“Oh, I hope not,” gasped her chum. “Who is he? Anybody we know, Jess?”
Jessie waved her away. “Run for Chapman or the gardener. Where can they be? Let them get out the hose and put out this fire. Do, Amy!”
“I’ll do that myself,” declared the other girl. “I thought of it first,” and away she went to where the hose was reeled beside the house-plug.
Mrs. Norwood had come out on the veranda, and, seeing that the girls were doing all they could, had herself gone in search of Chapman or the gardener. Jessie unfastened the aviator’s helmet and carefully removed it.
One look at the face of the victim of the accident, and the girl emitted a scream that startled her mother, just then coming around the corner of the house.
“For pity’s sake, child!” she cried. “Is it as bad as that? Come away, Jessie. Here comes Chapman. Let him attend to it!”
Chapman ran hastily to the spot—just in time, in fact, to get the stream of water from the hose right between the shoulders. Amy was rather reckless with the hose. But she soon got it trained upon the burning petrol tank. That scattered the flames at first, but in the end it extinguished the fire.
Chapman, meanwhile, leaned above the injured pilot and began an examination of his body. The victim remained unconscious, and Jessie continued to stare at his pale countenance, not offering to help the chauffeur in his examination. She had recognized the young man lying there on the ground.
“Oh, Momsy! it’s Mark Stratford,” the girl murmured. “Poor Mark! What will his father do if he’s killed?”
“‘The millionaire kid’,” the chauffeur said, kneeling beside the injured pilot. Nor did he use the nickname given to Mark Stratford by his college chums in any tone of scorn. The heir to the great Stratford estate, as well as to the controlling interest in the Stratford Electric Company at Stratfordtown, was well liked by everybody who knew him. Then Chapman added: “It’s a bad tumble he took, Miss Jessie; but he ain’t dead.”