“Gracious! are you hurt, Starrie?” Coombsie and Colin rushed to him.
“I—think—not! I guess I’m all here.” Leon made a desperate attempt to rise, and instantly sank back, clutching at the grass around him with such a sound as nobody had ever heard before from the lips of Leon Starr Chase—the moan of a maimed creature.
“My ankle! My right ankle!” he groaned. “I twisted it, coming down on that rotten branch. It feels as if every tree in the woods had fallen on it together! Ouch! I—can’t—stand.” Drops of agony stole out upon his forehead.
“You’ve sprained it, I guess!” Nixon was now bending over the victim. “Here, let me take your shoe off, before the foot swells! Perhaps, with Col and me helping you, you can limp along to that clearing?”
Leon made another attempt, with the leather pressure removed, but sank down again and began to relieve himself of his stocking too, in order to examine the injury.
“Ou-ouch!” he groaned savagely. “My ankle is as black as a thundercloud already. It feels just like a thunderstorm, too—all heavy throbs an’ lightning shoots of pain!”
The trail of those fiery darts could be traced in the livid blue and yellow streaks that were turning the rapidly swelling ankle, in which the ligaments were badly torn, to as many hues as Joseph’s coat, against a background of sullen black.
“Well! this is the—limit!” Coombsie dropped the lunch-basket, to which he had clung faithfully, into a nest of underbrush: with a probable logging-road within reach that might serve as a clue to lead them somewhere, here was one of their number with a thunderstorm in his ankle!
And then the hero that dwelt in the shadow of the savage in that contradictory breast of Leon Chase flashed awake again in a moment, as at Big Swamp; the real plucky boyhood in him shone out like a star!
“’Twill be dark—in the woods—before very long,” he said, his voice sprained too by pain, while his clammy face, still coated with the red-ochre pigment of Varney’s Paintpot, smeared by the drops of agony and his coat-sleeve, was a lurid sight. “You fellows will have to hustle if you want to reach that road—if it is a logging-road—and get out of the woods before night! I can hardly—hobble. I’d better stay here: Blink will stay with me; won’t you, pup? When you boys get home—let my father know—he and Jim will come out an’ find me; they know every inch of the woods.”