In this desperate pass he tried to shout, but found, as the spent runner usually does, that he was almost voiceless. A feeble call was all he could manage, and on the contrary wind and noise of the storm, this was quite inadequate. He could only stumble on, borne up by his indomitable will. He was weakening and he knew it.
Yet the light of the bus so near him gave him fresh hope, and with it fresh strength. It seemed a kind of perversity of fate that he should have reached a point ordinarily within earshot, and yet could not make his approach known.
Just as the bus was passing his course, and when it was perhaps three or four hundred feet distant, Hervey, putting all his strength into a final spurt, sped forward in a blind frenzy like one possessed. He saw the bus go by; heard the voices within it. Throwing his jack-knife from him in a kind of frantic, maniacal desperation, he tried to scream, and finding that he could not, that his voice was dead while yet his limbs lived, and that his panting throat was clogged up and his nerves jangled and uncontrollable, he bounded forward in a kind of delirium of concentrated effort.
Then, suddenly, his foot sank into a hole. Perhaps with a little calmness and patience he could have released it. But in his wild hurry he tried to wrench it out. A sudden, sharp pain rewarded this insane effort. He lost his balance and went sprawling to the ground, another quick, excruciating twinge accompanying his fall, and lay there on the soggy ground like a woodchuck in a trap.
The old bus went lumbering by.
CHAPTER IX
THE HERO
The best account of this business was given by Darby Curren, the bus driver, or Curry, as the boys called him.