“Here!” came what seemed to be a very faint reply.
“Where?” shouted the girls, now making their way down, step by step, over the perilous cliffs.
Farmer Stevens knew every inch of that hill. He often had to rescue from its uncertainties either a sheep or a young cow. He also knew that precisely where the machine was ditched, the hill shelved to a perfectly straight bank, so that instead of an incline the wall of earth actually seemed to run under the surface.
“If she went over there,” he told himself, “she never stopped until—she landed.”
“Oh, Cora!” called the girls again, “can’t you tell us where you are?”
“Look out there, young ladies,” cautioned Mr. Stevens, “or you may go down—double quick!”
Hope was scaling the rocks like a wild creature. The two hired men were almost jumping from cliff to cliff making straight for the clump of hemlock trees at the very edge of the stream, that, in its quiet way, defied the great hill above it.
“Here she is!” called Hope. “Here in the—bed of hemlock!”
To Bess and Belle, not acquainted with the peculiarities of the flat-branched evergreen, finding Cora in “a bed of hemlock” was rather a startling discovery, but to Hope—what nest could have been safer! Cora had fallen over the cliff into the soft branches of a tree that jutted out from the shelving earth.
“Are you hurt?” asked the girl from the farm, looking up into the branch of the big green tree.