“Well! What a funny footprint! It’s a woman’s track, too, with spikes on the heel. Now, gracious! it couldn’t be that somebody else—somebody else has been trying my radio game, out here, listening in, in this wet spot, with a little portable receiving set?... That’s what it looks like! My-y!”
A breathless image of astonishment, Pemrose Lorry knelt in the underbrush near the trail, the scrubby tangled trail, broad enough to pass muster for a grass-grown road, with ruts in either side and a cart track in the center, which led from the girls’ camping-place of the night before—through an arm of woods—to the farmhouse on whose land they had slept.
Right on the trail, submerging it in one spot, was stagnant pond-water. Beside the pond was the curious footprint. Her face aflame, red as the Turk’s cap—flame lily, near—the girl knelt, examining it.
“I—I’ll wager that’s what it is,” she cried half-wildly. “Another radio amateur, radio fan, has—judging by appearances—been here, this morning, with her heel in the wet mud and her wire out to a tree—or smuggled away in an umbrella, possibly, listening in with a toy set, like mine—or probably with something larger—better—so far as results go. Oh, goody! ‘When Greek meets Greek!’ Don’t I wish we might run on to her.” She craned her neck, also red with amazement, as the painted wood-lily, searching the early sunlight, the woodland aisles.
“I don’t see why that mightn’t very well be,” said Una. “If our automobile is rigged up with radio, so that we can pick up messages within twenty miles, as we speed along, why mightn’t somebody have a little Kodak-like set, out here—and play with it out-of-doors, in the early morning. You—you aren’t the only lion,” laughingly. “In one of the out-of-the-way farmhouses there may be a red-hot amateur, like you; so many of them.... Heavens! What’s—that?” She jumped three feet.
Right in front of her was a bulky pincushion, a huddled pincushion, bristling all over with black and brown spikes, menacingly white-tipped.
And the pincushion inopportunely grunted.
She screamed. So did bronze-haired Lura—and Naomi, a brown-haired girl, who nursed a sketchbook.
“Gracious! A porcupine! Dandering Kate—as woodsmen call it!” shrieked Pemrose, startled from her contemplation of the mysterious footprint.
“Oh! don’t go near him—her,” panted Una. “It’ll shoot its quills into you.”