Their trips took them at one time or another to almost every section of the interior and the coast. At Lookout Beach, through New England, on Cedar Lake, at Crystal Bay, on the coast, even as far as the West Indies, all that happened to them on these expeditions, and it was much, is told in the previous volumes of the series.
In the volume immediately preceding this one, called “The Motor Girls at Camp Surprise,” a number of very strange happenings are recorded. To begin with, Cora’s car was stolen and she was almost inconsolable, for though her mother would have bought her one to replace it, she had an affectionate attachment for the old one that had so many happy memories connected with it. They found no real track of the thieves until, when they were spending the early part of the summer at Camp Surprise, they came across a gang of ticket counterfeiters, who had set up their plant in an underground passage leading from the very house where the girls were staying.
And now, as the reader has seen, the girls were on their way to spend the late summer in the heart of the Adirondacks. And right at the outset they had been witnesses of what was so nearly a tragedy that for the moment their hearts had stood still.
All alert, now that their terror for the child’s safety was dispelled, the girls hurried over to the driver, who still lay stretched out in the road. As they approached he opened his eyes and looked about him in a dazed way.
“The child,” he murmured, as he brushed his hand over his forehead. “Is it safe?”
“It’s all right,” replied Cora cheerily, immensely relieved to find that the driver was not dead, as she had feared. “But don’t try to talk now until you feel a little stronger.”
She knelt down and took his head upon her knee.
“Run to the house, girls, and get some water,” she commanded, taking charge of things, as she always did in a crisis.
The farmer’s wife, who had now got back some of her self-control, led the way into the house, and in a moment the girls were back with plenty of cool water and some linen. Cora washed a cut in the man’s head, deftly tied a bandage around it, and put some water to his lips, which he drank eagerly.
The cut was not a serious one, and the farmer, who had joined the group, announced after a brief examination that no bones seemed to be broken. He was urgent that the man should be taken into the house and a doctor sent for, but the injured man, who was getting stronger by the minute and seemed to have a very determined will of his own, vetoed this emphatically.