Next minute he'd jumped. But it wa'n't any use. He was too far away, and there was too big a crowd to get through. Even if he could have got there soon enough, he couldn't have stopped them crazy brutes any more'n he could have blocked a cannon ball.
I feels sick and faint in the pit of my stomach, and the one thing I wants to do most just then is to shut my eyes. But I couldn't. I couldn't look anywhere but at that pair of tearin' horses and them broad iron wheels. And that's why I has a good view of something that jumps out of the bushes, lands in a heap in the waggon, and then scrambles toward the front seat as quick as a cat. I see the red hair and the blue jersey, and that's enough. I knows it's that useless Rusty Quinn playin' the fool.
Now, if he'd had a pair of arms like Jeffries, maybe there'd been some hope of his pullin' down them horses inside the couple of hundred feet there was between their front toe calks and where little Miss Gladys was sittin' rooted to the cushions of her pony cart. But Rusty's muscle development is about equal to that of a fourteen-year boy, and it looks like he's goin' to do more harm than good when he grabs the reins from the whip socket. But he stands up, plants his feet wide, and settles back for the pull.
Almost before anyone sees his game, he's done the trick. There's a smash that sounds like a buildin' fallin' down, a crackin' and splinterin' of oak wood and iron, a rattlin' of trace chains, a couple of soggy thumps,—and when the dust settles down we sees a grey horse rollin' feet up on either side of a big maple, and at the foot of the tree all that's left of that yellow and blue waggon. Rusty had put what strength he had into one rein at just the right time, and the pole had struck the trunk square in the middle.
For a minute or so there was a grand hurrah, with mothers and fathers rushin' to grab their youngsters out of the carts and hug 'em; which you couldn't blame 'em for doin', either. As for me, I drops off the back of the coach and makes a bee line for that wreck, so I'm among the first dozen to get there. I'm in time to shove my shoulder under the capsized waggon body and hold it up.
Well, there ain't any use goin' into details. What we took from under there didn't look much like a human bein', for it was as limp and shapeless as a bag of old rags. But the light haired young feller that said he was a medical student guessed there might be some life left. He wa'n't sure. He held his ear down, and after he'd listened for a minute he said maybe something could be done. So we laid it on one of the side boards and lugged it up to the house, while some one jumps into a sixty-horse power car and starts for a sure enough doctor.
It was durin' the next ten minutes, when the young student was cuttin' off the blue jersey and the ridin' pants, and pokin' and feelin' around, that Mr. Twombley-Crane gets the facts of the story. He didn't have much to say; but, knowin' what I did, and seein' how he looked, I could easy frame up what was on his mind. He gives orders that whatever was wanted should be handed out, and he was standin' by holdin' the brandy flask himself when them washed out blue eyes of Rusty's flickers open for the first time.
"I—I forgot my—mouth organ," says Rusty. "I wouldn't of come back—but for that."
It wa'n't much more'n a whisper, and it was a shaky one at that. So was Mr. Twombley-Crane's voice kind of shaky when he tells him he thanks the Lord he did come back. And then Rusty goes off in another faint.
Next a real doc. shows up, and he chases us all out while him and the student has a confab. In five minutes or so we gets the verdict. The doc. says Rusty is damaged pretty bad. Things have happened to his ribs and spine which ought to have ended him on the spot. As it is, he may hold out another hour, though in the shape he's in he don't see how he can. But if he could hold out that long the doc. knows of an A-1 sawbones who could mend him up if anyone could.