"What makes you think that?" said Becher; "is not all which the man said plausible?"
"Plausible! Yes," said Wolfgang, "but a lie! Where, I should like to know, do you find, at this season, a deer-calf which may be expected to starve—they are all of them, even those which were dropped latest, several months old; he, therefore, cannot have found that in the woods. Then, again, no bear eats a young deer-calf—that's a fable; and the buzzard, which, besides, troubles itself little about anything which has life, goes to roost as other birds do, like the turkeys and the Prairie hens, at dusk. All that is pure invention to entice your daughters from home; and my advice is instantly to break up in pursuit—perhaps, we may yet overtake them!"
"But where to seek them?" asked Hehrmann, tearing his double-barrelled gun from the wall: "Where to find them? Which of us can follow their track?"
"I know what part of the woods they are gone to," said Schmidt, who had just entered. "I had left a cross-cut saw there this morning, and just went to fetch it."
"Show us the way, then," said Wolfgang, looking at the priming of his own rifle, which, prior to his journey, he had left behind him in Hehrmann's house.
"Oh, God—my children!" cried Mrs. Hehrmann, disconsolately. "Oh! let me go with you!—let me go with you!"
"Don't be terrified, my dear," said the worthy Hehrmann, consolingly, to her; "who knows whether our fears are well founded?—we have at once supposed the worst. It's quite possible that they have only gone into the woods to look for berries, and that we may meet with them close by here."
"I believe, altogether, that you think too badly of Dr. Normann," said Siebert, senior; "I don't think him capable of such villany."
"You are right!" exclaimed Hehrmann, who probably thought of the last conversation of Normann with his daughter, but would not torture his wife yet more by betraying too great an anxiety on his part. "You are right; still, we will go after them; perhaps, too, we may fall in with the runaway cow."