CHAPTER II
A BAD SPILL
If the tree had not been directly in the way a serious accident might have been avoided.
But the tree was in the way. The driver wrenched at his wheel in an effort to right the van and regain the road.
No use!
With a terrific impact van and tree came together, and Jane was hurled from her seat. For an instant that seemed an eternity she felt herself flying through the air, then came with a crash and a crackle of broken twigs into a mass of bushes fifteen feet from the road.
She lay there dazed for a moment, the breath knocked out of her body. She was almost afraid to try to move, for fear she would find she could not do so.
It had been an accident, a pretty bad accident. She ought, by all rights, she thought, to have been killed!
It was consideration for Mr. Powell and what might have happened to him that made her decide to get up. This, she found, was by no means an easy matter!
She seemed to be lying on a bed of thistles, and her slightest gesture dug a sharp point deeper into her shrinking flesh. She was becoming increasingly conscious that her body was all one dull ache. Her nerves were jumping, and she had an absurd desire to cry.
Some one was breaking through the bushes behind her.
They were not all dead then! Some one had survived!
That some one was lifting her up from her uncomfortable couch, some one who chuckled softly.
“Well, we’re all alive, anyway,” said the author of the chuckle as he set Jane gently on her feet. “And, judgin’ from the sounds back there, some of us are kickin’, too!”
Jane saw nothing to laugh about, or even chuckle over. She was sore all over and her legs wabbled painfully. The thought came to her that perhaps moving-men were used to knocking trees over with their moving vans, and so did not take such incidents as seriously as more ordinary people.
“Is—is—Mr. Powell—all right?” Jane asked tremulously. Her lips would quiver.
“Yes, Miss. Hale and hearty as ever and in full possession of his lungs, as you’ll hear if you listen quiet for a minute.”
Jane listened, and was inclined to believe that the moving-man was right. Mr. Powell was evidently in one of his towering rages and was giving the unfortunate driver of the truck full benefit of it.
Shakily, with the arm of the moving-man through hers, Jane made her way back to the road.
She was not badly hurt. In fact, it seemed a miracle to her that none of them was badly hurt. Except for a good many bruises, a severe shaking up, and the shock, they seemed as good as ever!
The furniture appeared to have got the worst of it. Not new to start with and showing an irritating tendency to fall apart even before they had been loaded into the van, several of the chairs and other articles of furniture belonging to the Powells had been rather severely damaged.
It was this fact that Mr. Powell was pointing out to a bruised and sheepish moving-man when Jane and her rescuer reappeared on the road.
“But I couldn’t help it if a tire burst,” the man pointed out, not unreasonably. “That’s likely to happen to any one. We was on a hill and I couldn’t keep the blamed thing from skiddin’.”
“Yes, that may be all very well! But why were going so fast on the hill?” cried Mr. Powell, his point not unreasonable either. “I thought you were going too fast and, if you will remember, I said so several times.”
“It wouldn’t have made no difference,” the man persisted doggedly. “When a tire busts a truck skids, and the heavier the truck the worse the skid.”
“Then do you mean to tell me,” Mr. Powell rose on tiptoes and fairly towered in his wrath over the taller man, “that you and your company don’t hold yourself responsible for my broken furniture? Do you mean to tell me that because a tire is likely to burst and cause an accident, I will have to pay for the damages that result from that accident? Do you mean to tell me——”
“I ain’t meanin’ to tell you anything!” the moving-man interrupted belligerently. He was evidently a good-tempered, easy-going fellow, but almost any one will lose his natural good temper if a wrathful finger is shaken long enough beneath his nose. “It ain’t my business to tell you anything! If you’ve got to fight any one, go fight the company. I ain’t got nothing to say about it! Anyway——”
“No, but if I have anything to say about it, you’ll lose your job!” cried Mr. Powell, his anger whetted by opposition. “When I do put in a complaint to your company, I’ll tell them——”
“What will you tell ’em?” growled the moving-man, and moved a little closer.
Here Jane thought it was time for her to take a hand in the discussion. This she did literally, taking Mr. Powell’s hand that was doubled into a belligerent fist and clinging to it resolutely.
“Please don’t, Uncle Dink,” she begged. Mr. Powell’s first name was Dickinson, but every one called him “Dink” and it seemed, somehow, to fit him.
Mr. Powell tried to take his hand away, but Jane still clung to it.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it, Uncle Dink——”
“Who said he meant it?” Mr. Powell pretended to growl at the girl, but he was weakening. Jane followed up her advantage.
“It was an accident, Uncle Dink. I’m sure the company will make good on any damage——”
“Sure, it will,” broke in the moving-man, for he was a peaceable fellow when given half a chance. “It don’t want no dissatisfied customers, and it’ll make good on all the damage. Although lot of the makin’ good will come out of my pocket,” he added ruefully.
“And serve you right!” snapped Mr. Powell, still irate, though softened. “Now if you’ll get busy and try to make up for lost time I’ll be obliged to you. We’ve a long way to go and I’d like to reach there before dark.”
“So would I,” growled the driver, with a doubtful glance at the van. “The question right now is—will the old bus run?”
In the next few minutes that proved to be a very pertinent question indeed! Something had been done to the engine of the “old bus” that made it very doubtful if it would ever run again.
As the two men several times declared in the exasperating hour that followed, they had been employed to move furniture, not to repair engines.
“You’ve been employed to get me to Greenville this afternoon,” said Mr. Powell irascibly. “How are you going to do it?”
The driver glared at the smaller man.
“If you could tell us that, you might save us a lot of trouble,” he grumbled. “And now if you want to get to Greenville at all, you’d better stop talking.”
Again Jane acted the part of peacemaker.
“If we could get some horses to tow us,” she suggested, “maybe we could find some place where we could get help.”
“There ain’t no sech animal, Miss,” the second man assured her gloomily. “As for horses, it would take about six to tow this load. And where are we going to get ’em?”
Another question, and still unanswerable.
It seemed to Jane as time passed and the driver still tinkered vainly with his engine that they might spend the night in that lonely place.
Once one of the men suggested that the two passengers might walk on to the railway station. It was only about a mile-and-a-half away, he said, and Mr. Powell and the young girl could go on to Greenville, leaving them to follow with the disabled van, as soon as they could.
This suggestion Mr. Powell would not listen to for a moment.
“I’ll stick with the furniture,” he said. “Though you can go, Jane, if you like. I’ll take you to the station.”
But Jane was game and decided to stick, too.
It was about an hour after that that the engine gave a few puffs and then turned over once or twice. This was at least more encouraging than dead silence, and Jane began to view the efforts of the moving-men with more hopefulness.
They finally managed to get the motor to running haltingly. Then the damaged tire was replaced by a spare, and everybody climbed hastily aboard, determined to make the best of their luck while it lasted.
It was a never-to-be-forgotten trip. The van stopped every quarter of a mile or so, and every time it stopped Jane held her breath for fear it would never start on again.
Mr. Powell did not hold his breath—nor his tongue. If Jane had not been there to act as peacemaker, it is quite certain that “Uncle Dink” and the driver of the truck would have come to blows at some point along the road to Greenville.
When they finally reached the fringe of the town it was well after dark. Jane was tired and ravenously hungry. Also she was disappointed that her first acquaintance with their adopted town could not have been made by daylight.
“If Lou has reached here before us I hope she had sense enough to go to an inn or a hotel, or at least to a neighbor’s house,” said Mr. Powell, voicing a thought that had been worrying Jane for some time. “Kind of dreary going to an empty house and waiting and having no one come. I suppose,” with a worried frown, “she’s had us killed some dozen times already!”
They—or rather the van—limped through the streets of Greenville and finally stopped in a street devoid of lights.
“Here we are, boss,” said the driver, flashing his electric torch on an empty, dreary-looking little house set well back from the street. “This is the address you gave me. Guess you might say we’re here!”
“And small thanks to you,” Mr. Powell would have added had not a gentle squeeze of Jane’s hand reminded him that it was foolish to irritate the fellow needlessly.
“Well, we’re lucky to get here at all—with whole necks, anyway,” he said, descending with difficulty.
Jane tried to stand, and gave an involuntary cry of pain.
“I can’t find my feet,” she explained when Mr. Powell came around to help her to the ground. “They’re asleep, I guess.”
“As the rest of you should have been long ago,” grumbled Mr. Powell.
In spite of his own sore stiff muscles, he half-lifted Jane down from the high seat and set her gently on her feet.
“If you’ll make a light in the house, we’ll unload your stuff,” suggested one of the men.
“I’m going to see where my wife is first,” said Mr. Powell in a worried tone. “She couldn’t have got here or she would have had a light going herself.”
He started up the walk toward the dark house when suddenly Jane caught at his sleeve. A broad band of yellow light streamed from the open door of the house next door.
“Look, Uncle Dink,” cried Jane. “Some one is calling to us!”