Kendrick had landed luckily and except for the shaking up and a few bruises he was little the worse for his tumble. Still sitting where he had plowed up the ballasting, he rubbed his arm tenderly and tried to penetrate the gloom, his eyes not yet accustomed to the starlight after the bright interior of the observation car. With his suitcase receding at the rate of thirty miles an hour this was going to be a fine pickle as a result of his haste! They were miles from Nowhere, he knew, but that did not worry him much; he was used to walking—had walked that very piece of track with the Rutland party not so long ago. However, there was the girl——
He scrambled to his feet, put his hands on either side of his mouth and shouted. The unexpected loudness of the call startled him a little; it went echoing around and in the dead solitude of the low-lying hills seemed to carry for miles. But although he listened intently there was no answer other than the echo which soon drifted far away and got lost somewhere. The silence returned like a heavy blanket; even the little birds listened in fear.
He called again. Again there was the echo; then the heavy silence.
"Funny," grumbled Phil. "She's either mighty badly hurt or she's deliberately hiding on me. Where are you, Miss Wil——Miss Lawson, I mean?" he shouted.
"—awson, I mean—mean," mocked the double echo. The bellow flung away to distant cadences which settled softly into the night mysteries.
There was dankness in the air and the smell of skunk cabbage from a short stretch of swamp and brule directly opposite. Through the velvet gloom the fire-flies trailed. Rocky ridges were scattered around in the background and high on the right was a huge rounded pile of rock with a few white-stemmed birches clinging to it for all the world like thinning gray hairs on an almost-bald head. It was too dark to see the birches clearly, but the ex-chainman for the Rutland survey party knew they were there and how they looked; he had seen hundreds of such growths. Behind the big rock formation probably there was a lake.
Kendrick snatched up some pebbles and hurled them into the underbrush in anger at those pesky little birds with their mournful monotony of note. He knew she could not be far away and started down the track slowly, scrutinizing the ground on each side. He found her at last, lying very still among the bog reeds.
Gently he lifted her out onto the dry sandy ballast, greatly alarmed at her unconsciousness, and went in search of water. He located a tiny pool just off the right-of-way and realized for the first time that he was hatless. Hastily he sat down and removing one of his boots, dipped it in the water and came hobbling back with it as fast as he could go in an attempt to reach her before it had leaked out. He was so intent upon this that he was quite close before he realized that she was sitting up. She greeted him with an exclamation.
"Good!" cried Phil with satisfaction. "That's the stuff!" He sat down on the end of a sleeper embedded in the sand, and peered at her anxiously; but the light was rather uncertain and he was glad to note that eastward the tree-tops blackened against a silvering sky. The arrival of the moon would help a lot. "How badly hurt are you, Miss Lawson? Do you know that people have got killed, jumping from trains?" he reproved.
"Then whatever possessed you to do it?" she retorted. "I am not dense enough to believe it is just coincidence that you are here. You had no business to follow me, Mr. Kendrick, and I resent it very much."