“Artie Marley!” gasped Ward. “He’s fallen off.”
Mr. Meade reined in his team and stood up, his eyes searching the road which they had just come over. The children stood up, too, and tried to see, but there was nothing but an unbroken expanse of whiteness.
“I don’t see how he could fall off without saying a word,” observed Mr. Meade. “But if he isn’t here, he must be somewhere else. Hang on now, because I’m going to make the turn—if I can,” he added.
He tried, but the long, loaded sled wouldn’t swing easily, and it couldn’t be backed as a wagon could. Then, too, the farmer was afraid the load might shift, and he couldn’t risk overturning five children and having a pile of heavy logs fall on top of them.
“Can’t make it,” he said, when he had pulled the front runners around so that the road was blocked. “Some one will have to go back and hunt for him. I don’t dare leave you alone with the team, or I’d go. I think you two boys will be the ones. Don’t go off the road, and if you need help, shout and I’ll hear you.”
“We’ll all go,” said the anxious Polly. “Perhaps he’s buried in a drift and can’t get out.”
“There are no bad drifts,” Mr. Meade assured her. “It snowed nearly all night, but there wasn’t any wind. I wouldn’t say there was enough snow to even cover a boy, let alone bury him.”
The five children set off over the road they had just traveled, to search for the missing Artie. It seemed a very lonely road, now that they were walking on it, instead of being mounted high on a pile of wood.
“I don’t know what Mother will say if we come back without Artie,” worried Margy. “I must say, Ward, I think you ought to have been watching him.”
“Oh, Margy, Ward isn’t to blame,” protested Polly. “Artie always takes care of himself. I think a branch of a tree has swept him off. He’s so thin, and if he happened to be thinking about something else, he’d forget to hold fast, as Mr. Meade told us to do.”