“Noo, gin onything be lost or strayed—gin ony lamb be lost or strayed, may the Almighty in his mercies fetch it back!
“An’, noo, I’m awa’ to find her!” said Andrew, the Scot.
CHAPTER XXII
On Little Sister
In a gray bunk of a mountain camp a girl lay, like death.
The pink flush of dawn stealing through a small square that stood for a window brushed her face, like a wing—and only made it more pallid.
Near by a woman stood staring at her; a woman whose transient likeness to herself, as the light caught her face, too—her too brilliant dark eyes—made her a thousand times the more terrible.
“Don’t shrink from me—honey,” said a voice whose scorching wildness had a low hiss in it, like the hiss of flame around green wood in a fire. “Don’t—oh! don’t turn away from me; I have been trying to draw you to me for so long—influencing you, influencing you at a distance; some day I knew I would get hold of you—have you to myself, to myself, for a while—no matter how your parents might guard you.... And now—now—I have!”
The eager flame died down; and the poor green wood in the bunk, lay charred by it, until the very sap in its veins seemed dried up—life blood, as it were, ceased to flow.
“I have hovered near you—near you for a year, precious—ever since I came back to these mountains, my own hills where I was born.” The woman’s figure, so pitiably “hulgy-backed”, round-shouldered, came to the edge of the bunk.
The kidnapped girl twitched, twitched spasmodically—a quiver only noticeable in her toes and in the dark, curly eyelashes flickering upward for a second to the red, spotted handkerchief around her captor’s neck, but so full of horrified repugnance that the latter involuntarily retreated a step.