Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch Part 9

"Oh, John is not feeling well, I guess. He hasn't acted like himself all day. But it's as much as my life's worth to ask him how he feels. He's got the temper of a wolf when he's under the weather--poor old John has."

Of course, the girls gave the motorman little attention--unless Rhoda did from her situation up front. The rest of them only noticed him when he started or stopped the car with more than ordinary abruptness.

"I do wish he wouldn't jerk the car so," complained Laura Polk.

"He's made me almost swallow my gum twice."

"Gracious, Laura!" gasped Lillie Nevins, looking alarmed, "if you really have any gum you had better swallow it before Miss March sees you."

At this Laura merely chuckled delightedly.

"I really don't like the way this man is running the car," Miss March said finally to the conductor. "Tell him to have a care. He will have us off the track."

The interurban line was not a smooth, straight-ahead road. They swung around turns that were somewhat sharp. John stormed along as though he were running on a perfectly straight track.

"I'll see what I can do," said the conductor doubtfully, and he went forward and tapped on the gla.s.s of the front door. But the motorman only gave him an angry glance and would not even reach around and lift the latch.

"He's running away with us!" exclaimed Lillie Nevins, who was always easily frightened.

"Oh, my dear!" laughed another girl. "What an elopement!"

"I hate to do it," said the conductor, when he came back to Miss March. "But I'll report him to the inspector when we get to the end of the route."

The car topped the heights of the ridge of hills that lay between Adminster and Freeling. On the Freeling side of the ridge the slope to the valley was almost continuous. But near the bottom was a sharp curve. Here was a low stone wall along the edge of the road, beyond which was a sheer drop of thirty or more feet into a rocky gorge. It was a perilous spot. More than one accident had happened there; but never an electric car accident.

The rapidity with which the motorman ran the car, and the jerky way in which he stopped and started it, did not bother Nan Sherwood much, for she was not nervous. Miss March, however, began to stare ahead apprehensively, and the way in which she twisted her pocket-handkerchief in her hands as the car started down the long slope betrayed her feelings. Nan was really sorry for Miss March.

The wheels pounded over the rail-joints and the car began to rock threateningly. A small obstruction on the track would very likely have thrown the car off the rails.

"I do wish that man would have a care," sighed Miss March.

Nan jumped up. She feared that the teacher would soon become hysterical. Also, Grace and Lillie began to betray fear and more of the girls were anxious. Nan stumbled forward to the end of the car.

Rhoda sat there, looking ahead, and betraying no emotion at all.

Nan could see the shoulders of the motorman, who was sitting on the one-legged stool on which he had a right to rest when the car was out of town. The rules of the company did not force him to stand all the time. His head seemed to sag forward on his breast. The car was running so fast that he pitched from side to side on his seat--

Or was it from some other reason that his body swayed so? The question shocked Nan Sherwood.

"Oh, Rhoda!" she exclaimed, turning to the Western girl, "what is the matter with him?"

Rhoda Hammond sprang up. Her face was pale but her lips were firmly compressed. She clung to the handle of the door. Nan was holding herself upright by clinging to the other handle.

"There is something the matter with that man!" cried the girl from Tillbury.

They shook the door handles. Of course they could not open the door, nor did the motorman heed them in any way.

Nan screamed aloud then. She saw the hands of the man slip from the handle of the brake and from the controller. The car seemed to leap ahead, gaining additional speed. The man slipped sideways from his stool and crumpled on the platform of the car.

The other girls did not see this. Even the conductor on the rear platform did not know what had happened. Only Nan and Rhoda realized fully the trouble.

"My dear!" gasped Nan, "we cannot get to him. And n.o.body can stop the car!"

She felt almost a sensation of nausea at the pit of her stomach.

She did not weep or lose control of herself. But she felt frightfully helpless.

There seemed nothing to do but to stand there, clinging to the door handle, and watch the car reeling down the slope at a speed that promised disaster at the curve, if not before. Never in her life, in any time of emergency, had Nan Sherwood felt so utterly helpless.

The girl from the West said not a word. She, too, clung to the handle and stared through the pane at the crumpled figure of the motorman on the platform. But she remained thus only for a moment.

Suddenly she swung sideways and pushed Nan away from the door. The latter tumbled into the nearest seat. Hanging by her left hand to the door handle, Rhoda Hammond doubled her gloved right and smashed one of the gla.s.s panes in the door.

At the crash of gla.s.s Nan sprang to Rhoda's side, and everybody screamed. The conductor burst open the rear door and started forward. Rhoda paid no attention to the shouts behind her.

She reached through the broken pane and lifted the latch which held the two halves of the door together. She flung them apart and leaped down the single step to the enclosed front platform of the car, Nan close at her side.

The conductor arrived. But it was the girl from Rose Ranch who did it all. She seized the controller and turned off the current. Her right hand wound up the brake as though she had practiced the work.

Fast as the car was speeding, the pressure on the wheels made itself felt almost at once. Nan wished to help, but realized that in her ignorance she might blunder, so held herself in.

"What's happened to John?" demanded the conductor. "My goodness!"

he added to Rhoda, "you're a smart girl."

But he took her place at the brake. The car did not halt at once.

It ran down almost to the turn in the road before it came to a jarring halt.

Some of the frightened girls had gathered around Miss March. The others crowded forward. Nan was holding Rhoda Hammond tight about the neck, and she kissed her warmly.

"You are a splendid girl, Rhoda!" Nan cried. "You stopped the car."

"I didn't see that you showed any white feather, Nan," urged Bess Harley.

"Ah, but Rhoda was more than brave. She knew what to do. We'd have gone off the track and pitched over that wall probably, if it had depended on me to stop this old car," declared Nan generously.

CHAPTER VIII

AFTERNOON TEA

The girls from Lakeview Hall were not likely to forget their experience on the car for many a long day. And they were honestly appreciative of the fact that Rhoda Hammond, the girl from Rose Ranch, had saved their lives.

But they did not really know how to show Rhoda that, in spite of her bad start at the Hall, the att.i.tude of at least the party of girls who had been with her in the electric car, had changed toward her.

Nan put her arms about the Western girl and kissed her warmly. She could do that, for from the start she had been kind to the girl from Rose Ranch. But the others hesitated. Rhoda was not a shallow girl. She did not turn easily from one att.i.tude to another.

The unconscious motorman had been picked up and laid on a seat in the car, and the conductor had run them into Freeling. John was there put in a hospital ambulance. That was all they could do for him.

The doctors said he had been walking around suffering from pneumonia for several days. The girls sent him flowers and some other luxuries and comforts when he was better.