“Ralph, I have lost my character, and you know I am a coward at heart; but, and until to-day I should not have believed it, it is so comforting to know I have a—I have you to protect me.” Then she laid her hand on my brow, adding gently, “Poor forehead that was wounded in my service! But it is getting late, Ralph, and my father will be feverishly anxious about me.”
Grace was right in this, because, long before we borrowed the rancher’s Cayuse pony and set out again, Colonel Carrington and the others reached the bank of the river, and saw only a broad stretch of muddy current racing beneath the rigid branches of the firs. Then after they had searched the few shingle bars—the one we landed on was by this time covered deeply—the old man sat down on a boulder apart from the rest, and neither dare speak to him, though Lawrence heard him say softly to himself:
“My daughter—my daughter! I would to God I might join her.”
They turned homeward in solemn silence, though perhaps a last spark of hope burned in the Colonel’s breast that by some wholly unexpected chance we had reached it before 189 they did, because Lawrence said he seemed to make a stern effort to restrain himself when they saw only Miss Carrington sitting dejectedly near the window. Thereupon Lawrence was glad to escape, and Ormond, who rode out to gather the miners for a systematic search, left them mercifully alone.
Afterward the old man brokenly narrated what had passed, and then there was a heavy silence in the room, out of which the sunlight slowly faded, until, as Miss Carrington told me, the ticking of a nickeled clock grew maddening. At last she rose and flung the window open wide, and the sighing of the pines drifted in mournfully with a faint coolness that came down from the snow. Meantime, Colonel Carrington paced with a deadly regularity up and down, neither speaking nor glancing at her, until he started as a faint beat of horse hoofs came out of the shadows.
“Only Geoffrey returning!” he said bitterly. “But I have been listening, listening every moment for the last hour. It is utterly hopeless, I know, and we must bear the last black sorrow that has fallen upon us; but yet I cannot quite believe her dead.”
The tramp of hoofs grew nearer, and the Colonel leaned out through the open casement with the hand that gripped its ledge quivering.
“That is an Indian pony, not Geoffrey’s horse, and a man on foot is leading it,” he said. “They are coming this way; I will meet them.”
Miss Carrington, however, laid a restraining grasp upon him, and very slowly the clock ticked off the seconds until, when two figures came out through the thinning forest into the clearing, the Colonel’s face grew white as death. For a moment he choked for breath, and his sister sobbed aloud when he recovered himself, for she too had seen.