“I would like to know how you are going to help it. To be sure, we could go back to the boat and get one of the boys, but that would just delay the game and I know you ought to get that leg set as soon as possible. Besides, I don’t believe men are any better in an emergency than girls, ’specially Camp Fire Girls; do you, Jane?”
The girls slipped the skirts on the oars and laid the improvised stretcher close beside the man. He was able to help them a little and, without causing him too much pain, they at last had him on the stretcher.
“I am awfully sorry for you; it will be hard on you going down this hill, but we will try not to bump you,” Jane promised him.
The man on the stretcher had not lost a bit of his hundred and eighty pounds, the girls decided as they lifted their load. Both of them were thankful for their hard muscles and good wind. After what seemed ages, they reached the beach and set the stretcher in the dinghy. Then both of them threw themselves flat on the seaweed that the tide had left and rested and caught their wind. The man had lost consciousness from the painful journey down and from lack of food.
“No use bringing him to till we get on the boat. It will hurt him horribly getting him over the side. Another thing, Jane, there won’t be room enough for both you and me in the dinghy now. You pull a better oar than I do, so you get in and row the man out and I’ll swim along out in a minute. I’ll get there soon after you do.”
“But I could come back for you,” objected Jane. “You must be dead tired.”
“Of course I don’t feel ‘fresh as a daisy,’ but it is no harder for me to swim out to the boat than it is to row out.”
There was no one on deck of the “Boojum” as Jane brought the dinghy carefully alongside. She called to Breck and he came up from the galley.
At his surprised look she said, “Frances found this broken-legged man up on the top of the hill on that island and we brought him down. He has fainted or something and I don’t see how we can get him over the side of the ‘Boojum’.”
“How in the world you two kids did it is beyond me, but I will ask questions later. Mr. Wing and I can rig up a bosun’s chair and get him on board all right.”