With this White bade the bewildered Frenchman a mocking adieu, and left him still blinking at the sunlight from which he had been so long secluded.
A few minutes later the Baldwin house again stood, closed and tenantless, while a cart driven by Cola, and accompanied by the two young men on foot, climbed the hill back of the village by a road leading to the nearest railway station. Monsieur Delom witnessed this departure, as did many others, but no one saw the cart leave the highway a little later and turn into a dim trail leading through an otherwise pathless forest. After a time it emerged from this on another road and came to a farmhouse to which Mrs. Baldwin had previously been taken. Here mother and son bade each other farewell, while the former also prayed for a blessing upon the stranger who had so befriended them, and whose fortunes had become so curiously linked with theirs. Then the cart with Cola still acting as driver rattled away, and was quickly lost to sight.
It lacked but an hour of sunset when our refugees reached a pocket on the outer coast, in which the two schooners lay snugly, side by side, nearly filling the tiny harbour. On the beach David Gidge already waited, and, as the lads transferred their few effects to the boat that had brought him ashore, he climbed stiffly into the cart which Cola was to guide back over the way it had just come.
"Good-bye, Cola," said Cabot, as he held for a moment the hand of the girl he had come to regard almost as a sister. "Try and have a lot of specimens ready for me when we come back."
"Good-bye, sister!" cried White. "Take care of mother, and don't let her worry about us. We'll be back almost before you have time to miss us. Good-bye, David! I trust you to look out for them because you have promised."
"Oh! how I wish I were a boy and going with you," exclaimed Cola. "It is so stupid to be left behind with nothing to do but just wait. Do please hurry back."
"All right," replied her brother. "With good luck we'll sail into Pretty Harbour inside of a month, and perhaps with money enough to take us all to the States."
"Oh, wouldn't that be splendid! Do get started, for the sooner you are off the quicker you'll come back," cried the girl.
"That's so. Come on, Cabot," and in another minute the boat had shot out from the beach, while the cart was slowly climbing the rugged trail that led inland.
On reaching the schooners our lads found Captain Bland impatiently awaiting them, since the transfer of goods was nearly completed, and he was anxious to get his compromising cargo away from the coast patrolled by those meddlesome frigates.