runaway wheel flashed into a mud puddle,
veered and before his astonished eyes shed a rib or two and a clavicle
from the swaying bundle, veered again and collided with his own wheel. In
another instant, the right-hand gutter held two muddy bicycles, the
greater portion of a human skeleton, Phebe McAlister and the composer of
the _Alan Breck Overture_.

An experienced bicycle teacher once said that no woman ever picked
herself up from a fall, without saying that she was not at all hurt. True
to tradition, Phebe staggered to her feet, exclaiming,--

"Thank you; but I'm not hurt in the least. I'm so sorry--"

Then she paused abruptly and stared at the stranger in the gutter. He lay
as he had fallen, his face half buried in the mud and his right arm
twisted under him. More frightened than she had been in all her headlong
descent of the hill, she bent over him and tried to turn him as he lay.
Gifford Barrett was an athlete as well as a musician, however, and it
took all of Phebe's strength to stir him ever so slightly. As she did so,
she disclosed a gash where his temple had struck upon a stone, and his
right arm swung loosely out from his side. Phebe McAlister had suddenly
found herself in the presence of her first case, and the presence was
rather an appalling one.

In any crisis, the mind attacks a side issue. Phebe rose from her knees,
took off the sodden thing which had been her hat, and carefully covered
it over her saddle. Her face, underneath the streaks of mud, was very
white, and her lips were unsteady. Then she pressed her hands over her
eyes, bit her lips and gave her shoulders a little shake. That done, she
knelt down in the mud once more and set herself to the task in hand,
wondering meanwhile who and what her victim might be.

Obviously he was a gentleman. His firm, clean-cut lips alone would have
settled that point to her satisfaction. Beyond that, she had no possible
clue to his identity. The situation was a trying one. The nearest house
was a mile away; the rain was still pelting heavily down upon them, and
she, Phebe McAlister, was alone in the storm with a perfect stranger whom
she had knocked from his bicycle, stunned and perhaps injured for life.
To whom did he belong? What should she do with him? If he died, who would
be responsible, not for the injury, but for making the funeral
arrangements? For a moment, the unaccustomed tears rushed to her eyes,
and, seen through their mist, her victim seemed t