He hurled himself down the other slope, past the pool, and into the trail which Jeffrey had taken yesterday. It was break-neck riding, in a strange saddle. But the girl’s anxiety rose with the excitement of the horse’s wild rush, so that when they reached the top of the divide where she had last seen Jeffrey it was the horse and not the girl that was ready to settle down to a sober and safer pace.
Her common sense told her that she was probably foolish; that Jeffrey had merely stayed over night somewhere and that she would meet him on the way. But another and a subtler sense kept whispering to her to hurry on, that she was needed, that the good name, if not the life, of the boy she loved was in danger!
She had found out from Mrs. Whiting just who were the men whom Jeffrey had gone to see. But she did not know how she could dash up to their doors and demand to know where he was. It was eleven miles up the stony trail that followed Wilbur’s Fork, and the girl’s nerves now keyed up to expect she knew not what jangled at every turn of the road. Jeffrey had meant to come straight back this way to her. That he had not done so meant that something had stopped him on the way. What was it?
On one side the trail was flanked by giant hemlocks and the underbrush was grown into an impenetrable wall. On the other it ran sheer along 87 the edge of Wilbur’s Fork, a rock-bottomed, rushing stream that tumbled and brawled its way down the long slope of the country.
Time after time the girl shuddered and gripped her saddle as she pushed on past a place where the undergrowth came right down to the trail, and six feet away the path dropped off thirty feet to the rock bed of the stream. She caught herself leaning across the saddle to look down. A man might have stood in the brush as Jeffrey came carelessly along. And that man might have swung a cant-stick once––a single blow at the back of the head––and Jeffrey would have gone stumbling and falling over the edge of the path. There would not be even the sign of a struggle.
Once she stopped and took hold of her nerves.
“Ruth Lansing,” she scolded aloud, “you’re making a little fool of yourself. You’ve been down there in that convent living among a lot of girls, and you’re forgetting that these hills are your own, that there never was and never is any danger in them for us who belong here. Just keep that in your mind and hustle on about your business.”
When she came out into the open country near the head of the Fork she met old Darius Wilbur turning his cattle to pasture. The old man did not know the girl, but he knew the Lansing colt and he looked sharply at the steaming withers 88 of Brom Bones before he would give any attention to her question.
“What’s the tarnation hurry, young lady?” he inquired exasperatingly. “Jeff Whiting? Yes, he was here yest’day. Why?”