“Oh! If you’d only have told me before! I would have had him found long, long ago! To think of that poor fellow wandering around alone, sick, crazy, suffering—not knowing where he was or what he was doing! And we strolling around, looking at old ‘Barracks’ and things, and telling silly stories of silly picnics! It was cruel, cruel! Come, Alfy. You like him, too. You don’t look down on my poor boy—you come and help me find him!”
She seized her old friend’s hand and ran toward the house, which now looked anything save beautiful in her sight; and, turning, she saw the lake, gleaming in the noonday sun as it gleamed in the red rays of sunset with Jim there to admire it.
“The lake! He’s drowned! That’s where he is, our Jim! In the bottom of that horrible lake!”
Catching Alfaretta’s hand more firmly she drew that frightened girl along with her to the edge of the pond and to a little boat that was moored there. Both lake and boat were merely toylike in proportion and the bottom of the pond was pebble-strewn and plainly visible through the clear, shallow water.
“He ain’t—he—ain’t—he can’t—you could see—him—He isn’t—Oh! Dolly, Dolly Doodles! I’m sick! It makes me feel terrible queer!” wailed Alfaretta. “But Jim can’t—Jim can’t be drowned! He can’t!”
“Yes he can, too. Shut up. Help me untie that rope. Get in. Take an oar. Row—row, I tell you,” snapped Dorothy, distraught.
“I can’t. I dassent! I never touched to row an oar in my life. Not in my whole life long, and—I—I shan’t do it now!” retorted the mountaineer with equal crispness.
But she had no need to try. The whole party had followed Dorothy to the water’s edge and had divined her intent. Not one believed that Jim was drowned, though they could have given no good reason for this disbelief. Only that was too horrible. Such a thing would not have been permitted! Yet Herbert, as the best oarsman there and also as the loyal friend of the missing lad, assumed the place Alfy would not take. Without a word he did what Dorothy desired. He slipped the painter from its post, helped the girl to take her seat in the little “Dorothy,” even smiling as he observed that it had been named for her, and quietly pushed out from shore.
It was just as Alfy had said: the bottom of the lake was clearly visible everywhere, and no frightful object marred its beauty. Dorothy was utterly quiet now but her searching gaze never lifted from the water, as Herbert patiently rowed around and around. The group on the bank waited also in silence, though certain after that first circuit of the pond that Jim was not there.