“Lucky escape!” Tom shouted, turning his blazing face once to look back at the party in his car.

“Oh!  More than luck, Tommy!” returned Ruth, earnestly.

“It was providential,” declared Helen, shrinking into her seat again and beginning to tremble, now that the danger was past.

“Good hunting!” exclaimed the girl from the ranch.  “Think of charging a wildcat with one of these smoke wagons!  My! wouldn’t it make Bashful Ike’s eyes bulge out?  I reckon he wouldn’t believe we had such hunting here in the East—­eh?” and her laugh broke the spell of fear that had clutched them all.

“That critter beats the biggest bobcat I ever heard of,” remarked Jerry Sheming.  “Why! a catamount isn’t in it with that black beast.”

“Where’d it go?” asked Tom, quite taken up with the running of the car.

“Back to the ravine,” said Ruth.  “Oh!  I hope it will do no damage before it is caught.”

Just now the four young friends had something more immediate to think about.  This Jerry Sheming had been “playing ’possum.”  Suddenly they found that he lay back in the tonneau, quite insensible.

“Oh, oh!” gasped Helen.  “What shall we do?  He is—­Oh, Ruth! he isn’t dead?”

“Of a strained leg?” demanded Jane Ann, in some disgust.

“But he looks so white,” said Helen, plaintively.

“He’s just knocked out.  It’s hurt him lots more than he let on,” declared the girl from Silver Ranch, who had seen many a man suffer in silence until he lost the grip on himself—­as this youth had.

In half an hour the car stopped before Dr. Davison’s gate—­the gate with the green lamps.  Jerry Sheming had come to his senses long since and seemed more troubled by the fact that he had fainted than by the injury to his leg.

Ruth, by a few searching questions, had learned something of his story, too.  He had not been a passenger on the train in which Jane Ann was riding when the wreck occurred.  Indeed, he hadn’t owned carfare between stations, as he expressed it.

“I was hoofin’ it from Cheslow to Grading.  I heard of a job up at Grading—­and I needed that job,” Jerry had observed, drily.

This was enough to tell Ruth Fielding what was needed.  When Dr. Davison asked where the young fellow belonged, Ruth broke in with: 

“He’s going to the mill with me.  You come after us, Doctor, if you think he ought to go to bed before his leg is treated.”

“What do you reckon your folks will say, Miss?” groaned the injured youth.  And even Helen and Tom looked surprised.

“Aunt Alvirah will nurse you,” laughed Ruth.  “As for Uncle Jabez——­”

“It will do Uncle Jabez good,” put in Dr. Davison, confidently.  “That’s right, Ruthie.  You take him along to your house.  I’ll come right out behind you and will be there almost before Tom, here, and your uncle’s Ben can get our patient to bed.”

It had already been arranged that Jane Ann should go on to Outlook, the Camerons’ home.  She would remain there with the twins for the few days intervening before the young folk went back to school—­the girls to Briarwood, and Tom to Seven Oaks, the military academy he had entered when his sister and Ruth went to their boarding school.