Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at the path's side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.
The next turn of the path hid them from sight again. But in two minutes she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.
When she reached them they had disentangled Gerda and the bicycle, and Barry held Gerda in his arms. She was unconscious, and a cut in her head was bleeding, darkening her yellow hair, trickling over her colourless face. Her right leg and her left arm lay stiff and oddly twisted.
Barry, his face drawn and tense, said "We must get her up to the path before she comes to, if possible. It'll hurt like hell if she's conscious."
They had all learnt how to help their fellow creatures in distress, and how you must bind broken limbs to splints before you move their owner so much as a yard. The only splint available for Gerda's right leg was her left, and they bound it tightly to this with three handkerchiefs, then tied her left arm to her side with Nan's stockings, and used the fourth handkerchief (which was Gerda's, and the cleanest) for her head. She came to before the arm was finished, roused to pained consciousness by the splinting process, and lay with clenched teeth and wet forehead, breathing sharply but making no other sound.
Then Barry lifted her in his arms and the others supported her on either side, and they climbed slowly and gently up to the path, not by the sheer way of their descent but by a diagonal track that joined the path further down.
"I'm sorry, darling," Barry said through his teeth when he jolted her. "I'm frightfully sorry.... Only a little more now."
They reached the path and Barry laid her down on the grass by its side, her head supported on Nan's knee.
"Very bad, isn't it?" said Barry gently, bending over her.
She smiled up at him, with twisted lips.