[p85]
Would anyone come to find them? they wondered.
“Well, I’ll make the attempt to go down and get a lantern, and bring back someone,” volunteered Oscar at last. “I don’t mind for myself, but I can’t play guide for——”
“Ay, I know,” agreed Dick; “to be hampered with other people’s lives is a great responsibility. Well, take your own life in your hands and go, and I’d take mine and go with you; but——”
“You stay there with the girls,” growled Oscar, and gripped their hands, as in parting, all the way round.
They let him go a few steps away, and his shadowy form was lost. The girls clung to Dick, too cold, too scared, too much as in a dreadful dream, to cry—ay, too much benumbed. The boy shouted, Oscar responded; once and again shouts were exchanged, then came a scream—a scream so shrill that it seemed to cleave their poor failing hearts in two—and then silence, blank silence, save for the howl of the wind as it whirled the snow. Dick shouted himself hoarse, but there came no answer. Something terrible must have happened to Oscar.
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[p86]
CHAPTER VII.
OSCAR LOST—A FRUITLESS SEARCH.
The dead silence that followed, save for the hooting of the storm, was more terrible, if that could be, than Oscar’s scream, for it told of what? They did not say, but their hearts throbbed out what they feared.
“Oh, Dick! what shall we do?” cried the little girls, clinging to him.
He was a boy so strong, so brave—surely he could think of something. Well, he did think of something, but that was after they had shouted “Oscar! Oscar!” till the storm itself seemed the name. This is what he thought of.