CHAPTER VI A STRANGE RESCUE

Although both Nancy and Orilla gave all their strength to the task, it was only with great difficulty that they succeeded in getting poor Rosa over to the pavilion.

“Now try,” insisted Orilla for times repeated, “not to attract attention. It’s awful to be always getting in scrapes—”

“Orilla Rigney! You just hush!” spoke up Rosa quite unexpectedly. “You make me sick. One would think I did this purposely, when I was merely following—”

“Land sakes, you hush!” begged Orilla, her tone of voice changing instantly from that of the arrogant boss to that of the humble petitioner. “I know it was an accident.”

“Oh, do you? Nice of you, I’m sure. I guess I know it—ouch!” A necessarily sudden move took all the courage from Rosa. She sank65 down upon the edge of the platform, her arms actually clutching at Nancy’s knees.

“Well, you don’t have to be such a baby,” snapped Orilla.

“Better a baby than a fool,” quarreled Rosa.

“Please don’t excite yourself, Rosa,” begged Nancy. “The thing to do now—”

“Oh, let her talk,” sneered Orilla. “That’s the best thing she can do—”

“But I won’t let you talk in that voice without—without talking back,” spoke up Nancy. “At least you are old enough to have sense—”

“If I were able I’d love this three-cornered fight,” put in Rosa, attempting to prevent that very thing. “But as it is—well, I can see myself in dry-dock all summer.”

“For a scratched ankle!” again sneered Orilla.

But Nancy had made up her mind. They were now safe upon the lighted platform, and she was going at once to find Dell, and she hoped Gar would be with her. Scarcely waiting to explain this to Rosa—Orilla she could not help ignoring—she hurried off.

66 “But do hurry back, Nancy,” begged Rosa, whose face could now be seen and it showed her suffering. “I’m nearly dead—”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Nancy again heard Orilla mutter, just as she hurried off.

Dancers impeded her way, and she was obliged to do some skillful dodging in and out of the movements to avoid actual collision. But Nancy scarcely saw them. Neither did she hear the jolly music, for it seemed to her tragic that such an accident should befall Rosa. It was only human for Nancy to feel impending gloom, so far as her vacation was concerned, but her dislike for Orilla, and the little mother instinct that so spontaneously went forth to save Rosa, had more to do with her thoughts than any possible loss of good times.

“I guess I’ve got something to do,” she was telling herself as she peered into face after face, hoping to pick out that of Dell or Gar Durand.

“Looking for us, too, I suppose,” she sighed. Then, realizing that they must know Rosa and her habits better than she did, came the discouraging67 fear that they too might be off in the woods—hunting for Rosa.

Moments seemed like hours, and every time Nancy espied someone who looked a little bit like Dell and presently found she was mistaken, her resources would wane.

“If it had been any other time,” she couldn’t help grumbling, “when I knew persons and places. But the very first night—”

“Woo-hoo!” came a call. Then: “Nan-cee!”

“Oh, there she is!” cried Nancy aloud, disregarding those around her. “Dell!” she called. “Here I am!”

In a moment Dell, her own face showing relief at the locating of Nancy, sprang up to her side and just grabbed her.

“You runaway! Where ever have you been?”

“Oh Dell, do hurry!” whispered Nancy. “Where is your brother?”

“Child! What is it?”

“Rosa’s hurt.” The words were driven straight into Dell’s anxious ears.

“Rosa—”

68 “Hush,” warned Nancy. “Can you get your brother?”

“Yes. He started at the other end. Don’t leave this spot. See, it’s the big post—” and Dell was off to locate her brother.

Briefly, very briefly, Nancy attempted to give Dell and Garfield some account of Rosa’s troubles, as presently they were all hurrying toward the sequestered spot where Rosa waited. She did not mention Orilla—somehow she felt that Rosa would not have wanted her to. Better let her cousin explain that angle, Nancy wisely decided.

But before they had actually come up to Rosa, Nancy saw that she was alone: that Orilla had left her!

“Oh, you poor darling!” exclaimed Dell with genuine sympathy. “To think you were here all alone, and we were hunting—”

“Slipped off into the rocks,” said Rosa simply, “and not even a life-guard around. Gar, how are you going to tow me in?”

“How come?” asked the boy. “Something ‘busted’, really?”

69 “A leg or two,” replied Rosa, “and it hurts like thunder, if you must know the horrible details. Give me a lift. Margot will have the fire department out—”

“Wait till I get the car. There’s a lane along here—”

“Trust Gar to know the lanes,” said Rosa, her spirits soaring with the presence of her friends.

In snatches she and Nancy told Dell something of what had happened—just something. It did not seem necessary to speak of Orilla, although there was a gap in her story when Rosa insisted she had simply been bound by ropes of briars and couldn’t possibly break loose. It was taken for granted then that she did eventually, somehow, “break loose”, and the actual “chopping out” was thus entirely omitted from the recital.

A welcome little toot from the horn of Gar’s car told them that he had made his way through the lane, and the next moment he was again upon the platform, planning how best to get Rosa into the car.

70 No one joked about her size, nor did they blame her for the predicament, for it was rather a serious matter, as each understood it, and only Rosa herself was privileged to do any joking.

“I can limp if you’ll promise me not to let me step for a single step on that game ankle,” she told her friends. “I never knew one ankle could hurt as badly as this does.”

Gar and Dell insisted upon doing the lifting, as they really were much stronger than Nancy, so with the car lights to guide them, they practically carried Rosa through the little patch that separated the pavilion from the roadway.

Even so, the journey was not accomplished without groans, grunts and admonitions, and it was growing more clear to Nancy each moment that the fat cousin was really quite a baby after all.

She wondered what had become of Orilla. It seemed improbable she should have entirely deserted the injured girl, and as the car was cautiously backed out into the clearance,71 Nancy kept watching for little flashes of the light which Orilla had carried.

Deeper resentment bore down upon her, however, as they finally made the main road without a single flash sending forth a secret farewell signal.

“How can Rosa be so indifferent to such treatment?” Nancy kept asking herself. “And why ever does she bother with that girl?”

Meanwhile Gar, from his place at the wheel, could be heard questioning Rosa. She was sitting in front because that position was deemed the easiest riding, and now, as they all sped off toward Fernlode, some of the terrors of the accident seemed lifted.

“No fooling now, Rosa,” Gar was saying, “how did that happen? You can’t fool me—”

“Gar Durand! How does a broken leg ever happen? It just breaks, doesn’t it?” evaded Rosa.

“Not just like that, it doesn’t. It has to get broken, and I’ll bet a peanut you were up to something—”

72 “The dopy-doc has got to fix you up, Rosa, you know,” interrupted Dell. “Perhaps we had better pick him up or give him a call on our way out. You know what a fuss he makes about night visits.”

“Margot would simply pass away and we’d have a double funeral, if we brought the dopy-doc up to the house, bodily,” replied Rosa. “Not that I want him a—tall—”

“Better get him,” insisted Gar. “I can’t keep lugging you around—”

“As if I’d let you!” Rosa parried.

“If you keep on getting better this way, Rosa,” put in Nancy, “I don’t believe you’ll need any doctor.”

“Bright idea! Wonderful coz! I don’t want the dopy-doc,” exclaimed Rosa. “Why should I have him until—”

“We are sure,” drawled Gar, “that the injuries are fatal.”

“Fatal?” repeated his sister. “You mean serious.”

“No, I don’t either. I mean—”

“Ouch!” yelled Rosa. “There you all go;73 mocking me. That’s the worst it has hurt—yet—”

Which turn of affairs fully decided Dell, for she gave definite orders then that Gar should stop for Doctor Easton, loquaciously called by Rosa, the dopy-doc.

“I’ll tell him to come out tonight,” she declared in the face of Rosa’s pleas and protests. “Can’t tell what a game ankle may do, and while I’m in charge—”

“You’re perfectly right,” insisted Nancy under her breath, rejoicing that someone would take Rosa in actual charge.

“And we’ll all be so late—” grumbled Gar, in that good-natured way boys have, “that our family will have the megaphone out. Nancy,” he said politely, remembering that she was, after all, something of a stranger, “whenever you hear the megaphone you’ll know there is nothing the matter. It’s mother’s warning to be careful of the water.”

“Now watch Margot take a fit when she sees you help me—please don’t call Baldy, Dell, he uses hair-oil,” said Rosa, when the74 car was pulled up in front of the side porch and the girls with Gar were promptly alighting, “and he’s sure to sling me over his shoulder, if he gets the chance.”

The next half hour was consumed in getting Rosa installed in her bed and “fussed up”, as Nancy put it, and also in the appeasing of Margot, who would not be satisfied with the account of the accident.

“Turned on her ankle!” insisted Dell.

“Turned on her ankle,” reiterated Gar, who just “hung around” waiting for the doctor.

“Really, I can’t see—” moaned the distressed woman.

“But it’s only her ankle,” chanted Nancy.

“Say Maggie,” sang out Rosalind, from her billowy pillows, “do you want me to have something else the matter? Because if you do I can exhibit a wonderful array of scratches—”

“The doctor,” announced Margot, solemnly.

“The doctor,” repeated Rosalind, comically.

“The dopy-doc,” whispered Dell. “Let you and me escape, Nan,” she suggested.