"A deer, for instance, might easily land in
the night and take a look round--"
"Or a bear!" gasped the Bo'sun's Mate, with a look so portentous that we
all welcomed the laugh.
But Joan did not laugh. Instead, she sprang up and called to us to
follow.
"There," she said, pointing to the ground by her tent on the side farthest
from her mother's; "there are the marks close to my head. You can
see for yourselves."
We saw plainly. The moss and lichen--for earth there was hardly any--had
been scratched up by paws. An animal about the size of a large dog it
must have been, to judge by the marks. We stood and stared in a row.
"Close to my head," repeated the girl, looking round at us. Her face, I
noticed, was very pale, and her lip seemed to quiver for an instant.
Then she gave a sudden gulp--and burst into a flood of tears.
The whole thing had come about in the brief space of a few minutes, and
with a curious sense of inevitableness, moreover, as though it had all
been carefully planned from all time and nothing could have stopped it.
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