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 result was to set the echoes reverberating, and to strain their throats.

"Oh, come on, we'll find the trail ourselves," Sylvia finally said.

They hastened along, but had not reached the fork in the path when the storm burst.

There was a series of vivid lightning flashes, the thunder seemed doubly loud out in that wilderness, and then came the drenching rain.

"Come under this tree!" urged Rose, darting toward a beech.

"You may be struck!" Hazel warned her.

"Have to take a chance," Rose retorted. "Beech trees are the safest, I've heard, and I can't stand out in the rain."

But the tree was not much shelter, and as the shower showed no indication of slackening, and as the girls were now fairly desperate, they decided to keep on. Their clothes could stand a good deal of rain before becoming wet through, and their shoes were waterproof, so they were not in such desperate plight as might otherwise have been the case.

But it grew darker and darker, and at last they found themselves stumbling along in the woods, tripping over fallen trees, banging into trunks and getting tangled in underbrush.

"We're off the trail!" cried Sylvia. "We can't go on. We must stop or we may come to some harm."

Frightened, they huddled together, while the rain beat down pitilessly.

"Oh, help! help!" suddenly screamed Rose. It was as though she could stand the strain no longer. "Help! help!" she cried. "We are lost!"

Above the patter of the rain on the leaves, and above the low muttering of thunder a voice answered:

"Stay where you are. We're coming!"