to put a loaded truck on it,” he remarked; and then they walked on.
They had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards beyond the creek and its ramshackle bridge when they heard the distant honk of an automobile horn. The machine was coming along the pike behind them, and they could see that it was being driven at a good clip. Moreover, it was approaching the wooden span without showing any signs of slackening the speed.
“Gee!” Larry exclaimed, “if he hits that scrap heap going like that—”
He got no farther, for at that precise instant the oncoming machine did hit the scrap heap. As the two trampers sprang aside to give a clear road, there was a ripping crash, a shrill scream from somebody in the auto, and car and wooden bridge disappeared in a cloud of dust.
“Great Moses!” gasped little Purdick, “I’ll bet the last one of them’s killed!”
“Come on!” Larry shouted, and they broke all track records in a flying sprint to the scene of the disaster.
It was a pretty bad smash. The car was a heavy touring machine. It had turned part way over on its side in the fall and was tangled hopelessly in the bridge timbers and planking.
Its occupants—there were three of them, a woman, a girl and a man—were caught under the crushed top, and when Larry and Purdick ran up, the girl was crying and trying to lift the woman, who seemed to be either dead or in a dead faint. The man, bronzed, middle-aged, and looking as if he might be a retired cattle king, was pinned between the bent steering-wheel and the back of the driving seat, but he did not seem to be badly injured.
“If you two can take a plank and pry me loose,” he said quite calmly, as Larry and Purdick jumped down into the chaos and fell frantically at work. In a jiffy the thing was done, and then the three of them tore the broken top away and got the woman and the girl out. With every chance for a fatal accident, or at least a sad array of broken bones, it proved that no one of the three was seriously hurt. The woman, a stoutly built lady with the prettiest silvering hair Larry had ever seen—so he was saying to himself—came to as they lifted her to the level of the roadway, and a torn dress seemed to be the worst of her injuries. The girl had a cut in one round arm made by a piece of flying glass when the wind-shield broke, but she tied her handkerchief around it and after that was done, paid no more attention to it than a boy would.