"And maybe it won't go away at all. We'll have to stay here till the folks come to find us, Russ. I—I want—my mo-mother!"
"Now, Rose Bunker, don't be a baby!" said her brother. "That thing can't get at us in here——"
Just then something thumped heavily on the roof of the hut. Russ could not say another word. They heard the great claws of the big cat scratching at the roof boards.
Rose screamed again and this time her brother's voice joined with hers in a hopeless cry for help.
CHAPTER XXIV
AN EXCITING TIME
Russ and Rose Bunker had slipped out of the house on the hill without saying a word to anybody as to where they were going. Since coming to the Meiggs Plantation there had been a certain amount of laxness in regard to what the children did. They had a freedom that Mother Bunker never allowed when they were at home.
Because the Armatage children went and came as they wished, the little Bunkers began to do likewise. The house was so big, too, that the children might be playing a long way from the room in which their mother and father and Mr. Frane Armatage and his wife sat.
The servants who were supposed to keep some watch upon the children were now all in the quarters. Servants in the South seldom sleep in "the big house." And perhaps Mother Bunker forgot this fact.