“And, anyway, I’m only afraid of bears at night—when I go up to bed in the dark,” Carolyn May told herself. “Here it is broad daylight!”
Besides, if it were any such animal, Prince would surely give tongue. He only sniffed and pricked up his ears. The strange object had disappeared again.
It was just at the place where the spring spouted out of the rocky hillside and trickled across the road. There was a sort of natural watering trough here in the rock where the horses stopped to drink. The dog drew the little girl closer to the spot.
“Where has that man gone to? If it was a man.”
Prince stopped suddenly and whined.
“What is the matter, Princey?” demanded Carolyn May, really quite disturbed. There was something in the drift that the wind was heaping beside the beaten track. What could it be? “Prince!”
The dog barked, and then looked around at his mistress, as though to say: “See there!”
Carolyn May tumbled off the sled in a hurry. When she did so she slipped on a patch of snow-covered ice and fell. But she was not hurt.
“There! that’s where the water runs across the road. It’s all slippy—Oh!”
It was the sleeve of a man’s rough coat thrust out of the snowbank that brought this last cry to the child’s lips. In a very few moments the sign of the unfortunate wayfarer would have been completely covered in the drifting snow.