It was Barty’s way to hold his tongue, and he had held his tongue then, but he had thought.
“I tried to please her and I tried to please you,” was what he thought; “and I’m hanged if either of you know what you want. All right—I do!”
So he had set off in a grim and dogged humor. Of course, he was glad—very glad—that Stafford had found Jacko so charming. Of course he did not object to her going about with that fellow named Terrill—certainly not! He trusted Jacko absolutely, and he was glad she had been able to amuse herself a little; only it was a queer sort of gladness. Of course, he wanted to be fair to his little pal.
“Jacko!” he shouted.
His lusty voice died away across the lake, and nothing answered. The canoe was still there, so she couldn’t have gone back. She must have turned off the trail into the woods. It was not a cold night; and there was nothing there that could hurt her. Barty said that over and over again to himself as he turned back—not along the trail, but through the whispering wood.
His flash light threw a valiant little pathway through the surrounding darkness. He stopped every now and then to call her. He limped painfully, and because of his injured foot he had on soft moccasins, not good for going over stones and broken branches; but he could have gone barefoot over red-hot plowshares then, and scarcely known it.
What, nothing here to hurt her—little Jacko, alone in the black shadow of the whispering trees—in the forest, where the old enemies, the nameless and formless things, never wholly forgotten by the most civilized heart, still lurked? He saw the wood not with his own eyes, but with Jacko’s. Little Jacko, with her eager, beautiful gait, her gallant little head held so high, and her pitiful youth and slightness!
“Jacko!” he shouted in anguish. “Jacko!”
He was in a panic now, trying to run, stumbling and falling, whirling the flash light in a wide circle, shouting until his voice was hoarse and strange. There was no fear, however baseless, that he did not feel for her now, no disaster that he did not foresee.
And at last he heard her. Her voice answered his.