“Goodness! it’s as if she had dug a hole and buried herself,” said the scorched Sanbie who, counting his burns upon the grass, forgot for a moment the solicitude due to his employer’s daughter.
“Hush!” said the Guardian sharply. “She must be somewhere near. Nothing could have happened to her.... Oh! I should not have let her take part in it at all. She was too precious.”
“T-too precious!” sighed the hiss of the dying flames mockingly, curling where a shed had been—it was the only answer.
“Una! Un-a! Where are you? Oh! where are you, dear? Can’t you answer? Don’t play with us!... Who saw her last?”
But it was not like Una to play. Her nature was more woven of fancies than frolic—even were frolic thinkable at such a time. And so the Guardian felt, with a thousand pricks of burning in her body now, as she put the desperate question as to who had seen her last.
“Let me think; I guess I did—I may have done so,” said Dorothy. “I was the next girl to her when she passed the bucket to you at the time that beam fell in—and the horses kicked up such a shindy. I was behind her, as she ran back to the stream, to fill it again—she was running very fast. But when I got to the brook, in the dark, I couldn’t find her so I helped Naomi fill her bucket—and we passed that back along the line. Sanbie was yelling to us to ‘shake it up there!’ so I thought I did—right,” wailed Dorothy.
No one had any later news—not Pemrose, her play-marrow. She had been fighting brush fire.
“Perhaps—perhaps she fell, slipped and hurt herself or fainted—fainted with the fright and rush,” said Theresa. “We’d better scatter and look for her. She couldn’t, she couldn’t have been kicked by one of the horses—trampled?”
The pasture burned anew at the thought, shriveled to a cinder, it seemed, where the fire had been conquered, with the withering of girls’ hearts within their breasts.
Dividing into two search parties, one led by the old blacksmith, breathing like his own forge, furnace-fed, the other by Sanbie—both of whom knew the ways of excited horses better than the womanhood which had helped them—they searched the Long Pasture, from end to end, hummock and hollow and found no trace.