"He--he was wearing the same gray cap!" was the next cleaving flash of memory.
He was not really wearing it now. It bobbed in the rill beside him.
As one eye turned feverishly towards it, the third thunder clap of perception came in the staggering sense of how like he was to Una.
She might have been his daughter--Una--with that little fixed star of feeling set like a shining pebble now in her right, fascinated eye, reflected, exaggerated in the glazed cast of pain in the stone-gray eye of the man beneath her, whose climber's suit of homespun was daubed with mountain mud,--whose tweed cap was the brooklet's toy.
He had been trying to scoop up water in it.
And that brought Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl, to herself again, within quarter of a minute of her first laying eyes on him.
For there is one gallant anchor that will hold in any pinch,--when thought is shattered and speculation the maddest blur: the Camp Fire law: Give Service!
She unhooked her little camper's cup from where it hung at her green belt, and offered him a drink.
She dipped her handkerchief in the trickle of water and wiped the cold drops of faintness and agony from his forehead.
And then, when he had confided to Andrew, who knelt beside him, that he had slipped upon the wet, slimy moss beside the rill, as he ascended the trail, and broken his knee-cap by striking heavily against a confronting rock, she said that they must lift him to a dry spot.
"That's--r-right. She knows what to--do. Ouch! a--a knee-cap slipped, or broken--is--the deuce of a rack," groaned the victim, as they proceeded to raise him, the girls supporting, each, a knickerbockered leg, Pemrose the injured one, while Andrew took the main weight of the writhing body, until they laid it upon some dry moss.
Yes! and she knew further what to do, that Camp Fire Girl who wore the Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist, for plucking off her soft, green sweater she rolled it into a wad and placed it under the hollow of the injured knee, so flexing it, supporting it, while Una doubled hers into a pillow for his head,--Una who moved as if in a fantastic dream.
And then arose the question as to the next move; how to go about obtaining further help.
"We might--might make a stretcher with poles, saplings, with our sweaters, your coat, Andrew, and--and carry him down to the nearest farmhouse," Pem suggested.