“You’re crazy,” shouted Bob. With all his strength, Bob caught the distracted Alan by the shoulders and hurled him to the floor of the engine room. “You can’t do that,” he panted. “You’ll kill Buck and yourself too. Buck’ll get him. Buck,” he called anew, putting his face to the opening again, “put this line under your arms before you try again.”
As before, there was no answer from Buck. The gritty reporter had taken his old position—his left arm between the ladder rungs—and was again coiling his line. Alan had drawn himself to the opening and lay beside it as if dazed. The giant car was now horizontal—shooting ahead with meteorlike speed—but without a jar and almost without vibration. Where they were, not one of the boys knew or cared. Even Roy above, with his gaze riveted on the compass, had only thought and ears for what might be happening below. To leave his post meant certain death for all.
“Here she comes again, Ned!” sounded once more from beneath the car.
“He’s got it; he’s got it,” cried Bob almost hysterically as he clasped dazed Alan by the shoulder. “Brace up, old man—brace up. You’ve got to help now. He’s all right—brace up.”
Just as Buck had forgotten his illness in the sudden crisis, Alan now rose to the emergency. Sick at heart as he was, he again threw off his nervousness and almost forced Bob from the aperture. One look at Ned made him doubly ashamed of the condition that fear had wrought in him. The steel-nerved Ned, though racked with pain—with nothing but a slender steel bar between him and certain death—had already taken a turn of Buck’s line around the steel uprights between which he was caught. At that moment he was passing the free end of the light cable about his own body beneath his arms.
The three pairs of eyes that watched every movement needed no signal to tell them when the suffering boy had done all he could. One glance by Ned said plainly enough: “Do what you can to save me.” Then his rescuers saw him grip the steel anew and close his eyes.
The first strain of his efforts at an end, Buck now seemed almost incapable of further effort. He held his end of the line above his head but it did not quite reach the outstretched arms of Alan.
“A little more,” urged Alan, “careful now; a little more!”
As if the panic of fear had at last reached him, Buck looked up in silent appeal.
“Shut your eyes. One foot at a time,” went on Alan. “You’re all right.”