Only the night before, while out for a stroll in the moonlight, she had made a delightful discovery. Three beautiful white foxes had their home beneath the cliff back of their cabin. She had surprised them at their play. She did not want one of their skins for a decoration.
But now, while she was wondering whether this man had any connection with Johnny’s half-mythical Moccasin Telegraph, her dogs suddenly took a turn to the right, speeding away on a fresh trail.
Seeing that this trail, cutting her old one at an acute angle, led toward camp and hoping once more that it might lead her to one of her party, she allowed the dogs to pick their own way.
This time she was not disappointed. They had not gone half a mile before she sighted, standing out dark against the sky, a lone figure at the crest of a ridge.
“It’s Lloyd Hill,” she told herself with a thrill of joy. She had recognized him on the instant. His was a military bearing not often found in the North. At this moment he stood rigidly erect, looking away toward the west as a commanding general might while surveying some vast smoking battlefield.
She was obliged to cross a narrow valley to reach him. This gave her time for reflection. Lloyd Hill was not like the other men of her camp. He was more reserved. He was, as her father expressed it, “a good listener.” He talked little. When he did speak his English was perfect. Jim spoke with the mellow drawl of the southern mountains; Clyde with the breezy tongue of the west. Lloyd impressed her as coming from a fine family; yet he never spoke of his family. A silent, rather slender, dark-eyed fellow, he was ever alert, yet never in a hurry.
“Always seems to be all there,” her father had said. “But how tense he is. If you fired off a gun when he wasn’t looking, he’d jump three feet from the ground!” This was more true than he knew, and for good reasons.
With these thoughts passing through her mind and with one half-asked question lurking back of all, “Who stole those films for the pictures we are using?” she crossed the intervening space to climb the ridge.
All this time, though she was sure he knew she was coming, he did not so much as turn his head. Only when she had reached his side did he speak. With one arm outstretched he said:
“Do you see that?”