CHAPTER XIII.
Sahwah's vanishing from the car was so uncanny and mysterious that, for a few minutes, we could think of nothing but a supernatural agency. The wind was like the wail of a banshee, and to our excited eyes the mist wraiths hovering over the swamp were like dancing figures. The croaking of the frogs was suddenly full of menace. They were not real frogs croaking down there in the mud; they were evil spirits dwelling in the swamp and they held the secret of Sahwah's disappearance. Shudders ran up and down our spines and the perspiration began to break out in our faces.
"Did Sahwah get into the car again after she helped you open the gate?" asked Nyoda.
At the sound of her voice our fear of the supernatural vanished and we were back to reality again. We were lost on a lonely road, it is true, but it was a (more or less) solid dirt road in the misty mid-region of Indiana, and not a ghoul-haunted pathway in the misty mid-region of Weir.
We all declared Sahwah had gotten into the car.
"She couldn't have," maintained Nyoda. "We haven't stopped since then and she couldn't have fallen out while we were going without making a splash that would have sent the water over the car."
"It's nearly a foot deep most of the way." We thought hard about the circumstances attendant upon our getting back into the car and it came to us that we were not positive, after all, that Sahwah had been with us.
"That wind—don't you remember?" said Nakwisi. "It whipped the corner of my veil into my eye and I couldn't open it again for some time after we started."
I remembered the wind. It had wrapped my veil around my face so that I couldn't see anything, and in my blindness I had slammed the door on my finger, and the pain made me forget everything else. It hadn't been a propitious time to count noses. I had dropped into the corner of the seat trying to get my finger into my mouth through the folds of my veil, and the effort not to cry out with pain made me faint. I had not even noticed when the car started. Margery was on the front seat with Nyoda and they had thought, of course, that Sahwah was in the back with Nakwisi and me. Well, it was evident that she wasn't.
"Poor Sahwah," said Nyoda. "Such a night to be waiting at the gate!"