“Well, Nancy was a little ahead,” Beverly went on. “She didn’t seem so tired as the rest of us, and Nelly was close behind her. Nelly had just said ‘We must keep together, girls, for it is growing darker.’ When Norma cried ‘Hark! I hear something!’ You know how sharp her ears are, being a musician? ‘It must be Anne coming!’ I said, and I was pleased. So I ran out to meet you. Something brown was coming, sure enough, just the color of our khaki suits. It came leaping and crackling the bushes, as if frightened. And then I saw it was a beautiful tawny deer followed by two baby fawns, like long-legged yellow dogs. They were coming straight towards me, the pretty things! But when they spied us they swerved abruptly and bounded away into the underbrush and were out of sight in a minute. We were so surprised that we didn’t move or speak a word. Then all of a sudden Nelly Sackett who was close to me gave a jump right at me and knocked me down on the ground.”
“Why, what did she do that for?” cried Anne.
“Lucky she did!” answered Beverly. “It was the quickest thing you ever saw, and it saved my life. ‘Don’t fire!’ yelled Nelly as she jumped. But in that very same instant there was a rifle-crack. The bullet must have gone right over my head. It hit the tree behind me!”
“Oh, Beverly! Who fired it?”
“I don’t know who he was. But a minute later a man’s head poked out of the bushes. He had the most wicked, dark face, but he looked frightened enough then. ‘I thought it was a deer,’ he said in a gruff voice with a curious accent. ‘Didn’t mean nothin’.’ And without another word he disappeared.”
“That must have been the shot I heard!” said Anne. “O Beverly, if I had known what it was! How brave Nelly was to save you!”
“That makes another hero in that family,” said Beverly. “They just seem to do the right thing when the time comes, don’t they?”
“Beverly, what did that man look like?” asked Anne thoughtfully.
“He was short and dingy, with a black beard and little bright eyes,” she answered. “He wore a cap and a red shirt. I couldn’t see any more in that quick minute. But I reckon he was some kind of strange foreigner.” Beverly’s voice was growing drowsy, and she drawled more than ever.
“It wasn’t my man!” thought Anne. “I wonder which of them lives in the ‘ha’nted house’? And what is he doing there all by himself? I wonder what that man meant by ‘Scalawag’? And oh, how glad I am Beverly was not killed!”