The mill had stood at the foot of “Lily Pond,” where the road crossed the stream, nobody knows how long. There was an old-fashioned dam, built of a few logs and a good deal of earth and rock, now overgrown with grass and bushes up to the very sluiceway of the mill. The waste-board, over which the water flowed in a thin, glistening sheet in the early spring when the pond was high, was scarcely more than ten feet long. About a hundred feet further down the stream was a shady grove of willows and other trees, growing down close to the water’s edge. Toward this spot Winthrop with his sister, Puss and her father rode merrily enough that hot July day. Mr. Rowan did not go down to the grove at once, but, having let the young people jump out with their baskets at the Lily Pond Bridge, drove on to a neighbor’s to transact some business, promising to join the party at lunch a half an hour later. Winthrop assisted his sister carefully down over a steep embankment to the willows, Puss springing ahead and calling to her companions that she had found “a lovely place right beside the water.”
Baskets and shawls were soon safely stowed away, and Winthrop, with the help of the girls, arranged a sort of shelter of boughs. When a small fire had been kindled on a flat rock just in front, Puss laughed with delight, and Marie’s delicate face showed a glow of healthy pleasure, which her brother noted with quiet satisfaction. Plainly Taconic life was bringing the frail invalid back to strength and health.
Leaving the girls to chatter over the beauties of the place and their plans for the coming weeks, Winthrop strayed down stream a few rods, following a cat-bird, whose whimsical calls led him to suspect a nest among the alders which lined the river at that point.
The bird kept persistently out of sight, but repeated its cry in a more and more distressed tone, until Winthrop reached the very heart of a thicket.
“I’ve got you now!” he said aloud, as he stooped and thrust aside a mass of foliage. Then he started to his feet. He had very nearly laid his hand on—not the pretty, rounded nest of the gray-winged thrush, but the evil, grinning features of Mort Lapham.
“I rayther guess we’ve got you this time, my Boston daisy,” said Mort, rising in his turn. “Tie him up, fellows!”
The ugly youth’s two boon comrades sprang forward from the rear, and before Winthrop could offer the slightest resistance, entangled as he was in the tough, slender stems of the alders, he was bound, hand and foot.
“What are you going to do with me, Phil Bradford?” asked the prisoner quietly, though his heart sank as the three cowardly assailants hurried him roughly through the underbush.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” growled the other, who had not forgotten the blow given in defense of the girl by the roadside. They emerged presently in a little opening that crowned a bluff, some half a dozen feet or more above the surface of the river, where it here made a sudden bend toward the steep bank forming at its base a deep, black pool, with here and there a few pine needles turning slowly in its eddies.
In all this time Winthrop had not uttered a cry. He would not alarm the girls unnecessarily, and might include them in his own dangerous situation.