“Let me see,” she said out loud in a puzzled voice. “Cousin Helen and the girls are—well where are they? And——Oh,” she cried, pressing her hands to her head as memory came back to her and she perceived herself to be alone on the plains. Then she looked about for the treacherous Jocko, but he had disappeared over the horizon.
When Billie’s blood had resumed its normal tempo and her head had ceased to throb, she began to walk in what she judged from the sun to be a Southerly direction. She walked for a long time but nowhere could she see signs of her friends.
“I might as well be a canoe in the middle of the ocean,” she said at length, sitting down on the ground in despair. “I don’t seem to get anywhere, and—Oh, dear, how hot and tired and thirsty and hungry I am!”
Once she tried calling, but her voice seemed to her only a small piping sound in the great emptiness.
“I declare, I feel about as large as a microscopic insect,” she exclaimed with a little sobbing laugh.
Then with a sudden resolution, she began to run.
“I won’t be lost,” she cried. “I won’t! I won’t! Haloo-oo-o, Barney—Rosina—where are you?”
Perhaps you have heard of the madness of people lost in a great forest or in the desert. It is a terrible growing fear which often turns into insanity unless it is held in check. Billie had heard of this madness. Her father had once told her of the sad case of a man lost in the Adirondacks who ran round and round in a circle, and when at last he was found, he was still running in a circle, completely out of his senses.
Checking her impulse to give way to this delirium, the young girl sat down and began to think.
“Now, Billie,” she said out loud, as if she were addressing some one else, “don’t go and make an idiot of yourself. Be silent and go quietly, or you’ll be a raving lunatic in five minutes. Of course the whole ranch will set out to find you as soon as they know you are actually lost. And of course they will find you. There can be no doubt of that. You are not going to die yet. You are far too young and strong and fond of life and—and hungry,” she added with a little quaver in her voice.