CHAPTER IX
FROM ICY WATERS
“Here, Gloria, get into this and run! We’ll take care of Jack.”
Trixy gave this order, with it wrapping a heavy coat around Gloria, who was still standing in that pitiful little wet slip.
“I’m all right,” she declared, chattering.
But Pat was almost hysterical. “She’ll die! She’ll get pneumonia! And Jack! Oh, Jack must be dead——”
“Here, Pat, chase along with Gloria and don’t let her stop, do you hear? Race her like a horse, right up to the house. Keep her blood pumping——”
“All right,” agreed Pat, grasping Gloria’s hand and starting off with her. Action was what she needed.
Meanwhile Jack had opened her eyes, dazedly and so unlike the happy, mocking girl she had been in that time, now so hard to recall, but only a day or two ago.
Quickly her companions made an emergency chair of willing arms and carried her up the short cut, directly to the side door of Altmount. Her tawny head rested against Trixy’s shoulder, and it was Mary Mears who held Trixy’s hand beneath the helpless form. Mary’s face was alight and eager, her manner was quickened into expert generalship, and even the absorbing emergency did not prevent Trixy from noting this startling change. Then, there was jolly Pat gone off into hysteria, blaming herself for not being able to do anything else. Naturally Gloria had done the rescuing. Her childhood training at the water’s edge in Barbend gave her skill, while her own instinctive courage provided the inspiration. The other girls were shouting, wailing, gasping and were otherwise “plain silly,” so useless, so confusing, but Mary Mears, she was suddenly the executive.