Rising in his stirrups on the plunging horse he pointed to two white arms stretched in benediction from the tallest tree upon the shoulder of Little Sister.
“If anybody found a trace of her, he was to signal the other search parties,” young Treff had said, two minutes before. “The sign was to be two smokes—or a white cloth waving. We haven’t time for the smokes—and a handkerchief won’t show up very far.”
“My sweater—my jersey!” Pemrose had gasped. “I can ride on in my blouse.”
“Camp Fire Girls on top, eh?” Treff let out another Western yell, as he pointed to the cream-white arms burgeoning in the wind. “And, by heaven! they are on top,” he cried. “They have crashed through. Una—what this summer must have been doing for her! And nobody suspected it.... There’s another bit of blue rag!”
With a rearing swerve of his horse he plucked it from the bush on which it had lit; the fine bit of cloth, true blue, cut or gnawed from a girl’s riding habit—perhaps by the teeth of the girl whose brain had been a fragile flower basket.
“I suppose she felt that there was no use in putting up, trying to put up, any open fight against that kidnapping relative,” he said. “The only thing she could do—all that she could do was to leave such clues as she could behind her. Well! we’re on their track, sure enough. Horses’ prints in that swamp there, Revel’s among them, I’ll be sworn—toes turning out! They’ve ridden down the mountain on the opposite side from that on which we came up—and this—this is the blamed ‘cheekyside’, too—of all the cross trails—”
Already he was falling behind—gnashingly behind—upon the clumsy and “winded” Cartoon, on the difficult trail that zigzagged over the mountain’s shoulder among birches and red maples a few inches in diameter, from twelve to fifteen feet in height.
But the slender little trees, herding together, could screen from view any riders making headway upon the lower stretches of that corkscrew trail.
“If only Una could know that we’re after her—hotfoot!” he raged to the tormenting branches that swept his face.
And one minute later the world rocked to the cry: