FIRST AID IN THE CLOUDS!
“What’s that?” all three exclaimed.
Facing in the direction whence the sound seemed to come, they put their
hands around their mouths, and shouted together, “Hoo-oo!”
Again there was a faint reply.
“It’s down the Gulf Side Trail, and a bit west!” cried Art. “Come on!”
“Easy!” cried Rob. “We don’t want to go rushing off the trail this way,
or we’ll be lost, too. Here, let’s go south on the Gulf Side, until the
shouts are directly west of us, and then strike in toward ’em. Keep
yelling as we go.”
The answering halloo grew nearer as they moved south on the Gulf Side,
and presently it seemed quite close, to the west. The boys struck off
toward it, over what seemed almost like a rocky pasture there was so
much mountain grass at this spot, and in a hundred yards or so they
came upon a man and two women, one of the latter seated on the ground
moaning, her face pale with pain, while the other was rubbing her
ankle.
“Thank God!” said the man, as the Scouts appeared.
“But they’re only boys!” added the woman who was not hurt, her face
clouding with disappointment. She looked as if she had been crying.
The injured woman, however, said nothing. Rob took one look at her, and
saw that she was fainting. He caught her just in time to keep her from
falling backward upon the rocks.
“Here, hold her!” he said brusquely to the man, while he unslung his
pack and fished for the aromatic spirits of ammonia.
She came to in a moment.
“Lost?” asked Rob.
“We were walking from Washington to the Madison Hut,” the man answered,
“and this cloud came, and we lost the path coming down Mount Clay. Are
we far from it now? We have been wandering blindly, getting more and
more confused, and finally this lady sprained her ankle.”
“She ought to have high boots on, not low shoes,” said Rob; “especially
a woman of her weight.”
“Get me down the mountain somehow,” the injured woman moaned. “I’ll
never come on a trip like this again!”
“We can’t carry her far,” said Art, bluntly, “she’s too heavy. We’ll
have to get help.”
“Let’s get her to the trail,” Rob suggested, “and then one of us will
have to go for help. What’s nearer, Washington or the Madison Hut? Look
at the map, Art.”
“We must be on the edge of the Monticello Lawn on the south shoulder of
Jefferson,” Art replied. “It’s about an even break, but it’s nearer to
Adams, where our crowd is waiting for us.”
“Well, we’ll get her to the path, and decide,” Rob said. “Stretcher!”
The boys made a stretcher with their coats and staffs, and Rob and the
man took the ends, while the woman, who was large and heavy, was helped
up, groaning with pain, and sat on it. It was quite all they could do
to carry her, and the poles sagged dangerously. Art went ahead with the
compass, walking almost due east, and they reached the Gulf Side Trail
and lowered the stretcher.
“Now,” said Rob, “two of us had better go for help to Adams. Art,
you and I will, I guess. Peanut, you wait here and make the lady as
comfortable as you can in our blankets.”
“Hold on!” Peanut cried. “See, the cloud is breaking up! Maybe we can
signal. That would be quicker.”
The clouds were surely breaking. They didn’t so much lift as suddenly
begin to blow off, under the pressure of a wind which was springing
up. The top of Jefferson was visible through a rift even as the party
watched, and presently a shaft of sunlight hit them, and the whole
upper cone of Jefferson was revealed, a pyramidal pile of bare, broken
stone.
“Give me the staffs and two towels,” Peanut cried. “I’ll have help here
in half an hour!”
Rob went with him, and the two Scouts, forgetting how weary they were,
began almost to run up the five hundred feet of the summit cone,
without any path, scrambling over the great stones without thought of
bruised shins.
When they reached the peak, the clouds were entirely off the
range--they had disappeared as if by magic--and the sharp cone of Adams
to the northeast, almost two miles away in an air line, was plainly
visible. As they stood on the highest rock, a flash of light sprang at
them from the other summit.
“Hooray!” Peanut cried, “they’re there! They’re flashing a mirror at
us!”
“More likely the bottom of a tin plate,” said Rob. “Where’d they get a
mirror? Out with your signals!”
Peanut tied a white towel to the end of each staff, and standing as
high on the topmost rock as he could, held them out. Against the blue
sky, on the peak of Adams, the two boys saw two tiny white specks break
out in answer. They were so far away that it was very hard to follow
them, to keep the two apart.
“Oh, for a pair of field-glasses!” Rob cried. “Do you think they can
get us?”
“If we can get them, they can,” Peanut answered. “Here goes!”
“Woman hurt, bring help, Gulf Side,” he signaled, very slowly.
They both watched, breathless, for the answer, but it was impossible to
make out whether they were understood or not.
“Here, you take one flag, and stand up here; you’re taller,” Peanut
said, jumping off the rock. “I’ll stand below you. That’ll separate the
two more. Now, again!”
Very slowly, holding each letter a long time, and running a few steps
to left or right with their flags, they signaled once more, the same
message.
This time they saw the answering flags change position. “Good old Lou,
he’s done the same trick,” Peanut cried. “Look, I can read it now!”
“I can’t,” said Rob.
“Well, I can----G-o-t-y-o-u! Got you!” Peanut shouted. “They’ll be
here! How long will it take ’em?”
“Oh, half an hour, I should say,” Rob answered. “Come back, now. Maybe
the woman has fainted again.”
“Gee, why do people try to climb mountains when they don’t know how?”
said Peanut, as they descended again toward the little group of figures
below them.
“Help is coming!” they cried, as they drew near.
“Well, you boys were certainly sent by Providence!” the man exclaimed.
They all made the injured woman as comfortable as they could while they
waited. There was still a little water left in the Scouts’ canteens,
and they made a cold bandage around her ankle, which Rob decided was
not broken. Then there was nothing to do but sit and wait. It seemed
hours, though it was really less than thirty minutes, when over the
east shoulder of Jefferson, where the Gulf Side Trail skirts the
precipitous wall down into the Great Gulf, came the rescue party,
almost on the run--Mr. Rogers, Frank, Lou, and four men.
One of these men, it speedily turned out, was a doctor, and he took
charge at once, while Rob watched him admiringly, for Rob was going to
be a doctor, too. He felt of the injured ankle carefully, while the
patient winced with pain.
“No broken bones,” he said, “just a bad sprain. You should wear stout,
high boots for such work, madam.”
(“Just what we told her,” Art whispered.)
“And now,” the doctor added, “she’s got to be carried to the nearest
point on the railroad. Jim, you start along now to the summit house,
and telephone down for a train to be sent up immediately. We’ll get her
to the track at the point where the West Side Trail crosses, just below
the Gulf tank.”
“How far is it?” asked the Scouts.
“Two miles,” the doctor answered, “but we can do it all right. You boys
have done enough to-day. We are going that way anyhow, and you are
going the other.”
“Couldn’t we take her to the Madison Hut?” asked Frank.
“That would be a great help!” the doctor said. “How would we get her
down the mountain from there?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Frank.
Meanwhile, one of the four men had picked up his pack again and
was striding rapidly down the trail toward Clay, headed for Mount
Washington and the telephone. The other three trampers, and the man who
had been lost with the women, made a new stretcher of their staffs and
coats, put the woman on it, and started after him.
The Scouts begged to help, but the doctor said no.
“Twice a day over the Gulf Side is enough for boys of your age,” he
declared. “We can get on all right. You go back to the hut--and take
it easy, too.”
The man and both the women who had been rescued said goodbye to Peanut,
Rob and Art over and over, shaking their hands till the boys grew
embarrassed.
“Heaven knows what would have become of us if they hadn’t heard our
shout!” the uninjured woman exclaimed, again close to tears. “We were
lost, and Bessie was hurt, and we’d have perished!”
“Not so bad as that,” the doctor said, with a smile, “because the cloud
cleared, and you’d have found the path, and we four would have come by
just the same.”
Peanut’s face clouded. He had thought of himself and his two companions
as rescuers, and here the doctor was proving that if they hadn’t done
it, somebody else would! The doctor evidently guessed his thoughts, for
he added:
“That’s not taking away any credit from these Scouts, though. If we
hadn’t happened to be headed for Washington you would undoubtedly have
been in bad trouble, and if the cloud had lasted longer, you might have
been in for a night on the mountain without shelter, and that never did
anybody any good. Pretty good work for the boys, I think!”
Peanut looked happy again, and the two parties shouted goodbye to each
other, as those with the stretcher moved down the trail toward the
distant railroad trestle, and the Scouts moved northward, toward the
Madison Hut.
Then Peanut suddenly realized that he was tired. He was more than
tired--he could just about drag one foot after the other. Art was not
much fresher, and even Rob said if anybody should ask him to run fifty
yards, he’d shoot ’em.
They passed the Six Husbands’ Trail, swung around north of Jefferson
onto the knife-blade col between that mountain and Adams, passing
Dingmaul Rock, a strange shaped boulder called after a mountain animal
which is never seen except by guides when they have been having a drop
too much. Peanut laughed at this, but he grew sober and silent again
when it was passed, and when the trail swung to the left of Adams,
rising over the slope between Adams and the lesser western spur called
Sam Adams, he didn’t even grin when somebody suggested that they climb
Adams, which is 5,805 feet, the second highest mountain in New England.
“Go to thunder,” was his only comment.
Once they had toiled up the slope, however, they looked down-hill all
the way to the Madison Hut, and in thirty minutes they had crossed
the Adams-Madison col and reached the stone hut tucked into the rocks
at the base of the cone of Madison, the last peak of the Presidential
range.
With one accord, packs and blankets were dropped off weary shoulders to
the ground, and the three Scouts who had been into the Gulf that day
flopped down on top of them, and lay there exhausted. The other three
had already been to the hut and left their load.
“Well, I guess you’ve had enough husbands for one day, eh?” said the
Scout Master. “And you’d better not lie there, either. Come on, inside
with you, and lie in your bunks.”