“Don’t you worry,” advised the master of that domain. “Rod Ide ain’t waitin’ three weeks for good slippin’ jest for the sake of settin’ in his store window and singin’ ‘Beautiful snow’! He sure got a load of supplies started on that first skim o’ snow, and they’re due here to-night—” The cook paused, kicked at the cookee for slamming the stove-cover at that crucial moment of listening, and shrilled, “There she blows!”
Wade heard the jangle of bells, and hastened to meet the dim bulk of the loaded sled. The driver did not reply to his delighted hail, but before he had time to wonder at that silence some one struggled out of the folds of a shrouding blanket and sprang from the sled. It was a woman; and while he stood and stared at her, she ran to him and grasped his hands and clung to him in pitiful abandonment of grief.
It was Nina Ide. In the dim light Wade could see tears and heart-broken woe on her face. He had had some experience with the self-poise of the daughter of Rodburd Ide. This emotion, which checked with sobs the words in her throat, frightened him.
“It’s a terrible thing, and I don’t understand it, Mr. Wade,” quavered the driver. He slipped down from the load and came and stood beside them. “We was in Pogey Notch, and the wind was blowin’ pretty hard there, and I told the young ladies they’d better cover their heads with the blankets. And I pulled the canvas over me, ’cause the snow stung so, and I didn’t see it when it happened—and I don’t understand it.”
“When what happened?” Wade gasped.
“They took her—whatever they was,” stated the driver, in awed tones. “I didn’t see ’em or hear ’em take her. And I don’t know jest where we was when they took her. I went back and hunted, but it wasn’t any use. They was gone, and her with ’em. They wasn’t humans, Mr. Wade. It was black art, that’s what it was.”
“Probably,” said Tommy Eye, with deep conviction. He had led the group that came out of the camp to greet the tote team. “There were ha’nts here last night. They got Foolish Abe.”
“They sartinly seem to mean the Skeet family this time,” said the driver. “It was that Skeet girl—the pretty one that’s called Kate—that they got off’n my team.”
The men of the camp, surrounding the new arrivals, surveyed Nina Ide with respectful but eager curiosity.