“But—but this isn’t my camp—” she tried to straighten her round shoulders—“and—and when you’ve had some refreshment, honey, we’ve got to ride on—on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together—together—hidden for a while.... The Gypsies would hide us, their encampment is over on Bald Mountain,” she muttered, speaking aloud to herself, as she fidgeted round the cabin. “I’ve done favors for them.... And search parties will look for her on the other little mountain first, anyhow, if they suspect me, at all,” she added, with that flash of needle-nosed cunning before which Una’s cold flesh crept.
The woman was ferreting out a water bucket, as she spoke, moving, indeed, as if the camp, a pine-log cabin, was not hers, although she had made her own of it and kindled a fire there.
It belonged as she knew, to two young city men, college professors, who had locked their cabin before going off on a fishing trip, to prevent amateurs from meddling with the transmitter and receiver of a very powerful sending station with which they experimented overseas.
Somehow, however, “Magic Margot,” with the cleverness of a burglar, had found entrance through a connecting woodshed, the night before, because she saw that the half-drugged girl whom she was holding on her horse could go no further.
“No! Even if the farmers should suspect me, at all—connect me with her disappearance,” she flashed a sidelong glance at Una, “they would not be likely to look for her here first, on Speckle Mountain—Little Speckle Mountain,” muttering more vehemently as she stirred up the fire on the hearth and lifted the bucket.
“Speckle Mountain ... Little Speckle Mountain!” Una was not distinctly conscious of hearing anything; and yet the words sank into her subconsciousness, as she lay perfectly passive, almost a dead girl, while her captor opened the door, with a final:
“The spring is some distance off, dear one. But I shan’t be very long. Try to sleep a little—before we ride on.”
She was closing the door as she spoke—tying it on the outside.
Suddenly, as if remembering something, she slipped inside again, fastened a steel creeper upon the heel of her shoe, took a bulky umbrella from a corner—an umbrella that looked as if it had an unnatural growth among its ribs, with bright ear-phones dangling from it, flashed one half-doubtful glance at the stark girl in the bunk—another at the complete wireless outfit upon that rough deal shelf—and was gone.
In the same dim subconscious way that she had absorbed the remark that she was on Little Speckle—Little Sister Mountain—as the girls called it, Una felt the meaning of these maneuvers soak in through her clammy pores: she had become too familiar with radio practices, during the summer, to miss it.