The car roared through the settlement of shacks about the Four Corners like a fast express. Nobody tried to bother them. In twenty minutes thereafter the car stopped at the City Hospital. The patient was carried in on a stretcher, and one of the interns took Hester’s name and address. Dr. Leffert evidently had no standing at the institution, and he merely handed the patient over to the hospital authorities and hurried away. Hester drove the car home and found both her mother and father excitedly awaiting her coming.
“Now, don’t you bother about me—or the car!” she said, sharply, when her parents began to take her to task for worrying them so. “I haven’t had a bite to eat, and I’m tired, too. Your old car isn’t hurt any——”
“But you can’t ride that car all over this country alone, Hess! I swear I won’t have it!”
“But I did drive it alone, didn’t I? And it isn’t hurt any. Neither am I,” she replied, and it was several days before her parents learned the particulars of their daughter’s wild ride over the mountainside with the squatter, Billson, warning the small farmers of the coming fire.
“I declare for’t!” her mother then said. “You’re the greatest girl, Hess! The folks say you’re a heroine.”
“They say a whole lot beside their prayers, I reckon,” snapped Hester.
“But one of the country papers has got a long article in it about you and that Mr. Billson. Only they don’t know your name.”
“No. I told Doc. Leffert to keep still about it,” said Hester. “Now! there’s been enough talk. I want two dollars, Ma. I want to send that Billson some jelly and some flowers. He’s having a mighty hard time at the hospital. And there isn’t a soul who cares anything about him—whether he lives or dies.”
“Ain’t that just like you, Hessie?” complained her mother. “You throw that poor fellow good things like you was throwing a bone to a dog! I—I wish you wasn’t so hard.”
But events were making Hester seem harder than usual these days. She was completely cut off from the society of her school fellows. She had no part in the after-hour athletics. Nobody spoke to her about the fine time expected at Keyport when the basketball team went over to battle with the team of the Keyport High.