“Here,Gloria, get into this and run! We’ll take care of Jack.”
Trixy gave this order, with it wrapping a heavy coat around Gloria, who was still standing in that pitiful little wet slip.
“I’m all right,” she declared, chattering.
But Pat was almost hysterical. “She’ll die! She’ll get pneumonia! And Jack! Oh, Jack must be dead——”
“Here, Pat, chase along with Gloria and don’t let her stop, do you hear? Race her like a horse, right up to the house. Keep her blood pumping——”
“All right,” agreed Pat, grasping Gloria’s hand and starting off with her. Action was what she needed.
Meanwhile Jack had opened her eyes, dazedly and so unlike the happy, mocking girl she had beenin that time, now so hard to recall, but only a day or two ago.
Quickly her companions made an emergency chair of willing arms and carried her up the short cut, directly to the side door of Altmount. Her tawny head rested against Trixy’s shoulder, and it was Mary Mears who held Trixy’s hand beneath the helpless form. Mary’s face was alight and eager, her manner was quickened into expert generalship, and even the absorbing emergency did not prevent Trixy from noting this startling change. Then, there was jolly Pat gone off into hysteria, blaming herself for not being able to do anything else. Naturally Gloria had done the rescuing. Her childhood training at the water’s edge in Barbend gave her skill, while her own instinctive courage provided the inspiration. The other girls were shouting, wailing, gasping and were otherwise “plain silly,” so useless, so confusing, but Mary Mears,shewas suddenly the executive.
“We’ll have her around all right presently,” she said calmly to Trixy. “Keep the girls back, Norma, we’ll go straight up.”
Within the house they laid Jack down, very flat, upon the floor, and again the girls werebanished, although the procession from the lakeside was loathe to disband.
Little Miss Taylor was too frightened to do more than approve of the efficiency shown by Trixy and Mary, and even the cynical Jean Engle looked on in unstinted admiration.
An hour later Jack lay on her own bed, blinking painfully.
“Wasn’t I the goose——” she mumbled.
“No, indeed,” replied Mary. “You were uncannily wise. If you hadn’t slipped down, like a tired bird, into the safety of that nest when you felt the dizziness coming, you most certainly would have slipped overboard. But there’s nothing to worry about now, you will be as fine as ever in a day or two.”
“Mary,” she whispered, “could I just speak to Gloria? I won’t talk—long.”
“Wouldn’t I do?” Mary’s voice was plaintive. She seemed so eager for the sick girl’s confidence.
“If you don’t mind, Mary, I want Gloria—to do something for me. She’s so——”
“Oh, all right, I know. Of course,” agreed Mary. “But Miss Taylor insists upon quiet until you have been looked over by the doctor.”
Jack turned wearily upon her pillow, and at the mention of “doctor” a deep frown gathered upon her still pale face.
“It really isn’t anything to be alarmed about,” she sighed. “I was simply tired, went out for a bracer in the strong air, and somehow——”
“We know, dear,” soothed Mary. “But with Miss Alton away, of course, Miss Taylor must be extra careful.”
Her voice droned down to a lull, for the patient was dozing off as if from exhaustion. While Mary and Trixy were attending to Jack, another scene was being enacted down the corridor.
In Pat’s room, where she insisted Gloria be taken, a rather noisy operation was being performed. The “rub down” being administered was vigorous to the point of violence.
“Leave me a hoof!” wailed Gloria. She was trying to retrieve “the hoof” Edna was working on.
“Think we ought to roll her?” suggested Blanche who had taken part in the other features of the reviving orgy.
“Just to show our appreciation,” inserted Jean. The last of the pure alcohol was solemnly pouredover two refractory feet, the same being pinioned by Patsy, who held a useless basin beneath.
“Oh, now, girls!” begged little Ethel. “No fair! She’s tired and warm as toast. Look at her cheeks!”
They were well worth looking at. As were Gloria’s dark eyes, “shooting stars,” according to a delighted little “freshie,” Naomie, who managed to slip in during the excitement. And Gloria’s head tied up in Pat’s best silk banner, the red one, brother Tom sent from his school, gave the prostrate but by no means quiescent Gloria, a very spectacular appearance, indeed.
Finally, the alcohol exhausted and some of the practitioner strength along with it, Pat, the leader, called a halt. They had been rubbing, drying and according to the patient, bouncing Gloria around from pillow to cushion, and between times to the floor, for fully an hour, so delighted were they with the excitement, and determined to make a good job out of it, and the result was now a case of glow.
“Putting the ‘glow’ in Gloria,” chuckled Pat. She was reacting from her frenzy of hysteria and would be at “concert pitch” for days to come.
“Let me up! Help! Don’t smother me!There! Where’s my own duds?” begged the girl surrounded by “her admiring friends.”
“Oh let’s,” lisped Ethel. “Let’s put her in that glorious red robe.”
“Say!” snapped Pat, “if you put any more glory in this bird she’ll flutter off to paradise. I’m so glad my name’s plain Pat.”
Nevertheless, the red robe was being applied. Then, a pair of silly little satin mules, with gold tassels, were put on Gloria’s feet, while an uncertain throne was erected among cushions from many adjacent rooms, and some further off down the hall. Thereon was installed the heroine.
“If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget it,” declared Pat. “To see her come sailing in with poor Jack’s petticoat at full mast——”
“Is she all right?” broke in Gloria. The surrounding mirth only followed an assurance of Jack’s favorable condition, and even now a scout was kept busy running up and down the hall, reporting snatches of words or indications, surreptitiously gathered from the crack at Jack’s door.
“Sleeping nicely,” announced the outpost, Janet Thornton. “And the doctor’s about due. Mary is still with her.”
“Mary?” repeated Gloria.
“Yes. One more strange thing that has developed on top of the accident,” explained Jean, who never missed the critical aspect of anything, “is the evolution of Mary. She’s as wise as an owl, as quick as a wink and——”
“As strong as a lion,” finished up Pat, smacking her lips gleefully.
“I always thought she was posing——”
But Jean got no further. She was wilted by the flash of the many condemning eyes.
“Be human, Jean,” whispered Maud Hunter. “The idols are changing. Can’t you see Glo, Trix and Mary are the new trio?” Maud was just human enough herself to enjoy the dethronement of Jean.
“What I can’t fathom,” returned Pat, who had propped herself up on Gloria’s left and was now licking a home-made lollypop, “is why you dashed out, risking life and limb, after what seemed to be an empty canoe? Why, I ask you?”
“Just the sailor’s instinct of rescuing anything helpless on the water,” said Gloria quietly. “The canoe seemed to be having a good time but it couldn’t make shore——”
“Comes of being born a hero! A real, naturalhero,” interjected Edna. “I have always heard that the——”
“Needle of a mariner’s compass always points north,” paraphrased Janet. “Edna, we can’t exactly build bon-fires and have parades until Jack is able to tell her story, so save some ammunition.”
“Jack’s story!” repeated Edna excitedly. “Oh, what a thrill that’ll be!”
“Why?” interrupted Pat, immediately on the defensive. “Was there anything thrilling in going faint in a canoe?”
“But why the canoe?” This was from Jean in her most caustic tone.
“Why not the canoe?” flung back Gloria.
“In November?”
“Certainly, or in December if one cared to,” Gloria slipped away from the most becoming cushion as she defended Jack. “For my part, I think water sports in the cooler weather lots more fun than in the broiling summer time.”
“Uh-huh!” chanted Pat. “We see you do. Has that cake of ice melted off your left biceps yet?” A lunge at the biceps went after the answer. “Gloria Doane, star swimmer of Lake Manypeaks, champion rescuer of floating canoes,and otherwise, notwithstanding and all the same, a fairish sort of girl——”
“Here, Pat, get your breath!” ordered Gloria forcibly, checking the flattering outburst. “We haven’t any more alcohol, and you’re too lumpy to rub easily.”
“Now, there,” choked Pat, “you spoiled my speech. I was going to say——What on earth was I going to say?”
“You said it,” retorted Jean. “We were discussing the unusual procedure of canoeing in winter. Gloria was for it, you know, but then, Gloria is from a sea coast town, aren’t you?”
“If she hadn’t been, I just wonder when and how we would have found poor Jack?” That from Pat settled Jean’s attempt at the usual “country girl” slur. Gloria turned her head up regally, however, and a couple of sniffs from her sympathisers were aimed directly at Jean. Somehow Jean couldn’t stay good natured long enough to even encourage the mood.
A commotion in the hall brought every girl up alertly.
“The doctor’s come——” lisped Edna.
“Come? Just with Jack now?” asked Gloria.
“And gone,” continued Edna, without a break in her voice.
“What did he say?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Is she all right?”
“Can’t we go in now?”
“Is Mary still on guard?”
“What’s Trixy doing?”
“Has Alty come back?”
“Oh, say,” protested Pat. “What is this, anyway? A spelling bee? Go ahead, Neddie. Tell us all you know and don’t strangle under it.”
“All I know is,” went on Edna, panting from the importance of her message, “Mary came to the door and told the kitchen girl——”
“Her name is Tillie, Edna,” volunteered Janet.
“All right. Mary told Tillie to fetch a hot foot bath——”
“Oh, maybe it’s pneumonia.”
“Shut up, Ethel. Go ahead, Ned,” ordered Pat.
“I don’t think it’s pneumonia, for I heard Jack laugh——”
“Oh, they do sometimes,” Gloria swallowed her own chuckle. “A laugh really isn’t a serioussymptom.”
“Now, don’t tease Edna when she’s just pantingwith sheer exertion and trying to answer your silly questions,” interceded Blanche. “If some of you had to duck in and out that hall, under doctor’s bags, hot water bags, and steaming hot baths——”
But Edna was through. She knew when she was being teased and she hated it. Not another word could any one, even Gloria, coax or cajole out of her.
It was getting late, almost dark, and the excitement was now momentarily subsiding. In Jack’s room Miss Taylor, Trixy and Mary were all trying to reconcile her to obey the doctor’s orders.
“An overstrained heart,” the gray haired man had pronounced the case, and “positive rest, no physical activities, not even prolonged walking” went with his directions.
Jack protested. She had had such spells before and always rebounded in a day or two. Why all the restriction?
When Trixy, over at a far end of the room, inadvertently heard Dr. Briggs ask what special effort had brought on the attack, she wondered about that early morning wild ride, down from Mount Major. But Jack had not admitted it, infact she replied to the doctor that nothing more than just “a played-out feeling” could have been responsible. And she had taken the canoe ride to brace up, she felt the need of strong currents of air, but they, evidently, were either too strong or she was too exhausted to do otherwise than “keel over.”
When the doctor had gone and it was possible for her to get a word with Trixy, Jack managed to repeat the request she had made to Mary.
“I must speak with Gloria,” she whispered, while Trixy smoothed a pillow. “Won’t you fix it—for me?”
And Trixy nodded an unmistakable assent.