Jane did so, adding petulantly: “My head was beginning to ache. I had had an unpleasant encounter with your Meg Heger.” Dan felt a sudden leaping of his heart. How strange, he thought, that for the first time in his life the name of a girl should so affect him. He had heard of love at first sight, but he had never believed in it. With an effort he again listened to Jane’s indignant outpouring of words. “Don’t say I deserved just such treatment,” she protested. “No one knows it better than I do. I acknowledge that I am despicable and I hate myself. Honestly, Dan, I do, but I don’t know how to change. I don’t seem to really want to be different.”
“That’s just it, Jane.” The boy had grown very serious. “Just as soon as you desire to be different you will at once begin to change. We are the sculptors of our own characters. We can set before ourselves a model of what we would like to be and carve accordingly.” Then, as the clock was striking twelve, the lad suddenly inquired, “Jane, when did all this trouble with the children occur? I left at nine. You think it was about an hour after that?”
The girl nodded, then, glancing out of the wide front door, she exclaimed: “I wonder why they don’t come back. I supposed, of course, that they had gone to find you. Gerald knew where you were going, didn’t he?”
Dan shook his head. “He could not have known, for I did not myself. Yesterday and the day before I climbed up to the rim-rock and planned doing it every morning as a strength restorative measure, but today, after we had been wondering how we were to get to the Packard ranch, I thought I would cross the mountain to the other side and look down into the valley, and see if I could, how much nearer was the trail which Jean Sawyer took on Sunday. But I found that it would be much too rough and hard for you, and so we will wait until we receive directions from Mr. Packard. If you will prepare the lunch, I will go out and put up a white flag. Surely Mr. Wallace will know that I wish to speak to him. Then I will call the children to come home. They may be close, but since you told them that you wished you would never see them again, they are probably hiding, hoping that you are to go on the afternoon stage.”
Jane was indeed miserable. Her flaring anger had often caused her to say things that afterwards she deeply repented. “Perhaps if I would go with you and call they would know that I did not mean all that I said,” she ventured. But Dan was insistent that she, at least, prepare a lunch for herself.
“You must not start for the East without having a good hearty noon meal,” he told her. As he spoke he was fastening an old pillow case to a pole. Leaving the house, he placed it at the top of the stairway.
Then going to the brook, he began a series of halloos, but a hollow, distant echo was all that responded.
Dan, after a fruitless effort to call to the children, returned to the cabin, his face an ashen white. “Jane,” he said, and his voice was almost harsh, “you will have to attend to stopping the stage if it comes soon. Mr. Wallace can carry your baggage down without my assistance. I am going to hunt for those poor little youngsters who felt that they were turned out of their home. Goodbye.”
Jane, with a low cry of agony, leaped forward with arms outstretched, but Dan had not given her another look, and by the time she reached the brook he was out of sight. The girl sank down on a boulder and sobbed bitterly.
“If they’re lost I shall never forgive myself. Oh, how selfish, how unkind I have been, thinking only of Jane Abbott and her comfort. I can’t go away now, and not know what has become of Julie and Gerald.”