“No, you didn’t. That’s only a big stick. Here, give it to me. I remember now, in Swiss Family Robinson, when the boys went through dense underbrush, they pounded the bushes ahead of them to frighten away snakes and other wild creatures.”
They moved forward, but it was Virginia herself who soon called a halt. “Girls,” she said in a very low tone, “it may be my imagination but ever since Betty spoke, I, too, keep hearing a rustling noise back of us. It stops when we stop, then begins again when we start on.”
“I believe we are being followed,” Betsy turned to say. “I remember how tigers and things used to trail after the Robinson boys, waiting for a good chance to spring out and eat them.”
At that Sally just sank right down on a stump and began to cry. Virginia tried to comfort her. “Dear,” she said, with a pleading look at the tormentor. “Betsy is just trying to tease. You know, Sally, as well as we do that there are no tigers near Boston. I ought not to have mentioned the rustle I heard. I thought it might be a squirrel or some harmless little wood animal—”
“That we might catch and eat instead of its catching and eating us,” Babs said cheerily. Then she called the command: “Procession, proceed!”
Virginia, the last in line, looked back when the rustle began again, but because of the density of the leaves she could not see the little creature that was indeed following them with bright eyes that never permitted them to get out of sight.
“How imaginative we are becoming,” Barbara remarked. “That surely ought to please Miss Torrence.”
“I say, Virg,” Betsy, in the lead, stopped swinging her big stick to call, “ask me to write a story for your next Manuscript Magazine, will you? I’ll name it ‘How six shipwrecked girls perished on a deserted island.’”
“If we’re going to perish,” Sally said dismally, “I guess we won’t be writing compositions about it.”
They had been climbing the wooded hill which they had seen from the boat and when they reached a clear place on the summit, they saw far below, on the other side, a sheltered valley-like depression which had a narrow opening toward the sea.