HE hope which stood high in John Sheldon’s breast was short lived. There was that one cry, undoubtedly Paula’s, then only the silence broken by Sheldon’s crashing through the bushes. Now and then when he stopped to listen he heard only his own heavy breathing.
But he pushed on, deeper into the woods. Her voice had floated to him clearly; she could not be very far away, and he knew the general direction. But when he came at last to the foot of the mountain where there were long lines of low cliffs he had found nothing. And, although he did not give up as the hours passed and the sun turned toward the west, his search went unrewarded.
He went back and forth along the base of the cliffs, fearing that she had fallen, that that scream had been whipped from her as she plunged over a precipice. He breathed more easily when he could be assured that this was not the case. After a while he even called out to her, crying “Paula! Where are you? I won’t hurt you.” But there was no answer.
Why had she cried out like that? One suspicion came early and naturally. Perhaps to draw him away from the cabin so that she or the madman could slip back to it. He had retraced his steps when the thought came to him, running. But as before there was no sign that another than himself had recently visited the house.
Late in the afternoon great black thunder clouds began to gather upon the mountain tops. They billowed up with the wind-driven swiftness of a summer storm, piling higher and higher until the sky was blotted out.
A peal of thunder, another—deep rumbles reverberating threateningly. A drop of rain splashed against his hand. He could hear the big drops pelting through the leaves of the trees; scattering drops kicked up little puffs of dust in dry, bare spaces. A forked tongue of lightning thrust into the bowels of the thick massed clouds seemed to rip them open. The rain came down in a mighty downpour. The rumble of the thunder was like the ominous growl of ten thousand hungering beasts.
The lightning stabbed again and again, the skies bellowed mightily, the forest shivered and moaned like a frightened thing under the hissing impact of the sudden wind. The dry ground drank the water thirstily, but even so, little rivulets and pools began to form everywhere. The rain, like a thick veil blown about by the wind, hid the mountains or gave brief views of them. For fifteen minutes the storm filled sky and forest noisily. Then it passed after the way of summer showers, and Sheldon came out from the makeshift shelter of a densely foliaged tree. He was a mile or more from Johnny’s Luck. The storm over, he turned back on his trail again, determined to gain the cabin before the daylight was gone, to wait there again for those for whom it was futile to search. Then the second time, unexpectedly, he heard Paula’s voice calling.
“Where are you?” it cried. “Oh, where are you?”
He stepped out of the trail, slipping behind a giant pine. She could not be a hundred yards away; he thought that she was coming on toward him, that she was running.
The world was filled with a strange light from the lowering sun shining through the wet air, a light which shone warmly like gold, which seemed to throb and quiver and thrill as it lay over the forest. It gave to grass and tree a new, vivid green, a yellow flower looked like a burning flame. Out of a fringe of trees into a wide open space Paula came.
She came on, running with her own inimitable, graceful swiftness, until she was not a score of paces from him. Here she stopped abruptly, looking this way and that eagerly, listening. Sheldon, his heart hammering from his own eagerness, stood still. If she came a little nearer—
“Where are you?” she called again. “Man from the world outside, where are you?”
Sheldon stared in amazement. She was calling him, she was seeking him, running to him!
Before he could answer, her quick eyes had found him out. With a strange look in them which he could not fathom, she ran to him. She was in the grip of some emotion so strong that she was no longer afraid of him, so that she laid her hand for the fraction of a second upon his arm as she cried brokenly:
“Come! Come quickly!”
“What is it?” he demanded, wondering. “What do you want? What is the matter?”
“You must help him,” she answered swiftly. “He says to bring you. But you must hurry. Run!”