It was Pemrose Lorry who spoke. Together with her Camp Fire sisters she had taken some training in first aid. And one agonizing accident which she had been told how to deal with was the case of a knee-cap displaced or broken.
There almost seemed to be a broken head on her own young shoulders through which wild, streaky lights and shadows came stealing, like moonlight through cracked shutters whose chinks are not wide enough to reveal clearly any object in a room.
It was the same breathlessly unreal feeling–the same dim moonlit groping, that she had felt as she sat on the cliff-brow with Stud, when he talked of the nickum and his father–and called the latter a “queer fish!”
For one thing she knew at a glance! She had seen the injured man, who lay calling for help in a miry spot of the Man Killer trail, before. Three times before, said lightning perception!
And it came upon her now, as emergency’s stiff breeze blew the cobwebs from her brain, the occasion of the second time, sandwiched in between that zero day when he had dragged her up a snow-bank, the youth who saved her addressing him as Dad, and the smiling June one when he lay on a fernbed before his lake-shore camp, grumpily fishing.
“I–I saw him: I know I saw him–again–crossing the street outside Una’s home on the day when the last installment of the Will was read,” she realized, her hands coming together convulsively at the thought of the blighting codicil which hung up the fortunes of the moon-going Thunder Bird for twelve long years.
“He–he was wearing the same gray cap!” was the next cleaving flash of memory.
He was not really wearing it now. It bobbed in the rill beside him.
As one eye turned feverishly towards it, the third thunder clap of perception came in the staggering sense of how like he was to Una.
She might have been his daughter–Una–with that little fixed star of feeling set like a shining pebble now in her right, fascinated eye, reflected, exaggerated in the glazed cast of pain in the stone-gray eye of the man beneath her, whose climber’s suit of homespun was daubed with mountain mud,–whose tweed cap was the brooklet’s toy.