Tish turned on her stone and looked at me.

“You will not be kidnaped,” she said shortly.  “I cannot imagine any one safer than you are in that costume.”

Well, I made my way along the trail as rapidly as I could.  It was twenty miles there and back and I’ve seen the day when two city blocks would send me home to soak my feet in hot water.  But the sandals were easy to walk in and my calico skirt was short and light.

I had no paper to write my message on, of course, but on the way I gathered a large white fungus and I scraped a note on it with a pin.  With the fungus under my arm I walked briskly along, planning an omelet with the eggs, if we got any, and gathering mushrooms here and there.  It was the mushrooms that led me to the discovery of a camping-place that was prehistoric in its primitiveness—­a clearing, surrounded by low bushes, and in the center a fireplace of stones with a fire smouldering.  At one side a heap of leaves and small twigs for a bed, a stump for a seat, and lying on top of it a sort of stone axe, made by inserting a sharp stone into the cleft of a sapling and tying it into place with a wild-grape tendril.  Pegged out on the ground to cure was a rabbit skin, indifferently scraped.  It made our aluminum kettle and canvas tepee look like a marble-vestibuled apartment on Riverside Drive.

The whole thing looked pitiful, hungry.  I thought of Tish sitting on a stone inviting her soul, while rabbits came from miles round to stick their heads through our nooses and hang themselves for our dinner; and it seemed to me that we should share our plenty.  I thought it probable that the gentleman of the woods lived here, and from the appearance of the place he carried all his possessions with him when he wore his bathing-trunks.  If I had been in any doubt, the sight of Aggie’s wire hairpin, sharpened and bent into a serviceable fishhook, decided me.  I scratched a message for him on another fungus and left it:—­

  If you need anything come to the Indian tepee at the lake.  We have
  no clothing to spare, but are always glad to help in time of trouble.

  (Signed) ONE OF THE SIMPLE LIFERS.

I went on after that and about noon reached our point of exodus from the wagon.  I was tired and hot and I kept thinking of my little dining-room at home, with the electric fan going, and iced cantaloupe, and nobody worrying about her soul or thinking her own thoughts, and no rabbits.

Our suitcases were safe enough in the hollow tree, and I thought the spring wagon had been back already, for there were fresh tracks.  This discouraged me and I sat down on a log to rest.  It was then that I heard the girl crying.

She was crying softly, but in the woods sounds travel.  I found her on her face on the pine needles about twenty yards away, wailing her heart out into a pink automobile veil, and she was so absorbed in her misery that I had to stoop and touch her before she looked up.