“Misconstrued, your grandmother!” retorted Dorothy rudely, at which Tavia chuckled in great delight. “I haven’t lived with you all my life, Tavia—more or less—without being pretty sure what you mean, as a rule. Are you coming or must I go alone?”
“Well, of all the nerve!” crowed Tavia in huge delight, as she spurred her mount down the road in the wake of Dorothy’s mettlesome pony. “I’ll say there is nothing slow about Dorothy these days—or Garry either. This promises to be a real interesting party.”
“I say, Dorothy,” she called, as she urged her pony neck and neck with Dorothy’s galloping mount, “we ought to work out some plan of attack, you know. We really ought. We’ll probably just be rushing into trouble this way.”
With difficulty Dorothy drew her pony to a walk and regarded her chum thoughtfully.
“I don’t know how we can make any plans when we haven’t the slightest idea what we are going to do next,” she said.
“We know just as much as Garry,” Tavia retorted. “That good-looking cowboy—Steve, did Garry call him—said that the two men and the boy disappeared in that direction,” and she swept an arm toward the mountains rising majestically before them. “Look!” she cried suddenly, leaning from the saddle and gripping Dorothy’s arm. “Do you see those two tall peaks with the smaller one between? If we keep our eye on that formation we can’t go far wrong.”
“But we shall lose sight of your church spires as soon as we enter the woods,” objected Dorothy, and Tavia’s face fell.
“That’s right,” she admitted. “You’re a better man than I am, Dorothy Dale. Oh, but I’ll tell you what,” she added, on the crest of another illumining thought. “There’s a trail—the one we used to follow when we were here before, don’t you remember? I am very sure that winds through the woods in the general direction Steve pointed out. It probably is the very one the kidnappers used when they spirited Joe away,” she added triumphantly.
“I wish you wouldn’t call them kidnappers, Tavia,” Dorothy objected nervously. “It sounds so horrid.”
“Well, I could think of a good many worse things to call Philo Marsh and your gallant friend, Stiffbold,” retorted Tavia. “Doro—I do believe—why, yes, here is the trail right here!”