“Nay, I don’t, lad; but the doctor has a sort of idee that we may, and I’m not the man to baulk him. He might be here, you see.”
“Yes,” said Macey; “he might. There: all right, we’ll go on when you give the word.”
“Forrard, then, my lads; there it is, and I wish we may find him. Nay, I don’t,” he said, correcting himself, “for, poor lad he’d be in a bad case to have fallen down here for the night. Theer’s something about it I can’t understand, and if I were you, Mr Distin, sir, I’d joost chuck an eye now and then over the stream towards the edge of the wood.”
Distin nodded and the line was swung round, so as to advance for some distance toward the wood which began suddenly just beyond the stream. There another shout, and the waving of the miller’s hat, altered the direction again, and with Distin close by the flowing water, the line was marched back toward the lane with plenty of repetitions of their outward progress but it was at a slower rate, for the tangle was often far more dense.
And somehow, perhaps from the brilliancy of the morning, and the delicious nature of the pure soft air, the lads’ spirits grew higher, and they had to work hard to keep their attention to the object they had in view, for nature seemed to be laying endless traps for them, especially for Macey, who certainly felt Vane’s disappearance most at heart, but was continually forgetting him on coming face to face with something fresh. Now it was an adder coiled up in the warm sunshine on a little dry bare clump among some dead furze. It was evidently watching him but making no effort to get out of his way.
He had a stick, and it would have been easy to kill the little reptile, but somehow he had not the heart to strike at him, and he walked on quickly to overtake the line which had gone on advancing while he lagged behind.
Ten minutes later he nearly stepped upon a rabbit which bounded away, as he raised his stick to hurl it after the plump-looking little animal like a boomerang.
But he did not throw, and the rabbit escaped. He did not relax his efforts, but swept the tangle of bushes and brambles from right to left and back to the right, always eagerly trying to find something, if only a footprint to act as a clue that he might follow, but there was no sign.
All at once in a sandy spot amongst some furze bushes he stopped again, with a grim smile on his lip.
“Very evident that he hasn’t been here,” he muttered, as he looked at some scattered specimens of a fungus that would have delighted Vane, and been carried off as prizes. They were tall-stemmed, symmetrically formed fungi, with rather ragged brown and white tops, which looked as if in trying to get them open into parasol shape the moorland fairies had regularly torn up the outer skin of the tops with their little fingers; those unopened though showed the torn up marks as well, as they stood there shaped like an egg stuck upon a short thin stick.