So amid much fun and nonsense the boys were shooed forth into the bright sunshine of the out-of-doors, and all the girls fell to to help their chaperon, not wanting to put the extra work the boys made entirely on Amy's shoulders.
Breakfast was good, but they ate hurriedly, anxious to get at the business of the day. They wanted more than they had wanted anything in a very long time to find Professor Dempsey and tell him the joyful news that his sons were alive.
"I'm horribly afraid of him at night," Mollie confided, as they started out at last, "but in the daytime I am only sorry for him."
"Do you think we shall find him, Will?" asked Amy, with a helpless little look into Will's self-reliant young face. "I do want to so much."
Will looked down at her with an expression that said to any one who would read it: "I would give you anything in the world you asked for, if I only could."
But all he really said was: "That remains to be seen. He proved himself a rather slippery customer last night, and the chase we put up may only serve to put him on his guard. Crazy people are tricky, you know."
"Goodness," said Grace, looking fearfully over her shoulder. "There is nothing in the world I am so afraid of as a crazy person."
"That's why she has always been so afraid of me, I suppose," grinned Mollie.
"Afraid of you," said Grace, her eyebrows raised in mock surprise. "Little shrimp--who are you?" There followed a characteristic scene that somewhat lifted the oppression they had all been feeling, and it was not till they had nearly reached the river at the head of the falls that they became serious again.
"It was right about here," said Betty soberly, "that we saw him the night that he started to jump into the river--or I suppose it was the same one," she added.