"For pity's sake!" she gasped. "What was that?"
"Just a loon on the lake over there—a harmless goose of a thing," and
Phil grinned at her reassuringly as he laced his boot. "But he isn't
as crazy as his laugh. That's just his way of singing 'I Hear You
Calling Me.'"
"Then give me John McCormack." He smiled as he caught her surreptitiously opening the silver-meshed reticule and powdering her nose, but pretended that he had not seen this bit of feminine incongruity. "My, how still everything is!" she said a moment later in a subdued voice as she swept a glance around at the silver landscape and up at the stars, fixed and dim in the infinite leagues of distance. "It would be possible to go crazy here very quickly, I suppose."
"You'd soon get used to the quiet; then the racket of the city would drive you crazy. Say, speaking of wild geese, Miss Lawson, reminds me that as soon as I learned where you had gone and what for, I followed you to tell you that this is a wild-goose chase you're on. That envelope contains a package of stage money. It's just a dummy, prepared by Mr. Wade to duplicate the one stolen not long ago from the Alderson Construction Company. Object: to fool that fellow, Podmore. Before we make any more mistakes, hadn't we better try to understand each other's position? As a starter I'm going to ask you to read this letter from the Chief. Wait, I'll scratch a match for you."
Before this speech was half completed he had Miss Cristy Lawson's undivided attention. She gazed at him in amazement, and as he shielded the burning match with glow-reddened fingers her eyes raced eagerly over the introduction of Mr. Philip Kendrick as the private secretary of the President of the Canadian Lake Shores Railway with the latter's full authority to act as his representative. There was no doubting the authenticity of it.
To relieve her embarrassment Kendrick hastened to explain in detail. It was only natural that she should have supposed him to be in league with Podmore. Had he but known she was on that train he could have told her everything and have saved her the inconveniences of the present predicament; but he had supposed her to be already at her destination.
She told him how her train had been held up by a freight wreck between Toronto and North Bay; so that she had missed connections there and had been forced to wait over for twenty-four hours.
"Hadn't we better be moving, Miss Lawson?" he suggested. "We'll have to hoof it to Thorlakson's and it's a good five miles from here. We can talk as we walk along."
He took her arm to assist her to her feet, but when she attempted to stand up she sat down again so suddenly that Kendrick thought she was going to faint.
"You are hurt!" he cried in alarm and was down beside her in a trice.