In spite of her bravado, Dorothy felt a lump in her throat. If Bill were missing, too, and she could not find him....
The pasture sloped gently upward over a hill, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. And on the horizon above the hilltop, the Castle reared its pointed turrets skyward. For a little while she watched the huge, grey pile of stone, whose narrow leaded windows reflecting the late afternoon sun, winked at her with many mocking eyes. What a dreary-looking place it was, she thought. Ugly and forbidding, it was entirely out of place in this New England countryside. The Castle seemed utterly deserted. It probably was. At least the path ended at the gully; there was no sign of it across the meadow.
Where was the bearded aviator—and above all, where was Bill?
“Bill distinctly said he would not snoop around the Castle,” she thought. “I wonder if he really came this far?”
So eager had she been to reach the edge of the wood that she had paid very little attention to the ground she was covering. As this new thought struck her, she turned and gazed back over the way she had come. There were her own footprints clearly defined in the damp earth—but there was no sign that either Bill or the smuggler had passed that way.
Back along the path she trudged, walking slowly this time.
“I’m a pretty poor woodsman,” she told herself. “They must have turned off somewhere.”
Her eyes searched the soft earth of the narrow trail and the thick bushes through which it wandered. But it was not until she had gone half way back to the stone wall that she discovered traces of footprints. And where the prints left the path, a ragged remnant of a handkerchief swung from a twig near the ground.
“There!” she pounced upon it joyfully. “How could I have been so stupid as to miss it—I might have known!”
The initials, “W. B.” embroidered in one corner of the dirty fragment of linen banished any doubt she may have had as to its ownership. Leaving it tied to the bush, she struck into the wood.