He moved away, and for a moment Hetty and Miss Schuyler did not look at one another. Then Hetty stood up.
“I should have screamed if he had stayed any longer,” she said. “The thing is just too horrible—but it is quite certain Larry does not know. I have got to tell him somehow. Think, Flo.”
XXIII
HETTY’S AVOWAL
The dusk Hetty had anxiously waited for was creeping across the prairie when she and Miss Schuyler pulled up their horses in the gloom of the birches where the trail wound down through the Cedar bluff. The weather had grown milder and great clouds rolled across the strip of sky between the branches overhead, while the narrow track amidst the whitened trunks was covered with loose snow. There was no frost, and Miss Schuyler felt unpleasantly clammy as she patted her horse, which moved restively now and then, and shook off the melting snow that dripped upon her; but Hetty seemed to notice nothing. She sat motionless in her saddle with the moisture glistening on her furs, and the thin white steam from the spume-flecked beast floating about her, staring up the trail, and when she turned and glanced over her shoulder her face showed white and drawn.
“He must be coming soon,” she said, and Miss Schuyler noticed the strained evenness of her voice. “Yes, of course he’s coming. It would be too horrible if we could not find him.”
“Jake Cheyne and his cavalry boys would save the bridge,” said Flora Schuyler, with a hopefulness she did not feel.
Hetty leaned forward and held up her hand, as though to demand silence that she might listen, before she answered her.