“You’ll get her back for me, Varley?” she cried, with clasped hands and tears streaming from her eyes. “It was bad enough when she went to England, but this is wuss!” Then suddenly, as she saw Varley’s face, her tone changed, woman-like: “Don’t take on about it so, Varley; don’t give up hope. Yer heart’s breakin’, I can see.”
Varley smiled.
“It’s broken!” he said, simply.
While he had been talking he had been examining the room for some traces of the kidnappers, and now he went outside with the lantern and examined the ground beyond the threshold.
Norman had been hunting round also, and suddenly he uttered a cry and held something white aloft.
Varley ran up to him where he stood, about a hundred yards from the hut.
“I’ve found this!” said Norman, eagerly. “It’s a sheet of paper with a piece of stick stuck through it.”
The two men held the candle above the paper and read it together. It was a badly spelled scrawl, written on the back of an old play-bill, and ran thus:
“We’ve got the gal. You can hev her by payin’ two hundred pounds, which we should hev got out of the coach. Let one man bring the muny ter the old hut in the Raven Claim on fridy evenin’, an’ the gal shall be given up. We wait til then, an’ no longer.”
There was no signature.