Meanwhile she wondered what had become of Lolla.  The gypsy girl, as Bessie understood thoroughly, was running severe risks.  If the two men knew that she was in league with Dolly’s friends they would certainly take some steps to silence her.  But John, Bessie felt sure, did not believe that Lolla, no matter how jealous she might be, would actually betray her own people to the hated Americans.  He had smiled in a confident manner while Lolla had made her threats, and Bessie thought he regarded the girl as a child in a temper, but sure to come to her senses before she actually put him in danger.

What to do next was a problem.  Bessie, when she had followed the rough path until it led to a trail, was completely lost.  She knew, roughly, and in a general way, the direction of Camp Manasquan, as the camp at Long Lake was called, but that was about all.

“If I go straight ahead I may be going just as straight as I can away from anyone who can help Dolly,” she reflected.  “Or I may get over toward Loon Pond, and run into that awful gypsy, and then I’d be worse off than ever!  Oh, I do wish I knew where I was, or how I can find Lolla.  She must know these woods, and she’d be able to help me, I’m sure.”

Finally, however, Bessie determined to move slowly along the trail in a direction that would, she thought, take her around the bottom of Deer Mountain.  She remembered that just a little while before she had come to the place where she had first seen Lolla, a side path had crossed the trail on which she had followed Dolly and her captor, and it seemed likely to her that that path would also cross the trail she was now on.

If it did she could work back to a spot she knew, and so find her bearings, at least.  Then, if there was nothing else to be done, she would certainly be able to get back to Long Lake.  For her to stay in the woods, lost and hungry, would not help Dolly.

So she set out bravely, walking as fast as she could.  The sun was high in the heavens now, and it was long after breakfast time, so that Bessie was hungry, but she thought little of that.

As she had hoped, and half expected, she came, presently, and at what seemed to her the proper place, upon a trail that crossed the one she was following, and she turned to the left without hesitation.  She might, she felt, be going in the wrong direction altogether, but she could not very well be more hopelessly lost she was already; and, if she had to be out in the woods without a clue to the proper way to turn, she felt it made very, little difference whether she was in one place or in another.

The new trail was one evidently little used, and when Bessie had been on it for perhaps ten minutes, and was beginning to think that it was time she came in sight of the larger trail from Long Lake to Deer Mountain, she heard someone coming toward her, and, rounding a bend, came into sight of Lolla.

The gypsy girl seemed overwhelmed with joy at the sight of Bessie.