“If it’s a hospital emergency call, the police will come,” Westy warned.
“Never mind,” said Doc, “get to a ’phone, that’s all I care about. And hustle.”
Before he had finished speaking Artie was gone. Several of them watched his fleeting form, moving with steady, easy speed down the smooth white road. The patter of his shoes sounded farther and farther off until the sound died altogether, and the hurrying figure grew smaller and smaller as if it were going down the scale from patrol leader to tenderfoot. They saw his hat blow off and that he did not pause to recover it. Then he passed between the old gateposts where the sentinels had once stood, and disappeared in a turn of the road. There were houses a little beyond that point.
Under Doc’s direction the scouts worked three boards under Blythe’s own balsam couch and carried this to where he lay. They got him onto it and bore it gently into the camping shack, out of the glaring sunlight. There, in Blythe’s Bunk, the only home he knew, they laid him gently down and at Doc’s request those who were not needed went out. The victim lay quite unconscious, his face ghastly pale and with a look of being polished caused perhaps by the water which Doc Carson kept applying.
The wet, matted hair, too, gave him a ghastly, unhuman look. But Doc said that his pulse was fair and that the blood was not flowing too profusely. That was all he would say. With the true spirit of one who ministers he seemed to have forgotten all else except that Blythe was stricken.
Outside the air seemed tense, the scouts standing about in little groups, waiting. Their suspense was shown in the occasional glances which they gave up the road. They spoke in undertones, their talk was forced and charged with nervous tension. A kind of foreboding dwelt among them.
“They’ll find out everything now,” one said. “Should we maybe hide his coat?”
“We have no right to do that,” said another.
“It’s out of our hands now,” Westy said.
Then spoke Pee-wee Harris out of his staunch, sturdy little heart, “I don’t care–I don’t care what you say–he didn’t do it. Lots of people look like other people. Because anyway I know he didn’t do it. Remember about that robin.”