Frances took the lantern from old Alvino’s shaking hand.
“Let’s go and look for their tracks,” she suggested, forcing a note of eagerness into her words, “so we can tell the men, when they come back to pick up the trail, how many there were and which way they went.”
“Oh, if Chance was only able to go after them, if he was only able!” Mrs. Chadron wailed, following Frances as she hurried along the wire fence that cut the garden from the river.
“It was somebody that knowed the lay of the land,” Mrs. Chadron said, “for that gate down there back of the house is open. That’s the way they come and went—somebody that knowed the lay of the land.”
Frances felt her heart die within her as the recollection of another night in that garden flashed like red fire in her mind. There was a picture, as she stopped with closed eyes, struck cold and shuddering by a fear she dared not own, of one flying, bent into the shadows, along the garden path toward that gate. Someone who knew the “lay of the land!”
“Did you hear something?” Mrs. Chadron whispered, leaning close to her where she had stopped, stock-still, as if she had struck a wall.
“I thought I—I—saw something,” Frances answered, in faint, sick voice.
The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the soft ground beyond it they found tracks.
“Only one man!” said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.