No Answer
“Una Grosvenor!” A weary Guardian, who had done the work of ten women,
in saving the sidehill, in saving thousands of dollars worth of
thoroughbred horseflesh, in saving the whole mountain, was calling the
roll—a panting victory-roll.
One after another her girls answered, some from the charred, wet ground
where they had wearily thrown themselves flat, without another breath in
their bodies.
It came to the last name on the alphabetical roll; a name which to each
of them had a sort of lily-like aroma about it, savoring of a choice
lily who toiled not neither did she spin, nor look after young brothers
and sisters, nor earn her Camp Fire favors, yet who lacked nothing
lovely that Life could give—for whose sake a grim horse-breeder would
drive his tandem up the mountain in the thick of a raving
“thunder-plump”, to save her from exposure.
“Una Grosvenor!... Gros-ven-or!”
There was no answer, save the pounding earth-din of the horses’ hoofs,
still circling, restlessly—their blowing snorts, now quieting down.
“Goodness! it’s as if she had dug a hole and buried herself,” said the
scorched Sanbie who, counting his burns upon the grass, forgot for a
moment the solicitude due to his employer’s daughter.
“Hush!” said the Guardian sharply. “She must be somewhere near. Nothing
could have happened to her.... Oh! I should not have let her take part
in it at all. She was too precious.”
“T-too precious!” sighed the hiss of the dying flames mockingly, curling
where a shed had been—it was the only answer.
“Una! Un-a! Where are you? Oh! where are you, dear? Can’t you answer?
Don’t play with us!... Who saw her last?”
But it was not like Una to play. Her nature was more woven of fancies
than frolic—even were frolic thinkable at such a time. And so the
Guardian felt, with a thousand pricks of burning in her body now, as she
put the desperate question as to who had seen her last.
“Let me think; I guess I did—I may have done so,” said Dorothy. “I was
the next girl to her when she passed the bucket to you at the time that
beam fell in—and the horses kicked up such a shindy. I was behind her,
as she ran back to the stream, to fill it again—she was running very
fast. But when I got to the brook, in the dark, I couldn’t find her so I
helped Naomi fill her bucket—and we passed that back along the line.
Sanbie was yelling to us to ‘shake it up there!’ so I thought I
did—right,” wailed Dorothy.
No one had any later news—not Pemrose, her play-marrow. _She_ had been
fighting brush fire.
“Perhaps—perhaps she fell, slipped and hurt herself or fainted—fainted
with the fright and rush,” said Theresa. “We’d better scatter and look
for her. She couldn’t, she couldn’t have been kicked by one of the
horses—trampled?”
The pasture burned anew at the thought, shriveled to a cinder, it
seemed, where the fire had been conquered, with the withering of girls’
hearts within their breasts.
Dividing into two search parties, one led by the old blacksmith,
breathing like his own forge, furnace-fed, the other by Sanbie—both of
whom knew the ways of excited horses better than the womanhood which had
helped them—they searched the Long Pasture, from end to end, hummock and
hollow and found no trace.
Nothing but a wooden bucket in the dim brook—where it had been whirled a
little way downstream and caught among stones. The water had played over
it for an hour. It told no tales.
“Ding-me-davel—knock me flat! The stream isn’t deep enough to drown
her!” puffed the exhausted blacksmith, drawing his bare arm, with the
whipcord muscles, across his forehead, dripping as it had never dripped
over an anvil in his life.
“Some pretty deep holes further down,” moaned Sanbie, licking his burns,
like a dog. “Gosh! now you see her—and now you don’t,” peering into the
darkness. “There’s hardly any breath left in my wind-works.” He looked
piteously at the Guardian. “But we can’t do much without a strong
lantern—light—I didn’t bring one, galloping up; carried behind him,
’twould have startled the horse. Now....”
Now, with hands scorched raw and lungs a desert, the young fire-fighter
was circling in the darkness until he cornered old King, most
good-natured of the bunch of horses on the sidehill—fast, too.
Jumping on without even a halter, weaving his blistered fingers in the
cool mane, he started to gallop back to the farm.
It was ages before he reappeared—while Guardian and girls searched
wearily in short circles—long ages before he reappeared with his dark
lantern carefully screened, so that no ray flung from behind ahead,
might startle even old King into shying into the ditch.
And now his parched “wind-works” were swelled to bursting with a
discovery which, for a long minute, rocking deliriously upon his
bareback, he could not bring forth.
“Hea-vens!” he gasped, at length. “Seems as if Something had visited us.
I counted the horses, coming back, Revel’s gone, too.”