They worked frantically pulling away the fallen boards and beams, Grove Bronson with a handkerchief wound around his bleeding hand, Wig Weigand with a great bruise on his forehead. Pee-wee strove like a giant. Soon the form of Blythe was revealed, braced by his hands and knees, and Roy lying prostrate beneath him.
“How are you?” one of the scouts called.
“All right,” Roy answered; “my foot is caught under the flooring.”
“Blythe all right? How about you, Blythey?”
Blythe did not answer. He seemed immovable, like a figure of stone. His bare arms gave the impression of a taut rope. A heavy timber which they lifted from across his back, where it had lain like a seesaw, must have all but broken his spine. A rusted nail in it had torn his poor, shabby coat almost in twain, and there was blood on the flannel shirt beneath it. Blood was flowing freely from a wound in his head and dripping down from his neck like water off a roof.
They turned back his coat collar to see if there might be a cut on his neck and there, confronting them, was the little cloth label containing the name of the clothing store in Quebec. It shocked the scouts to see that in the very moment of their friend’s supreme heroism.
“Blythe? Are you all right? Speak? Stand up, can’t you?”
He neither moved nor spoke. He seemed transformed into an iron brace. Across the calves of his legs lay a heavy timber, which had cut his trousers and which must almost have crushed his legs when it fell. As they lifted it blood trickled away. They noticed that he moved both feet spasmodically as if they had been asleep. There could have been no circulation there, for the timber across his legs had acted like a great tourniquet.
He remained immovable, silent, until the scouts had released Roy’s foot and helped him out from under that human roof. That roof, at least, had not collapsed. Bruised and bleeding as Blythe was, he remained in his attitude of Herculean resistance as if he had died and become petrified there.
Then he spoke, his voice weak but tense, “Is he all right?”