Strangely enough, Bud Wax was the one person in the room who brought her comfort. Oddly enough, too, the person she feared most was the one she saw for the first time that very moment, the man at the door.
Even as she stared at this man with a fascination born of fear, the man spoke:
“What you all so shook up about?” he drawled.
“Hit’s Hallie,” the grizzled old man said, running his hand across his brow. “She’s come back. They brung her back. Might nigh kilt her, I reckon, then brung her back.”
Florence’s lips parted in denial, but no words came out. Her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth. There she sat, staring dumbly, while a cheap nickel plated alarm clock on the mantelpiece rattled loudly away as if running a race with time, and faintly, from far away, there came the notes of some bird calling to his mate in the night.
* * * * * * * *
At this moment, back in the whipsawed cabin, Marion found herself at once highly elated and greatly depressed.
“If only we can find the rest of them—a whole sack of them!” she whispered excitedly to herself one moment, and the next found herself pacing the floor, murmuring: “Where can they have gone? Why don’t they come back?”
There was no connection between the two emotions which she was experiencing. The first had to do with a letter which had just been brought to her from the little postoffice down the creek; the last with the mysterious disappearance of Florence and Hallie.
The letter was from her friend, the curator at Field Museum. It read: