The car crashed into the weather-worn railing of the bridge
“That’s Lost Mine Hill, fellows!” he said. “From there, it’s not more than three miles to our stopping-place.”
Eagerly they stared and speculated as the truck clattered down the incline, its horn sounding raucously. At the bottom there was a straight level stretch of a thousand feet or so, with a bridge midway along it. It was sandy here in the hollow, and the truck had made little more than half the distance to the bridge when all at once, with a weird wailing of the siren, a great gray car shot into sight around a curve beyond.
It was going very fast. Dale and Court, hanging over the side of the truck together, had barely time to note the trim chauffeur behind the wheel and a man and woman in the luxurious tonneau when the explosion of a blow-out, sharp as a pistol-shot, smote on their startled senses. The car leaped, quivered, skidded in the loose sand, crashed into the weather-worn railing of the bridge, hung suspended for an instant above the stream, and then toppled over and out of sight. There was a tremendous splash, a great spurt of flying water, and then–silence!
CHAPTER XX
FIRST AID
Dale never knew just how he got out of the truck. Gripped by the horror and suddenness of the accident, his mind was a blank until he found himself running over the bridge amid a throng of other hurrying scouts. A moment later he was pressed close to the unbroken portion of the railing, and, staring down, caught a glimpse of the gray car upturned in the sluggish waters of the stream.
The car had turned turtle, and the great wheels, still spinning slowly, showed above the surface almost to their hubs. The water was roiled and muddy; bubbles and a little steam rose about the forward part of the car. Ten feet away floated a chauffeur’s cap. Nearer at hand, a light lap-robe, billowed by the air caught underneath, seemed for an instant to be the clothing of one of the passengers. But Dale swiftly understood its real nature, and with a choke he realized that the people were pinned beneath the car. All this came to him in a flash; then, as Mr. Curtis and the foremost of the scouts plunged down into the wide, but shallow, stream, he turned suddenly about and raced back to the truck.
It wasn’t the sick sense of horror that moved him. All at once he had remembered the troop first-aid kit, which he himself had carefully stowed away under one of the long seats. They would need it badly, and he did not think any of the others had stopped to get it. There would be plenty of them without him to lift the car.
Panting to the side of the deserted truck, Dale leaped into the back, and, dropping to his knees, tore and dug among the close-packed baggage like a terrier seeking rats. Swiftly he unearthed the square, japanned case and dragged it forth. When he reached the bridge again, the scene had altogether changed. Waist-deep in the water, a line of scouts was holding up the heavy car, whose weight was testified to by their straining muscles and tense attitudes. Already the two passengers had been dragged forth. The one whom at first they had taken to be a woman had been carried to the bank, and Dale saw, with a throb of pity, that she was a girl of not more than fifteen. Two scouts supported the limp figure of the man, and as Dale ran around the end of the bridge and down the bank a shout from Sherman Ward announced the discovery of the chauffeur.