“Did you not hear him say that Peter was coming?  Peter is his best friend; they are closer together, and are more to one another, than brothers.  If we tried to escape with her now, Peter would find us, and his hand is heavy.  We should do your friend no good, and be punished ourselves.  We must wait.  But hurry, before he comes.  Tell her to be happy, and not to fear.  I will save her, and you.  We will work together to save her.”

And with that Bessie, much as she would have liked to get Dolly out of the clutches of her captor at once, had to be content.  She realized fully that in Lolla she had gained an utterly unexpected ally, in whom lay the best possible chance for the immediate release of her chum, and the mere knowledge of where Dolly was hidden would be extremely valuable.

After all, it was all, and, possibly, more, than she had expected to accomplish when she had plunged into the woods after the gypsy and his prisoner, and she felt that she ought to be satisfied.  So she hurried at once up the path that Lolla pointed out, leaving the gypsy girl below as a guard.

The path was rough and steep, rising sharply, but Bessie paid little heed to its difficulties, since she felt that it was taking her to Dolly.  She kept her eyes and ears open for any sight or sound that might make it easier to find Dolly, but she did not call out, since she felt that it was practically certain the gypsy had managed, in some manner, to make it impossible for poor Dolly to cry out, lest, in his absence, she alarm some passerby and so obtain her freedom.

Bessie was sure that Dolly would not be left in some place that could be seen from the path, but she was also sure that she could not be far from it, since there had not been time for the gypsy to make any extended trip through the woods off the trail.  Bessie had traveled fast through the night, and she was sure that John, with the weight of Dolly to carry, had not been able to move as fast as she, and could not, therefore, have been more than twenty minutes or half an hour ahead of her in reaching the trail she was now following.

So she watched carefully for some break in the thick undergrowth that lined the trail, for some opening through which John might have gone with his burden.  There might even, she thought, be another of those precious sign posts that, back on the other trail, had been made by the torn pieces from Dolly’s skirt.

But, careful as was her search, she reached the end of the trail without finding anything that looked like a promising place, or seeing anything that made her think Dolly was within a short distance of her.  The trail led to an exposed peak, a ragged outcrop of rock, bare of trees, and covered only with a slight undergrowth.

Once there Bessie understood why the trail had been made through the woods.  The view was wonderful.  Below her were the waving tops of countless trees, and beyond them she could look down and over the cultivated valleys, full of farms, whose fields, marked off by stone fences, looked small and insignificant from her high perch.