“Ye-es,” nodded Una sleepily, from the hay. “Ha! Farm lights, at last!” She roused a little. “Horses stamping!”
One horse stamped upon Pemrose’s heart all that night. She felt sorry she had given it to him, to trample, thus.
“But I believe he’ll miss me, too—Revelation,” she said to herself. “Sometimes, when we were out riding, if we lay down under the pines, he’d come and feel me over with his nose, to make sure that I was there; I believe he’d have driven off anybody who attacked me.... Ah! lucky Una.... But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it.”
It came almost as a relief, affording an excuse for pent-up feeling, that when the campers got back to their own log cabin, at noon the next day, a second loss confronted her, over which she might puzzle and rave without breach of code.
“Look! Look! Look!” she cried—and became, in a moment, the center of a sensation, whirlwind sensation. “Somebody has been in here. In here to-day! There’s a window open in our sleeping room—marks on the floor; and my picture of Una, the one I had by my cot, is—gone.”
CHAPTER XIX
A Girl Brigade
“Smoke! Smoke!” It was a cry from Frances Goddard and Naomi, the artist, together. “Smoke! Smoke! Don’t you smell it? There’s a brush fire—somewhere.”
“It seems—near! The air’s thick—getting thicker,” the responsive scream was from others, “oh! choking thickness.... Heavens! The—shed!”
A banner of flame flung forth challengingly to the night air, at the moment, left no doubt as to where the heavy reek was coming from.
The gray shed at the corner of the Long Pasture!