Nothing but a wooden bucket in the dim brook—where it had been whirled a little way downstream and caught among stones. The water had played over it for an hour. It told no tales.
“Ding-me-davel—knock me flat! The stream isn’t deep enough to drown her!” puffed the exhausted blacksmith, drawing his bare arm, with the whipcord muscles, across his forehead, dripping as it had never dripped over an anvil in his life.
“Some pretty deep holes further down,” moaned Sanbie, licking his burns, like a dog. “Gosh! now you see her—and now you don’t,” peering into the darkness. “There’s hardly any breath left in my wind-works.” He looked piteously at the Guardian. “But we can’t do much without a strong lantern—light—I didn’t bring one, galloping up; carried behind him, ’twould have startled the horse. Now....”
Now, with hands scorched raw and lungs a desert, the young fire-fighter was circling in the darkness until he cornered old King, most good-natured of the bunch of horses on the sidehill—fast, too.
Jumping on without even a halter, weaving his blistered fingers in the cool mane, he started to gallop back to the farm.
It was ages before he reappeared—while Guardian and girls searched wearily in short circles—long ages before he reappeared with his dark lantern carefully screened, so that no ray flung from behind ahead, might startle even old King into shying into the ditch.
And now his parched “wind-works” were swelled to bursting with a discovery which, for a long minute, rocking deliriously upon his bareback, he could not bring forth.
“Hea-vens!” he gasped, at length. “Seems as if Something had visited us. I counted the horses, coming back, Revel’s gone, too.”
CHAPTER XXI
The Call of the Air
In the dawn-blink the gray dawn-blink, Pemrose Lorry sat before her radio instruments. All night long, when she was not out searching upon the mountain, she had been sending out the call-letters of every station, near-by, within her New England district, seeking to get one where she “came in strong enough” upon the air, to ask whether any one had seen a girl upon a bay horse passing.