"Hark! What's that?" asked Alice, suddenly, after a period of silence. A distant rumble came to their ears.
"Wagon going over a bridge, I should say," replied Ruth.
"More like thunder," Alice went on. "It _is_ thunder," she said a moment later, as a sharp clap reverberated through the still air. "Come on, Ruth, or we'll be caught."
They scrambled up from the mossy bed, and hurried from the little glen. But the storm came on apace, and before they were half-way out of the woods there was a sudden flurry of wind, and then came a deluge of rain, ushered in by vivid lightning, and loud thunder.
"Oh, Alice, we'll be drenched--and our new dresses!" cried Ruth.
"Let's get under a tree," suggested the younger girl. "That will shelter us."
"And get struck by lightning! I guess not!" protested Ruth. "Trees are always dangerous in a thunder storm."
"But we must find shelter!" said Alice, as they ran on.
They came to a little clearing in the woods, and pausing at the edge saw a lonely cabin in the midst of it.
"Come on over there!" cried Alice. "They'll take us in, whoever they are, until the shower is over."
Seizing Ruth's hand she darted toward the cabin. Then both girls saw a man open the door and stand in it--a man at the sight of whom they drew back in alarm.
For a moment the man stood in the doorway of the cabin, staring at Ruth and Alice standing there in the drenching rain. They had recognized him at once as the man whom they had seen run out of the old barn--the limping man who had fled down the moonlit road when he espied them on the bridge.
Whether or not he knew the girls, they did not stop to consider. Certainly they were dressed differently than on either of the occasions they had encountered him; but that might not obviate recognition.
"Come--come on back to the woods," whispered Ruth. "We--we don't want to meet him, Alice."
"No, I suppose not," agreed Alice, "and yet," and she seemed to shiver, "we ought not to stand out in this storm when shelter is so near, no matter who that man is."
"Well, I mean it! I am soaked, and you are, too. Besides, that lightning is awful--and the thunder! I can't stand it--come on. I'm sure he won't eat us!"
But the girls were saved any anxiety by the action of the strange man. Alice was trying to draw her sister toward the cabin, and Ruth, torn between a desire to get under shelter, and fear of the man, was hardly able to decide, when the stranger darted back into the cabin, and came out with an umbrella.