Chapter X: An Explosion

The rain came. It descended in perfect sheets, and only the fact that our tourists could reach a mountain house saved them from more inconvenience than a wetting.

They had just partaken of a very agreeable lunch by the roadside, all arranged and prepared by the boys, with endless burned potatoes down on the menu as "fresh roasted," when the lowering clouds gave Dame Nature's warning. Next the thunder roared about what it might do, and then our friends hurried away from the scene. The run brought them some way on the direct road to the Berkshires, and in one of those spots where it would seem the ark must have tipped, and dropped a human being or two, the young people found a small country community.

The special feature of this community was not a church, nor yet a meeting house, but a well-equipped hotel, with all the requisites and perquisites of a first-class hostelry.

"No more traveling to-day," remarked Cora, as, after a wait of two hours, she ventured to observe the future possible weather. "It looks as if it would rain all there was above, and then start in to scoop up some from the ocean. Did you ever see such clouds?"

Ed said he had not. Walter said he did not want to, while the girls didn't just know. They wanted to be off, and hoped Cora's observations were not well-founded.

Miss Robbins found in the hotel a sick baby to take up her time, and she inveigled Bess into helping her, while the wornout and worried mother took some rest. The little one, a darling girl of four years, had taken cold, and had the most troublesome of troubles--an earache--so that she cried constantly, until Miss Robbins eased the pain.

When the boys realized what a really good doctor the girls' chaperon was, they all wanted to get sick in bed, Jack claiming the first "whack."

But Walter had some claim on medical attendance, for when the storm was seen to be coming up he had eaten more stuff from the lunch basket than just one Walter could comfortably store away, and the headache that followed was not mere pretense.

So the rainy afternoon at Restover Hotel was not idle in incident. It was almost tea time when Cora had a chance to speak with her brother privately. She beckoned him to a corner of the porch where the rain could not find them; neither could any of their friends.

"Jack," she began, "do you know that the people in the gypsy wagon really did try to stop us? All that prattle of Bess and Belle was not nonsense. Only for Miss Robbins I should have stopped."

"Well, what's the answer?" asked her brother.

"That's just what I would like to find out," replied the sister. "It seems to me they would hardly have stopped a couple of girls to ask road directions or anything like that, when so many wagons, easier to halt than automobiles, had also passed by them."

"Maybe they wanted some gas--gasoline. They use that in their torches."

"But why ask girls for it?" insisted Cora.

"Because girls are supposed to be soft, and they might give it. Catch a fellow giving anything to a gypsy!"

"Well, that might be so, but I have a queer feeling about that old witch's threat. She looked like three dead generations mummified. Her eyes were like sword points."

"She must have been a beaut. I should like to have met her witchship. But, Cora dear, don't worry. We boys are not going to run away again, and if we see the gypsies we will see them first and last."

"But there are bands of them all over the hills, and I have always heard that they have some weird way of notifying each band of any important news in the colony. Now, you see, Jack, the arrest of that man would be very important to them. They are as loyal to each other as the royalty."

"Nevertheless it is a good thing the fellow is landed, and it was a blessing that he went for the cottage instead of to Miss Robbins' bungalow. _They_ had no means of calling help," mused Jack.

"I suppose it was," answered Cora. "But I tell you, I do not want another such experience. It was all right while I had to act, but when it was all over I had to----"

"React! That's the trouble. What we do with nerve we must repeat without nerve. Now, what do you think of your brother as a public lecturer?" and Jack laughed at his own attempt to explain the reaction that Cora really felt.

"My, wasn't that a bright stroke of lightning?" exclaimed Cora. "Listen! Something is struck!"

"That's right!"

"An explosion!"

A terrific report followed the flash. Then cries and shrieks all over the hotel alarmed those who were not directly at the scene of the panic.

"Oh, it's the kitchen! See the smoke!"

Jack and Cora rushed indoors, their first anxiety being to make sure that all the girls and boys of their party were safe.

"Where is Bess?"

"Where is Belle?"

"Where are Walter and Ed?"

"Oh! where is Miss Robbins?"

Every one was looking for some one. In the excitement the guests at the hotel were rushing about shouting for friends and relatives, while smoke, black and heavy, poured up the stairs from the basement.

Jack, Ed and Walter were among the first to get out and use the fire extinguishers. There were plenty of these about the hotel, but on account of the injury to the men who were working in the kitchen at the time of the explosion, and owing to the fact that all the guests in the hotel just then were girls and women, the men having gone to the city, there really were not enough persons to cope with the flames that followed the lightning.

"Quick!" shouted Cora, "we can get the buckets. Bess take that one," pointing to the pail that hung on the wall, and which was filled with water. "Belle, run around and find another! Regina is with the injured men, so we cannot have her, but there is a girl! Won't you please get a bucket from the hall?" this to a very much frightened young lady. "The fire extinguishers seem to be all emptied, and the men are beating back the flames from the stairway."

In a remarkably short time more than a dozen frightened girls and women had formed a bucket brigade under Cora's direction, and as fast as they could get the pails they handed them, filled and again refilled, to the boys, who were now doing all in their power to keep the fire from spreading to the dining-room floor.

"What happened?" demanded one woman, when Jack turned to take a pail of water from Cora.

"Lightning struck the boiler," replied the young man.

"Oh, mercy!" exclaimed the same unreasonable person, who was delaying the men with her questions. "Any one hurt?"

"Yes, three," and Jack, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and looking like the earnest worker he was, dashed again down a step into the dense smoke to splash the pail of water on the smouldering but now well-wetted woodwork.

It seemed then as if all the guests but our own friends had run out of the building, and were huddled on the porch or standing in the rain under the trees along the path.

Ed and Walter had carried the cook and the dishwasher out from the kitchen immediately after the explosion of the boiler, and the other injured ones were in the little cottage adjoining the hotel, where Miss Robbins was binding up their burns and making good use of her skill and the materials that she carried in her emergency case.

"But I am afraid this man is very dangerously injured," she told Ed. "A piece of the boiler struck him directly on the back of the head."

"Should he go to the hospital?" asked the young man.

"Without question, if he could. But this is so far from anything like a hospital."

"We could take him to Waterbury in Cora's car," suggested Ed. "That is large enough to make him somewhat easy."

"The very thing! But I could not go with him. This other man is suffering so," and she poured more oil on the face that had not yet been bandaged in cotton.

"Cora could run the machine, and I could hold Jim--they say his name is Jim."

"Poor Jim!" sighed the young lady doctor. "He has a very slight chance. See, he is unconscious!"

Ed rushed out, and in a short time had the _Whirlwind_ at the door. Jack and Walter were still busy with the fire, but they stopped when he called them, and together all three carried Jim tenderly out, and when Ed got in first they put the man in his arms. Cora also had been summoned, and without as much as waiting for her cap, but, getting into the cloak that Bess threw from the hall rack, she cranked up, and was at the wheel, following the directions for the nearest way to a hospital in Waterbury.

"It is his only chance," remarked Miss Robbins, when she heard some one say the jolting of the auto would kill him outright, "and both the car and its chauffeur can be depended upon."