“Oh, Tavia, I know! Don’t you suppose I would know his voice anywhere?”
Tavia nodded and scanned the mountain side with puzzled eyes.
“Where do you suppose it came from?” asked Dorothy, her voice lowered to a whisper. She was beginning to tremble and her teeth chattered uncontrollably. “It sounded as if——”
“It came from the side of the mountain,” Tavia replied. “I can’t understand it, but if we go cautiously we probably can solve the mystery.”
But to “go cautiously” was the last thing Dorothy wanted to do just then. Usually the cautious one, accustomed to restraining the impetuous Tavia, now the tables were reversed. Dorothy was the one who could brook no delay, Tavia the one who counseled caution.
But though Dorothy’s heart urged her to fly to Joe, knowing that he was in peril, her head whispered that Tavia’s advice was sound—that they must proceed with infinite caution if they meant to help her brother.
When Tavia said that the sound seemed to come from the side of the mountain she had meant to be taken literally.
Through the woods and directly in front of them they could see the mountain where it rose abruptly upward. There was no trail at this point, for here the mountain was practically unclimbable.
The trail, the one they had lost, zigzagged tortuously this way and that seeking those sections of the mountain where it was possible for men to force a pathway.
“We had better tether our ponies here,” Dorothy suggested softly. “If we take them much farther they are apt to whinny.”