The others could not keep from laughing at the picture of Nancy and Percy standing arm in arm in the wilderness.
“You remind me of a bridal couple walking up the aisle,” exclaimed Billie. But Nancy was too frightened to withdraw her arm from Percy’s even at this witticism. She leaned on him in an attitude of relief and extreme confidence.
“Didn’t I tell you I would be her staff before the day was over?” he remarked with a grin.
“I’ve been stung in a dozen different places,” sobbed Nancy.
“Stand still,” ordered Ben. “They will leave you and go back to their nest if you are quiet.”
And as he had predicted, the hornets did leave off their attack and return to their home, but not until Percy had been stung several times without a murmur. For the sake of Nancy Brown, he would voluntarily have stepped into any number of hornets’ nests.
At last the procession started on. In the misty twilight, they were a company of gray shadows moving silently along. When people are lost, really and unquestionably lost, their true natures rise to the surface: if there is any selfishness hidden away, it develops into complainings and reproaches; the faint-hearted make unhappy predictions; the lazy ones get tired before they have any right to. Ben had always admired the Motor Maids, but never more than now when he saw them quiet and courageous in the face of a night in the swamp. Nancy might shriek over hornets and snakes, but she would never confess to being tired or frightened. Not once had they complained or reproached him, and now when the will-o’-the-wisps began their ghostly dance through the mists, and the great wall of mountain loomed up in front of them black and threatening, it seemed to poor Ben that it would make it easier for him to bear his sorrows if some one would only make one little complaint.
It was Mary who gave out first. She was just sinking to her knees when Billie called out cheerfully:
“I see a light and it’s not a will-o’-the-wisp.”
There indeed was a light sending out a kindly beam in the darkness, and while they watched it, it went out.