Then she flung down the pail and rushed up the lane as though she would try to catch the vanished car,—but she stopped as abruptly with a half laugh.
“They may be miles and miles away by this time,—they had time enough while I was fussing over that old well. And the chain made such a noise and the wheel creaked so, I never heard another sound!”
Billie’s eyes filled with indignant tears as she began slowly to saunter back to the old house. She felt somehow impelled to return to the scene of her loss, perhaps to persuade herself that it was really so.
As she neared the spot where she had last seen her red car, she noticed a slip of paper blowing lightly about. Idly she picked it up and glanced over the words written upon it. Then she stood still and caught her breath as she realized what they meant.
“Stay here. Tell no one. Back soon.”
That was the message that Billie read, and she did not doubt for a moment that it was intended for her.
“Yes, perhaps you will come back, and perhaps you won’t,” she said half aloud. “Maybe you think that I think that you have gone for a doctor. But I don’t. You are two mean, wicked men to outwit a girl like that. I’ll never see my car again!”
Just as Billie uttered this despairing cry, she heard a distant hail, and then another.
“Who is coming now?” she thought. “It’s too soon to expect my sick (?) passenger and his one-eyed friend, and anyway I hear no car,——nor anything else, now,” she added. “Maybe I imagined it. Oh, I’d like to be a man for about five minutes! Then they wouldn’t dare!”