Poor Lady Gray was not much better at keeping secrets than old Lemuel was. She had had to put a great constraint upon herself not to reveal the anxiety which consumed her. Hours had now passed since Mr. Ford had ridden away, with a couple of men attending him. All the other men not absolutely required to look after the place had been despatched to search on foot. Their long-delayed return seemed to prove the matter of the sick boy’s disappearance a more serious one than at first imagined. Her answer was a sudden wringing of her white hands and the tremulous cry:
“No, no, I don’t. Pray God, no tragedy marks the opening of our home!”
CHAPTER VII
A RIFLE PRACTICE
“Mother, what do you mean? Don’t turn so white and do speak! What ‘tragedy’ could have happened up here in this lovely place?” demanded Leslie, putting his arm around the lady’s shoulders and wondering if she had suddenly become ill. She was slender but had never complained of any weakness, nor shown the least fatigue during her long care of him at San Diego. Since then, she had been like a happy girl with him and his father but something was amiss with her now.
In a moment she had calmed herself and was already blaming herself for her disobedience to her husband’s request for silence. However, this last matter was a small one; for, if the missing lad was not soon found, all would have to know it. Indeed, it might be better that they did so now. They knew him better than his hosts did and possibly might give a clue to his whereabouts. So she told them all she knew, and the surmise that he had wandered away in a fit of delirium. The very telling restored her own courage, and, as yet, there was little fear showing upon the faces of her young guests.
Except on Dorothy’s. Her brown eyes were staring wide and all the pretty color of her cheeks had faded. As if she saw a vision the others could not she stood clasping and unclasping her hands, and utterly sick at heart for the loss of her early friend. Longer than she had known any of these here about her she had known poor Jim. He had saved her life, or she believed so, in her childhood that now seemed far away. But for Jim, the poorhouse boy, she had never escaped from Mrs. Stott’s truck-farm when she had been kidnapped and hidden there. He had stood by her in all her little troubles, had praised and scolded her, and known her through and through. It was her talk about him which had made Mr. Ford invite him to San Leon—to his death, maybe.
That thought was too much. Clinching her small hands and stamping her little foot she defied even death to hurt poor Jim, good Jim, brainy Jim, who was to astonish the world some day by his wisdom!