He set about preparing a place for her on a broad seat before the fire.
“But you—” she protested.
“Oh, I’ll sleep with one eye open, here in a chair. As long as snow continues to fall, we are safe.”
“And when the sky clears you will call me?”
“Never fear.”
“While I sleep I will dream what we are to do next.”
“Success to your dreams.”
Turning his back on her, Red busied himself by drawing a crude map of the island modeled after her relief map of ashes.
“Going to be tough,” he whispered with a sigh. “Tough for both of us. But somehow we’ll make it. We’ve got to!”
After another look at the falling snow, he curled up for three winks. He slept them through, all unconscious of the commotion his disappearance had stirred up. The hundreds of columns printed about him in the papers all over the land, the scores of detectives on the trail of the kidnapers, the thousands of earnest persons in all walks of life who had volunteered to do all in their power to help bring him back—all this he would have found, had he known it, a matter for surprise and great bewilderment. For the Red Rover was, above all, a very humble and modest young man who loved doing things for their own sake, and who thought little of honor or great reward. That the world at large had been so greatly stirred by his disappearance he did not dream.