“Yes, yes,” broke in her husband. “Let’s do something! I can’t stand this waiting around, not knowing what may be happening to the poor child. Mr. Pickett tells me he’ll have every inch of woods for a radius of two miles around, searched by some of these young men. So we may leave that quite in his hands. But he thinks, and I think, that the child has been carried away. He said he heard the show people kept making their threats. They heard of the Singing, and judged that Azalea would be here and that it was their chance.”
“We ought to have cared for her better,” moaned Ma McBirney. “Thomas, I blame myself for not looking after her better.”
“Well, Mary, you’ll have to do all the blaming yourself then, for nobody else will do it. We’ve set ourselves to war against the children of Satan, and they’ve been more wily than we took them to be. That’s all there is to it.”
A light rain had begun to fall and the glory of the day was quite gone as the people turned from the grove around Friendly Church and moved off along the six roads that debouched from that gathering place.
Carin looked sadly from the little window in the curtains of their surrey, and wondered what strange thing could be happening to her friend. Though several hours had passed since she was lost, and though at least two hundred persons had joined in the search for her, and she had not been found, still, Carin found it impossible to realize that anything could have happened to the laughing girl who had run with her through the woods to the green dell.
Usually Carin liked to ride in the rain. It was fun to cuddle down beneath the robes, in the dusk of the curtained carriage, and “play.” Carin knew how to play much more delightful things without toys than with them. She had only to begin pretending that she was a princess who was being stolen and carried into the desert; or that she was a missionary traveling over the Himalayas; or a pirate’s daughter, going to hide treasure; or any other of a hundred things, to have a beautiful time. One of her favorite “pretends” had been that about the stolen princess. But the story had come true in a way, and Carin found it was not nearly so amusing as she had thought it would be.
The rain grew heavier and the sky sulkier, and when they reached home, it was chilly and almost dark. To be sure the great house was lighted up, and a fire was burning in the living room, and a delicious supper was spread. But these things did not bring as much comfort as usual. Mrs. Carson had insisted that the McBirneys should not climb the mountain that night.
“You’ll only have to come down in the morning,” she said. “Spend the night with us. We’ll telephone the sheriff and get him up here; and we’ll telegraph all the surrounding towns, and you’ll be right here to help and advise.”
“But there’s the stock,” objected Thomas McBirney. “I can’t leave the poor dumb beasts hungering and thirsting.”
“Hi and me’ll look after them, pa,” said Jim. “You just let us take the horses, and we’ll ride up there and ’tend to things.”