“How simple it is after all, coming up here in a plane without attracting attention! The plane from Houghton comes and goes at all hours. The people at Rock Harbor hear it. If it does not land at their door, they say, ‘It has gone to Tobin’s Harbor or Belle Isle.’ The folks at Tobin’s Harbor and Belle Isle think it has gone to Rock Harbor. The strange plane may come and go up here as its pilot wishes, and no one the wiser.
“After all,” she sighed, “we are not officers of the law. It’s really not our affair. And yet—”
She was thinking of the scream Greta had heard, and of the apparently helpless one carried to a boat and then to land, and after that of the scream they had both heard in the night.
“Life,” she told herself, “all human life is so precious that it is the duty of all to protect those who are in danger.
“Probably nothing very terrible,” she assured herself. “Nothing to be afraid of. We—”
She broke her thoughts square off to lean forward and listen with all her ears. Had she caught some sound from without, the snapping of a twig perhaps?
“Some prowling wolf or a moose passing.”
Not satisfied with this, she opened the flaps of the tent and peered into the moonlight.
The moon was high. The silence was uncanny. Every object, trees, bushes, rocks stood out like pictures in fairyland. Shadows were deep wells of darkness.
Some ten feet from their tent was a large flat rock, their “table.” This stood full in the moonlight. That they had left nothing on this “table” she knew right well. She had washed it clean with a canvas bucket full of water from a spring. And yet—