When he came to his senses, the stars were looking down at him, silent watchers known to scouts, the only comrades who saw what he had done. The clouds had cleared for Emerson Skybrow and he saw the light. These stars would guide him many times and oft; they seemed even now to be waiting for him.
He was lying half-submerged on rocks and mud. The plank which he had alighted on was floating. One of his eyes was glued shut and he had to use a trembling hand to open it. He stretched his arms and legs and found that he was not helpless. He felt of his forehead and it was shocking to the touch, as if something terrible had happened there. But this was only a cut, extensive rather than deep, and incrusted with blood. But it had ceased to bleed. He felt strange and his head ached cruelly and when he got to his feet, he found that he was weaker than he had supposed.
For a moment, he reeled and caught himself just in time to keep from falling. He glanced about bewildered, pressing his wounded forehead and wondering where he was. “I think I must be dreaming, I—I don’t—I seem to have lost my bearings completely,” he said in his nice way.
But soon he was in full possession of his wits; he remembered leaping, and he realized why he did not have his jacket on. He wondered how long he had lain unconscious. Long enough for the clouds to have passed and for the friendly stars to resume their watch in the sky, at any rate.
“This is certainly a predicament,” he said, looking about. From sheer force of habit he brought his left hand up to his bedraggled scarf and pinched it into proper adjustment in the opening of his soiled, wilted collar.
Suddenly it came to him in a flash why he was there. One misgiving was dispelled; the water was not deep. If it had been, he certainly would have been in a “predicament” for he did not know how to swim.
He stumbled through the shallow water, encountering rocks and sinking almost knee-deep in mud, and sat upon the little hubble of fallen masonry which was the only dry spot in that horrible prison. He lowered his throbbing forehead to his hands and sat thus for a few moments to regain possession of his fitful senses. Then he was startled into activity by sudden recollection of the urgency of his errand.
He seemed quite himself now, but weak and shaky. Tremblingly, in a panic of fearful apprehension, he looked for the dash of color which he had seen from above. There it was, a mud-stained sleeve, almost at his feet. He could not bear to touch the white hand that projected from it. Rather than do that, he felt of the other little spot of color near it, which also he had seen from above. It was a mass of disordered hair upon the water close to the debris. If the head which it covered lay face down then his reckless plunge and suffering had gone for naught.
He could not bring himself to move that spreading, undulating mass of hair. He found it easier to feel of the mud-smeared hand. If the one to whom that mud-stained hand belonged could have known that it was “Arabella” Skybrow clasping it, she would have been the most astonished little girl in the world.
Would she ever know? Or was she past all knowing? Was even she, the little red-headed subject of his heroism, not to see him as he really was?