“I’m right glad ye’ve come!” called out the boy, showing a wonderful amount of nerve. “I shouted till I could hardly call above a whisper, and I was nearly crazy with fear that I’d have to stay here till mornin’, when I heard you answer.
“Hurry, please, and get this old thing off me. Ye see I couldn’t reach the second spring nohow, try as hard as I might. It hurt something fierce whenever I twisted around that way.”
They were all bending down now. The first thing Rob noticed with a great feeling of relief, when he brought his lantern close to the prisoner of the rusty old bear trap, was that there were no signs of blood. This gave him fresh hope that the misfortune might not turn out to be quite so serious as he had at first anticipated; and also it proved that Zeb, a trapper of long experience himself, had hit the nail on the head when he said that the trap looked as if it might be old, and the springs weak in their action.
Apparently it had enough power to snap shut and hold fairly firm. Could the boy have borne heavily on both springs, he might have succeeded in effecting his release in the beginning.
Zeb immediately put his weight on the obstreperous spring. Andy pried back the unwilling jaws; whereupon Rob was able to take out the boy’s leg from the trap.
The boy rubbed his hand tenderly up and down his leg at the point where it had been seized. He gritted his teeth, and winced a little, but quickly exclaimed as if in deepest gratitude:
“Hurts some, but the bone wasn’t broken, and I’m unco’ lucky. What’s a black and blue bruise anyway? I can stand it, ye ken.”
With Rob’s help he managed to get on his feet, after which he immediately began to limp around, muttering to himself as he went, as though controlled by a mixture of emotions—thankfulness that it was no worse, gratitude because of the coming of these rescuers, and chagrin at having been caught in such a ridiculous situation.
Zeb meanwhile was examining the trap with the eye of an expert.
“Jest about worn out,” he was saying, “an’ she never’d hev held a bar in the wide world. Now, I wonder who put that no-good thing thar—no trapper as knowed his business, I’d say. Looks more like a kid’s work than anything else.”