CHAPTER V
A DAY IN THE WOODS
Mollie crept to the door of their hut at sunrise next morning. She thought she heard light footfalls outside their door. The other girls were fast asleep, worn out by the long trip of the day before. Yet when Mollie peeped outside no one was in sight; all was silence.
Only the birds had begun to stir in their nests and call their morning greetings across from one tree top to another. As far as Mollie could see stretched the unbroken forest. A narrow path ran down the hill between the trees. A steeper incline rose back of them and this was broken with deep ravines. Mollie could neither see nor hear anyone. Yet it seemed to her that she was not alone. She had a sense of some unknown presence.
She crept back into the room and put on her crimson dressing gown and slippers. She was bent on making a discovery. It could not be Naki or his wife, whose light footfalls she had heard moving swiftly around the house. They were nowhere to be seen. She was nervous about going out, as Miss Sallie had made dreadful suggestions about wolves and wild cats, yet she slipped out on the tiny porch. Far away through the trees and up the steep hillside she saw flying like a deer, a thin, brown creature. Was it human or a sprite? Mollie could not guess. She caught a glimpse of it, but it had been impossible to observe it accurately, so fast it flew. There was only a whirr of flying feet, and a flash of brown and scarlet to be seen. Could it be the famous ghost of Lost Man’s Trail?
At this same moment Naki came around from the back of the house. “I thought I heard some one,” he grumbled, looking suspiciously at Mollie.
“Yes, so did I,” she answered. “And I saw some one or something fly up the steep side of that hill.”
Naki did not answer. Mollie thought he looked at her queerly.
“You must have been mistaken, Miss,” he declared. “Nothing could have gone up that ravine over yonder. There’s only an Indian trail back there. Nobody travels much over that hill. It’s all cliffs and dangerous.”
Mollie shook her pretty head. She did not argue, but she knew what she had seen.