She forced her way slowly through the tangle of thorny creepers and thickly-springing sassafras around the pond to the old wood road. It curved away secretly into the gloom; old, undisturbed, overgrown; Nature had painted in this ancient blemish. Years ago the bed of the road had been packed so hard that even yet nothing would take root there except a mossy growth like fur underfoot. But at either side bushes had taken advantage of the free light to spring up thickly. Now for the most part they met overhead, though there were places where the sun splashed through.
Pen walked slowly, pausing often to softly call Don's name. Nothing answered her but bird sounds, and the soft chattering of leaves in the high sunlight. No breath stirred down below. She made wide detours through secondary roads, mere cuts through the woods that only a practised eye could follow now.
It was noon when she came out at the edge of the fields. She sat down under the fence to rest, and, from a sense of duty, to eat something. Afterwards she struck clear across the rough, neglected, cleared land to the woods on the other side, then back again, shaping a course that took her through every hollow. Her experience with sheep had taught her the exact lay of the peninsula, how each depression gradually deepened into a gully, running off to some branch on one side or the other. But nowhere did she find what she was looking for.
She spent several hours searching the banks of the little stream that meandered through the woods to the east of the fields. That was where she had sent him to make his camp that night. She found the site of his camp, but no evidences that he had revisited it. There were plenty of tracks in the mud of the stream, for the searchers had passed and re-passed this way, but no voice answered her soft calls.
Finally she struck across the corner of the farthest field, making for the path which went down through the woods to the arm of Back creek, that path they had followed on another night, a night of happiness. She thought of the old skiff drawn up on top of the bank, and had a wild hope that he might have launched it and succeeded in making his way down the arm and across the main creek to the mainland. True, the skiff was leaky and rotten, but a desperate man might make it serve for a short voyage. She ran the last part of the way.