“Go ahead,” said Penny. “You take Leaping Lena. The boy in the boat will row you across.”
“But how will you get home, then?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll find a way. You just go on. I only hope the old bus holds up all the way home.”
Louise laughed and then the two girls walked to the boat dock. In a few moments the boy in the rowboat appeared and took Louise across. Afterward, Penny turned back through the trees and went on to the forbidden part of the estate.
She spent a long time about the pool, examining the earth all about it, but she failed to learn anything new. Finally, she retraced her steps to the river. She expected to find the boy waiting for her, but he had disappeared. She walked through the trees to the boat dock and stood there until the old watchman on the other side observed her predicament.
He obligingly lowered the drawbridge and she crossed the river, pausing at the gear house to chat with him.
Penny listened without comment to his story of the automobile accident. Thorny had his own version of how it had occurred and she did not correct any of the details.
“I wish I had a way to get into Corbin,” she remarked when he had finished his lengthy account.
“If you walk down to the main road you kin catch the county bus,” he told her. “It runs every hour.”
A long hike along a dusty highway, an equally tedious wait at a crossroad, and finally Penny arrived in Corbin. She went directly to the Colonial Hotel, placing a telephone call to her father’s office.