"Let's keep on down this path for a while. He and Josh often go this way."
"If Josh would only come! I know he could find him."
"He will be found soon, I am sure. His little legs cannot carry him very far and I am sure he would not get out of the trails. He may be back at camp now. You turn back and let me follow this trail for a mile or so. You are tired, I know."
"No, indeed, I'm not; if I were it would serve me right. If only I had stopped and told him a story! I am so selfish when I get steeped in a book. What will Mother say if Bobby is lost?"
The girls wandered on, stopping every now and then to call to the lost child. Sometimes they would be answered by an echo and then would stop and listen and call again.
Douglas got in the car with Lewis, who whisked her down the mountain side to the station.
"Maybe he has carried out his threat of running away. He is always saying he is going back to Richmond when he gets tired of the camp, which he does occasionally when he has nothing to occupy him. If I had only stopped adding up expenses and built the log cabin for him! I have neglected him, I am sure--and what will Father and Mother say? I wish I had let him go with Josh. He always takes such good care of him."
"We are going to find him, Douglas, I feel sure. Why, the little shaver could not walk very far."
He was not at the station and no one had seen him. Old Abner Dean came out of his store and actually seemed to feel some concern for the boy. He was a hard old man but not hard enough to resist the charm of Bobby's eyes.
"He could not have come to the station without some one seeing him, and now I am going to take you home. He may be found by this time and if he is not I'll start out again. There is no use in your going," said Lewis, feeling very sorry for the distracted sister and very uneasy himself in spite of his repeated assurances to Douglas that the little shaver was all right wherever he might be.
"First let's go down this road a little way. He might have turned off before he got to the station. He knows that this is the road Josephus and Josh took this morning."
"All right! Anywhere that there is a chance of finding him!"
Lucy and Lil with Frank and his friend Skeeter, went over the mountain. Lucy and Lil were feeling very much cut up that they had refused to let poor little Bobby tag along earlier in the day.