What was she likely to do? Indeed, why had she come down here? These questions were easily answered by the young man. Lottie’s fondness for the echo was notorious in the neighborhood. She must have come here to shout across the cove and listen to the answer.
“And then what?” thought Haley.
She had not returned up the hill. Even in this smother of snow she could not have missed her way coming in that direction. She was still here in the waste of snow, over which the storm was now shrieking.
The young man made a horn of his two gloved hands and shouted Lottie’s name, again and again. Now the echo was completely smothered and no sound at all came back to him.
A real blizzard had swept down upon the lake. If the child had wandered out upon the ice, what chance would there be of her ever reaching the shore again, let alone any human habitation? And, Nelson asked himself, how should he set about finding her in the drifting snow!
CHAPTER XXVIII
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN KNOWN BEFORE
The thickening mist of snow shut off all sight of the shore when the school teacher was ten yards out upon the ice. Every few yards he stopped and shouted down wind, believing that the lost child would never be able to beat her way against it, and would naturally drift with the storm. In this supposition he was right. She had drifted farther out upon the ice than Nelson Haley believed possible. If she had been gone only an hour from the view of the girl at Mr. Cross Moore’s, the school teacher thought she must still be not far from the edge of the cove. He began soon to zigzag across the ice, wading through the soft-packed snow, sometimes almost losing his own sense of direction.
From the heights above the wind shrieked down upon him, and the snow seemed doing its best to bury Nelson Haley under a clinging white coverlet. Not that he was at all affrighted at first. To fight a snowstorm was merely fun for him.
He very soon thought, however, that there was serious danger for the missing child. He wished that he had gotten together a party to make this search with him. One searcher seemed very helpless in this fast gathering blizzard. He made small progress, and feared that he might pass little Lottie without seeing her.
Beaten down by the gale the child could easily be covered with the drifts and lie undiscovered until it was too late to save her. The possibility of this tragedy horrified Nelson Haley.