"Winifred," he whispered softly. "Wake up, dear child!"
Then jumping to his feet he shouted to her father:
"Here she is, sir—and she's coming back to life! Water, Sawyer—find a thermos bottle! There must be one somewhere in the wreckage."
To Villard all else in the world was naught but this beautiful child woman whose head and body rested against his breast. As if paralyzed her father looked on, mute and despairing.
"Splash some on her cheeks," he commanded of Sawyer, who hastened forward with the bottle from one of the upturned cars.
"More—more—ah—that's the stuff—water! See? She is breathing again, and I doubt that she is very much injured. We'll soon know," he said to himself as he began, ever so gently, to raise her arms, and nether limbs one by one. Then he laid her, full length, upon the grass, and pillowed her head with his motor coat.
"She doesn't cry out—no bones broken—thank God!—just bruised, and shocked by the impact after fall," he explained to the dazed father with quiet gentleness. "Get some cushions out of the wreck and we'll make her comfortable under the shade of a tree."
Almost immediately a man on a motorcycle dashed upon the scene and with difficulty stopped in time. Throwing his machine to one side he ran quickly to the big roadster—"Number 12" had literally run his man to earth. There lay the inanimate form of William Parkins with the pallor of death upon his face, and a bleeding wound well back of his left ear near the occipital bone. His body was pinned beneath his heavy roadster.
"The man is alive—give me a hand!" shouted "Number 12" to Barbour, who, still dazed, had fallen to his knees in prayer for his daughter's life. But, he made no answer, thereupon Sawyer responded as best he could for a man of his age. It was more than a one-man job to raise the tonneau of the big machine in order to allow Sawyer to drag the limp body from beneath the wreck.
A retired doctor himself he knew how to manage the situation better than the man who still called for his girl.