“Isn’t it wonderful!” Marion exclaimed as she hung her sweater on the deer’s antlers which served as a coat rack. “Just to live like this! To be primitive as our ancestors were! I shall never forget it, not as long as I live!”
Supper was over. Darkness had fallen “from the wings of night” when Marion slipped alone out of the whipsawed cabin.
As she entered the shadows that lay across the path that led away from the cabin, she caught sound of a movement off to the right.
Her heart skipped a beat, but she did not pause. The message she had to send could not be longer delayed. And yet, as she hurried on, she could not help wondering who might have been behind the bushes. Was it the prowler, he of the beady black eyes and hooked nose, who had peered in at the cabin window? If it were, what did he want? What did he mean by that strange exclamation: “Hit’s her?” Had he seen Hallie? Did he know her? Would he attempt to carry her away? She hoped not. The little girl had become a spot of sunshine in that brown old cabin.
Two hours later the proceedings of the previous night were being re-enacted. Marion’s beacon fire appeared on the mountain’s crest. Florence caught it at once and flashed back her answer. There followed a half hour of signaling. At the end of this half hour Florence found herself sitting breathless among the husks in the cabin loft.
“Oh!” she breathed. “What news! The railroad is to be built. I wonder if the land is still for sale?”
“And I,” she exclaimed, squaring her shoulders, “I must be afraid no longer. Somehow I must find my way down this slope to Caleb Powell’s home. I must buy that land.”
She patted the crinkly bills, five hundred dollars, still pinned to the inside of her blouse. Then, slipping quickly down the ladder, she stepped into the cool, damp air of night.
Yet, even as she turned to go down the mountain, courage failed her.
Above her, not so far away but that she could reach it in an hour, hung the mountain’s crest. Dim, dark, looming in the misty moonlight, it seemed somehow to beckon. Beyond it, down the trail, lay home, her mountain home, and loving friends.