The Nowadays Girls in the Adirondacks or, The deserted bungalow on Saranac Lake
"But to go back we would have to give up the search here," Roy's sister
said. "And we can't do that. We'll keep on until dark, and then we'll
go to the bungalow, and if we have no good news I hope some will be
waiting for us."
"I hope so," came from Rose, as she stalked on beside Sylvia.
There were two trails close together at one point, though they
separated widely farther on. Sylvia and her three chums, with Mrs.
Brownley, were on this, while the guide, with Mr. Russman, his son,
Harry and the boatman, were on the other. Just how it happened no one
could ever explain, but the girls must have gone farther than they
intended, for, of a sudden, they found themselves down in a little
glade alone. It was Sylvia who first discovered it.
"Why, girls!" she cried. "Where are the others?"
"Just back there a way," declared Alice, reassuringly.
"We must return to them at once," said the chaperon. "It will never do
to be separated."
They followed the trail back, but when they came to the place where the
divergence began there was no sight of the others. For a moment the
girls looked wonderingly at each other, and then Sylvia said:
"We must shout!"
They did, but they could not be sure they were answered. Certainly some
sounds came back to them, but it may have been the echoes.
"Hark!" suddenly exclaimed Hazel, when in another moment there might
have been a panic of fear for all of them. "Some one is coming."
There was a sound of approaching footsteps, and the breaking of
underbrush.
"Oh, if it should be----" began Sylvia, hopefully.
But the light in her eyes died out a moment later, as an elderly man
came into view. The girls had never seen him before, but he seemed to
be one who lived in the woods.
"Afternoon, ladies," was his cordial greeting.
"Oh, are you looking for--him?" asked Sylvia.
"For whom, miss?" He seemed a bit puzzled.
"My brother. He is lost in these woods--has been since last night.
We are searching for him with a party, but we took the wrong trail.
However, the others must be near here. But have you seen my brother?"
Quickly she described Roy.
"By hemlock!" exclaimed the old man, clapping his hand on his leg.
"Say, I wouldn't be surprised if that _was_ him!"
"Who? Oh, where? Tell me!" begged Sylvia, in her eagerness catching
hold of his arm.
"Why, about an hour back," said the old man, "I was passing along the
Ampersand trail, and on top of Bald Mountain I see a feller outlined
against the sky. He didn't have no hat on, and he seemed to be actin'
sort of queer. I thought it was one of the campers around here. Some of
them is kinder foolish," he added, apologetically.
"I know--go on!" exclaimed Sylvia.
"Well, I didn't do nothin'," said the old man. "I just watched this
feller a bit, and come on. Now I meet you and----"
"Oh, I'm sure that was Roy!" Rose cried. "Which way is it to Bald
Mountain?"
"Right back on this trail a mile or so," and he pointed to the one he
had been travelling.
"Come on!" cried Sylvia, eagerly. "Come on!" She hardly paused to thank
their informant, but rushed along the trail. Hardly knowing what they
were doing, but overcome by the excitement and the hope of finding Roy,
the others followed. They did not even think of Mr. Russman, Harry and
the others. They were intent on getting to Bald Mountain as fast as
they could.
Excitement gave them strength. Their weariness seemed to vanish
magically. Even Mrs. Brownley kept up with the girls, and she was not a
young woman.
The trail was not a plain one, but by this time the girls had become
used to following even a faint path through the woods. On and on they
fairly rushed. If they thought of the others at all it was to come to
the hasty, if incorrect, conclusion that they could easily go back and
find them once they had located Roy.
"How far did he say it was to Bald Mountain?" asked Hazel, when the
pace had slackened a little.
"A mile or so," replied Alice.
"Well, we've come more than a mile--more than two, I should say," Hazel
went on. "I say, girls, we'd better pull up a bit, and think of what
we're doing."
"Oh, don't stop!" begged Sylvia. "We _must_ find him!"
"But we must find Bald Mountain first," said Hazel. "And I don't see
any signs of it. We seem to be down in a sort of swamp."
They were, indeed, on low ground, and the trail now turned downward
instead of upward.
"Can it be that we are--lost?" cried Rose. She hesitated over the word.
"Lost!" gasped Alice. "Oh, it can't be!"
"Keep on a little farther," Sylvia urged. "We may come to the mountain
any minute now."
But the farther they went the more the trail sloped downward. Clearly
they had come in the wrong direction.
"We are lost!" said Rose at last.
CHAPTER XXXIII
UNEXPECTED HELP
For a moment a feeling of panic seemed to overcome not only the girls,
but Mrs. Brownley herself. The word "lost" appeared to have a most
sinister meaning under the circumstances.
For the girls had left their friends, the guide was with Mr. Russman
and the others, and they had taken a wrong trail.
Were they to be lost, even as Roy was lost, and with the prospect of
being left out in the woods with night coming on?
It was a question that each one hesitated to ask herself, and yet it
was one that needed to be answered.
"Oh, we can't be lost!" Sylvia said at length. "Here is the path. We
haven't strayed from that."
"Yes, but what good is it to us if we don't know where it leads to?"
Alice wanted to know.
"Oh, but it _must_ lead somewhere," Sylvia insisted. "If it doesn't
lead where we want to go, which, just at present, is Bald Mountain,
then we must go back along it until we get on the right trail. That is
simple enough."
"To say; yes," agreed Hazel. "But is it simple enough to do?"
"We'll try, anyhow," Sylvia went on. Somehow she seemed to have
recovered her spirits, which had been dampened by the assertion of Rose
that they were lost. "All we'll have to do," went on Roy's sister, "is
to keep going up instead of descending. We want to get on the heights,
where we can get a good view."
"That sounds reasonable," Mrs. Brownley said. "Suppose we try it?" and
she looked questioningly at her charges.
"I think we ought to call out before we stir another step," Rose said.
"What for?" demanded Sylvia.
"To see if the others are near here. If they are it will be better to
go to them or get them to come to us, and let Pete take us to Bald
Mountain. I don't want to risk trying to find it ourselves."
"Well, perhaps that will be better," Sylvia admitted. "We'll call. Mr.
Russman and the others can't be very far back. I suppose it was foolish
of us to come on without them. But they seemed to be quite near, and I
thought they would follow us."
"I didn't think of anything but of getting to Bald Mountain," asserted
Rose.
"If we had asked that old man he might have guided us," Hazel ventured.
"It's too late to think of that now," sighed Alice. "We shall have to
guide ourselves."
"And we can do it easily enough," asserted Sylvia, with perhaps more
conviction than she really felt. "Come on now, let's turn about and go
back. And we must hurry, for it is getting late."
The girls noticed, not without little shivers of apprehension, that the
shadows were lengthening perceptibly. How far from the bungalow they
were they could not estimate. And how far they were from where they
had last seen their friends and the guide was equally a matter of mere
supposition.
"Indeed we must hasten," agreed the chaperon.
She did not speak of her weariness. They were all weary, for they had
come the last mile or so at a fast pace, spurred on by the hope of
finding Roy on top of the hill, locally called Bald Mountain.
"We are somewhat like the King of France," said Sylvia, with a laugh,
as they started back. "We seem to have marched down the hill, and now
we are marching up again."
"The King of France reversed the process," said Rose.
"Besides, he had ten thousand men," added Hazel.
"Just one, in the shape of a guide, would be very welcome now,"
asserted Alice.
"Oh, we must learn to depend more on ourselves!" Sylvia exclaimed. "If
we are to have Nowadays Club outings every year we must learn not to
get lost in the woods."
"I still refuse to admit that we are lost!" said Alice.
"So do I," Sylvia agreed.
They were in better spirits now, and stepped on with lighter hearts.
The trail led slightly upward, and they marveled, now that they were
cooler-headed, how they had ever allowed themselves to keep on a
downward path, when they knew they were supposed to be going up a
mountain trail. But the excitement of the moment accounted for their
lack of observation.
It was not until they reached a place where the trail divided that
they came to a halt, and once more they looked at one another, if not
exactly with fear in their eyes, at least with shadows of doubt.
"I didn't notice this before," confessed Sylvia, pointing to the forked
paths.
"Nor I," said Alice.
"I thought we had come over a straight path from the time we met that
old man," was the contribution of Hazel.
"We were so excited we didn't know what we were doing," Rose declared.
"Now, the question is, which path did we come over?"
They stood at a place in the woods where three trails met in the shape
of a Y. They had come up the right-hand side of the letter. But on
their previous trip had they been travelling on the main stem, or on
the left-hand fork? That was what they could not tell.
Sylvia bent over close to the ground, as she had seen Pete do several
times. But the earth of the trail was hard packed, and she was not
expert enough to read the "sign" left by their footprints. Indeed she
could see none.
"Well," she said, arising, "I give up! I don't know which path it was."
"Let's shut our eyes and pick out one blindly," suggested Alice.
"Don't be rash," Mrs. Brownley warned them.
"But what can we do?" asked Hazel.
"Go along one path for a little way, and see if we can't pick out some
natural landmark that we passed coming down," went on the chaperon. "If
we can't do that, say within half a mile, we may be pretty sure we are
on the wrong trail, and we can walk back and try the other."
That seemed reasonable to the girls, and they decided to try that plan.
Again hope came to them to drive away their weariness! But as they
looked up and saw the shadows growing longer and longer, and noticed
the wood darkening under the pall of approaching night, it required all
their boldness to put on a brave front. They all tried to be brave for
Sylvia's sake, for, after all, was she not suffering more than any of
them, save perhaps Rose?
"Forward!" cried Mrs. Brownley. "Time is too precious to waste standing
still."
As they went along the path they had selected the conviction became
an ever-increasing one that it was not the path they had come over at
first. They saw a little waterfall they were sure they had not passed
before.
"We're wrong!" exclaimed Sylvia. "We've got to go back and try over
again."
There was nothing else to do. It was becoming dark so rapidly now that
they looked up in alarm, and found the sky becoming rapidly overcast
with clouds.
"We're in for a thunderstorm," declared Rose, in alarm.
"Well, we're not afraid of lightning," asserted Sylvia.
"No, but it will make it so much more difficult to travel and find the
path," Alice objected.
"It means we must hurry more than ever," Sylvia said.
"Suppose we shout here," suggested Sylvia. Their previous calls had
been unanswered.
They raised their shrill voices in shouts again and again, but the only