It was but for a moment—an eternal moment—that the man and the kneeling girl watched it, before it roosted, bird of thunder, in a tree top, a noble white ash, over fifty feet tall, growing upon this side of the garden wall.
The startled tree seemed rolling up the whites of its eyes in terror—rustling the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—as the burning plane landed and stuck upon a topmost branch; and, a second earlier, the aviator, finding that he could not make a better landing before the gasolene tank blew up, jumped.
As the dark, helmeted streak shot downward, it just grazed the old sundial, which now counted one flaming hour amid its many sunny ones—and landed right in the middle of the blooming flower clock.
“Dog out!” groaned Andrew and, with the hoarse exclamation on his lips, sprang forward to catch it—break the fall.
But his long arms, his strong breast missed it.
With a soft, reverberating thud it landed in the dial-bed, right on the head of pale Miss Poppy, garden beauty, who got the flattening shock of her life at the moment.
One leg of the figure, rebounding, hit its owner, the half-stunned aviator, below the waist line, after which he, too, drooped over, lay, huddled, amid the flattened flowers.
“Treff! Oh-h! my cousin Treff. Coming to take Pemrose—up!... Is he—dead?” It seemed to Una to be the ghost of herself that put the question.
“Dead—no! My paley lamb!” Even at this moment the elderly chauffeur shot a glance of fatherly concern and tenderness at the white-lipped girl—she was to him a symbol of the daughter he had lost.
“Dead—not by a hand’s-breadth!” Andrew was kneeling by the unconscious figure, straightening it out. “But his right leg’s broke, I fear—poor lad. Hit him in the stomach, too, that blamed leg, knocked his wind out—knocked him into as-far-land! Water-r, lassie! Water! A stream near-hand there, by the wood!”