Pam picked up the pot with the syrup.
“What about the trees I have not done?” she said to Don. “Will you be able to go over them later, or shall I come back presently?”
“I will do them when I come back from The Corner,” replied Don, and then he watched until Pam and the weeping Amanda had passed out of sight.
Gone was the joy of the sugaring! The grim story which the melting snows revealed was on every tongue. Nothing else was talked about, or thought about. A formal inquiry was held at The Corner, the Doctor’s wagon-house being used as a court-house for want of a better. Pam had to attend, also Sophy, and both of them told the story of the night alarm, describing how they had heard someone crying for help, and how, in spite of the fact that they knew wolves were in the neighbourhood, they had gone into the forest to hunt for the person they believed to be in difficulties.
“You must have been mad to do such a thing!” exclaimed the Doctor, looking at his daughter with horror on his face. He had thought so much of Sophy’s level-headed discretion that he had never seriously worried about the unprotected state in which she and Pam had lived all the winter. But the story of their wandering made him inclined to change his estimate of his daughter’s good sense. “Of course Miss Walsh would not understand how full of danger such a search might be; but you have been reared in the forest, or near it. If you had failed to hit the trail back to the house you would both have perished miserably by morning.”
“Would you have had us remain in the warmth and security of the house while someone was perhaps perishing within shouting distance of us?” demanded Pam with fire in her eyes. All this talk of taking care of themselves rather grated on her nerves.
“We should all have felt pretty bad if harm had come to you,” answered the Doctor, looking up at her with a smile which completely disarmed her resentment.
It was dreadful to Pam to have to stand in that crowded wagon-house and tell the assembled men that she had hidden the fact of the house being robbed, because she was afraid that if she spoke of her loss it would put the police on the track of her grandfather.
“If you did not see the person who entered the house and took the money, how could you be sure that it was your grandfather who had done it?” asked the legal gentleman in charge of the inquiry.
“I was not sure,” said Pam, turning to him with wistful appeal in her eyes. “I only felt that it must be Grandfather, who, pressed by his sore need, had lured us out so that he could enter the house, his own house, unobserved, to get the money.”