“Radio bug! I said to myself. So the wilderness has ’em, too!” The brown speck winked. “By—by flying low, as I did, across the trail, up the hill, I might have got a peep into the umbrella—just for fun!”
“Just for fun—you played a nice trick on us,” sniffed Pemrose.
“I didn’t see into the umbrella, but I saw her face to face, after I had flown off to a distance and made a landing. She had mounted her horse then. And by Jove”—the boy’s chest heaved under his khaki; he flicked the helmet-strings dangling, about his ears—“by Jove! she was the strangest... Ha! there she goes now—climbing the trail.”
It was a pathetic little figure upon which all eyes were now turned; the sunlight on it seemed almost heartless as it rode slowly up the mountainside, with the umbrella in the stirrup strap—the something bright upon the heel.
Pemrose’s grip tightened convulsively upon her rein—as when she had taken the leap.
It was the same figure that she had seen before in a woodland aisle, with the piercing eyes—keen and brilliant, but lonely, drifting.
“The Little Lone Lady!” she breathed to herself.
Treff’s gaze looked softened, too. He tapped his forehead under the aviator’s helmet significantly.
“You’re a radio bug, all right—what else you may be, I don’t know—but, all the same, there’s where you’re wanting, Sister!” he said.
