might have killed me. It would certainly have struck me, if I hadn’t dropped as I did.”
“Accidents will happen, you know!” pleaded Hammond. “I hope you don’t think I would do such a thing on purpose. It was a slip, just as when Dunnerwust shot the arrow into your nigger’s cap.”
He was about to say more, but checked himself, in the fear that he was beginning to protest too much.
“Perhaps we’d better gollow the firl – I mean follow the girl,” suggested Rattleton. “She may have tumbled down again.”
He did not wait for an order, but sprang into the path that led behind the tree, and hurried along it, with a half dozen curious fellows at his heels.
It was soon evident that the girl had not stuck to the path, which would have taken her back toward the village, but had plunged into the woods, which in places was thick with undergrowth.
“It’s no use to follow her,” said Hammond, joining the searchers. “It is likely she will make a short cut for home, where her father probably is, and where she can have the wound dressed. That is, if she was really wounded, which I doubt, from her actions. Perhaps the arrow only struck in her clothing, and frightened her. When I picked it up and examined the point, I could see no blood on it.”
The archery contest was virtually ended, with Merriwell and the Lake Lily Club the winners, and no one was in a hurry to go back to the shooting ground. But it was universally conceded in a little while that no good could be done by trying to follow one who knew the wilderness paths as well as any deer that roamed them, for it would be impossible to overtake her as long as she did not want to be overtaken.
While the boys talked and speculated, Nell Thornton was hastening on through the laurel scrub, unmindful of the stabbing pain in her shoulder; and, at the same time, Bruce Browning, wrapped in a heavy coat and with a handkerchief knotted about his shivering neck, was advancing slowly and languidly up the path in the direction of the archery grounds.
“I’m afraid that confounded chill is coming back,” Bruce grumbled, pushing a vine out of his way, “and I suppose I was a fool for leaving the cottage. I wish I had taken that other path, even if it is farther around. The bushes are thick enough here to make a squirrel sick, trying to worm through them. Hello! What does that mean?”
Nell Thornton, who had struck into this path from the woods, came into view, and was seen to reel and lurch like a boat in a gale.
Browning stopped and stared.
Then he saw her reach out to steady herself by a sapling, and sink down in an unconscious heap.
“By Jove! she’s fainted!” he muttered, stirred by the sight. “She must be ill or hurt! I wonder who she is?”
He forgot his lazy lethargy, and scrambled up the path with a nimbleness that would have been surprising to his friends, and which took him to Nell Thornton’s side in a very few moments.
“Blood on her hand and running down her arm!” he declared, with a gasp of astonishment. “Here’s a mystery for you!”
Nell Thornton lay with eyes closed, motionless, and seemingly without life. To Bruce her condition appeared alarming. He lifted her head, then let it drop back, and stood up and looked dazedly about, wondering what he should do. He recollected that he had seen a small stream of water trickling over the rocks a short distance below.
“Just the thing!” he thought. “I’ll carry her down there!”
As if she were a feather weight, he lifted her in his strong arms, and started down the path, moving in a hurry, now that his anxiety was thoroughly aroused.
“If the boys should see me now,” he groaned, “I’d never hear the last of it. Luckily, they’ll not be apt to see me. No doubt they are whanging away with their bows up on top of the hill. I wonder how she got hurt? Could it have been – ”
He stopped, and stared into the thin, pallid face.
“Could she have been hit by a wild arrow that missed the target and flew off into the woods? Heavens! I hope not!”
Down the steep path, slipping, sliding, maintaining his footing with difficulty, went Bruce Browning, with Nell Thornton in his arms, until he came to the rivulet he had seen gurgling over the rocks. There he put her down, as tenderly as if she were a sleeping child, and sought to make her comfortable by rolling up his coat and tucking it under her head and shoulders.
This done, he scooped up some of the water in his cap and began to bathe her hands in it, and to sprinkle it in her face.
But Nell Thornton was so slow to return to consciousness that Bruce was about to rip up the sleeve of her dress to ascertain the nature of the wound from which the blood still trickled, when she stirred uneasily.
Thus encouraged, he renewed his efforts, and a little later had the pleasure of seeing her eyes flutter open.
She stared in a puzzled way up into his face, then tried to get on her feet.
“Let me help you,” Bruce begged, slipping an arm beneath her head.
“Whar – whar am I?” she demanded, putting up a hand protestingly.
“You are hurt, and you fell in the path up there, a little while ago,” Bruce explained. “I brought you down here by the brook.”
She looked at her hand, saw the blood, and made another effort to get on her feet.
She succeeded this time, standing panting and wild-eyed on the rocks.
“I’m not hurt ter speak on!” she asserted. “I ’low ez how I must hev got dizzy-like an’ fell, but I ain’t hurt ter speak on.”
She seemed about to start on down the path, but checked herself, with the feeling that perhaps something in the way of an acknowledgment was due this handsome stranger, and continued:
“I’m ’bleeged to you. ’Twas a acks’dent, the way it happened. I war behint the tree, an’ they didn’t see me tell I stepped out, an’ then the arrer war a-comin’, an’ it war too late to be holped.”
“Then one of the arrows struck you, as I feared!” growled Browning. “Do you think you are much hurt? Perhaps you had better make an examination. The wound seems to be bleeding pretty freely.”
She drew the sleeve down, as if to hide the telltale color.
“Plenty time fur that when I git home, which, ef I ever git thar, I’d better be humpin’ myself along, too!”
Again she moved as if to start down the path, but was checked by Browning’s words:
“You are in no condition to go alone, Miss – Miss – ”
“My name’s Nell Thornton,” she said, coloring slightly, “ef that is what you mean. But these hyar mounting people don’t waste no breath a-sayin’ of miss an’ mister.”
Still, Browning could see that she was pleased.
“Miss Thornton,” he said, holding the cap, from which the water still dripped, “permit me to introduce myself. My name is Bruce Browning, and I belong with Frank Merriwell’s party, which arrived in Glendale only the day before yesterday. We have become members of the Lake Lily Athletic Club since,
