The clerk hurried to the telephone, while Bruce paced his office. "If that chauffeur has let anything happen to Bonnie, I'll—"
If Bruce had not cared more for his little golden-haired daughter than for anything else in the world, he never would have thought such a thing, much less said it; for he had had Jennings for years, and knew him for the safest, steadiest of drivers. But he scowled when the clerk hurried back to report that Jennings, with Bonnie in the biggest automobile, had left for the office almost an hour before.
Throwing his light coat over his arm, the big mill owner slammed down his rolltop desk and dashed out to the sidewalk, straining his eyes for a glimpse of the big automobile and Bonnie's flying curls. As he stood waiting on the curb, fuming at the delay, suddenly he heard a voice that sent his heart up into his throat.
"Daddy! Oh, Daddy, here we are!" The big automobile swept swiftly up to him—from the opposite direction!
"My Bonnie!" The big man snatched the dimpled, smiling girl into his strong arms and held her there.
In the excitement of the moment, Jennings interrupted his employer as the mill owner started to question him sternly as to the cause of the delay. Bonnie, too, broke in with her version of the story, and together they told him how a punctured tire had held them up fifteen minutes just as they were leaving the house in plenty of time.
They told him how, to avoid being late at the office, Jennings had taken the old short cut across to the mills, by the way of Red Bridge, only to be halted by a lad of fourteen who waved a red handkerchief at them and barred the way across the bridge in spite of the chauffeur's argument and threats.
They told him how a heavy lumber wagon, in which three farm hands were rattling home from the city, had come bouncing along to the other side of the river and how the men had howled down the boy's wild warnings and entreaties as they bowled on to Red Bridge as fast as their horses could go.
Bruce's stern face went white as his little daughter, shuddering at the awful memory of it, told how the bridge had gone crashing down into the river—men, horses, and all; how the boy who had tried so hard to warn them had almost given his own life trying to drag the drunken farm hands from the swift-running current; how two of the men had never come up again; and how the third, towed to shore by the half-drowned boy a quarter mile below, had been laid face down on the river bank as soon as the boy could catch his own breath long enough to get the water out of the man's lungs and start him to breathing again.
Still clasping Bonnie tightly to him, her father got into the automobile. "Home, Jennings. Why, what makes these cushions so wet?"