She turned her face toward the rocky ridge that towered above her and whispered to herself once more, “Alone, all alone.”
Strangely enough, though no one is known to inhabit Greenstone Ridge, and surely no one at that hour would be found wandering there so far from the regular haunts of men, she had experienced from the first a feeling that on that ridge she was not quite alone.
“And now,” she breathed, “I know I am not alone up here. There is someone else somewhere. But who can that person be? And where?”
Here indeed was a mystery. For the moment however, no mystery could hold her attention. Even thoughts of mother and the sunset were forgotten. It was enough to stand there, head bare, face all alight, listening to that matchless melody.
* * * * * * * *
As Florence had pushed her stout little boat off the sandy shore that afternoon, she had been tempted to call Greta back. “Perhaps,” she said to Jeanne, “we have made a mistake in allowing her to lose herself in that forest alone.”
“But what can harm her?” Jeanne had reasoned. “Wolves are cowards. The wild moose will not come near her. There is no one on the ridge. It will do her good to be alone.”
Thus reassured, Florence had straightened the line on her pole, hooked a lure to a bar on her reel, and, with Jeanne in the stern of the boat, had rowed away.
Someone had told Florence that the waters of Duncan’s Bay were haunted by great dark fish with rows of teeth sharp as a shark’s. From that time the big girl had experienced a compelling desire to try her hand at catching these monsters. Now she breathed a sigh of suppressed excitement as she unwound a fathom of line from her reel.
“You do it this way,” she said to Jeanne. Her whole being was filled with a sort of calm excitement. “Cousin Joe told me just how you fish for pike. You put this red and white spoon with its four-pointed hook on the line. Then you let the line out, almost all of it, a hundred and thirty feet. Then you row around in curves. You drag that red and white spoon after the boat. See?”