CHAPTER IV

WITH THE AID OF PROVIDENCE

To the little French girl, Petite Jeanne, each day dawned as a bright new adventure. Mysteries might come and go, as indeed they often had, but adventure! Ah yes, adventure was always with her.

Nor had her new treasure, the airplane with its gauze-like wings, lessened her opportunity for adventure. Indeed it had increased it tenfold. To Rosemary Sample one might say, “Well, you’re off to another airplane journey,” and she undoubtedly would answer with a sigh, “Yes, one more trip.” Not so Petite Jeanne. She was not reckless, this slender child of the air. Her motor was inspected often, each guy and strut tested, her radio tuned to the last degree of perfection. For all that, each day as she took to the air it was with such a leaping of the heart as comes only with fresh adventure.

And so it was that, as she climbed into the cockpit, with Madame Bihari, Danby Force, and the tiny gypsy girl at her back, she touched the controls of her perfect little plane for all the world as if never before had her fingers known that touch. And as, after skimming along the air above the foothills, she began climbing toward one lone snowy peak among the Rockies, her heart was filled to overflowing with a fresh zest for living.

“Just to live,” she whispered, “to live, to love, to dream, to hope and sometimes see our hopes fulfilled! To see the dew on the grass in the early morning, to hear the robins chirping in the early evening, to watch children play, to feel the wind playing in your hair, to feel the warm sunshine kiss your cheeks, to watch the red and gold of evening sky. Ah yes, and to watch that snowy peak just before me, watch it grow and grow and grow—that is _life_—_beautiful, wonderful, glorious life!_”

The airplane, which might have seemed to one far away a giant silver insect, went gliding about the white capped mountain to drop at last with scarcely a bump upon that landing field that had at other times been a pasture above the clouds.

How convenient it would be if at times one’s spirit might, for a space of a half hour or more, leave the body that, closing about it, holds it in one place, and go with the speed of light to distant scenes. The spirit of Rosemary Sample, speeding away toward Chicago, might for a quarter hour or more have been spared from the great trans-continental airplane. No one surely would have begrudged so faithful a worker such a short period of recreation. And surely Rosemary would have been thrilled by the opportunity of following our little company on the mountain crest as they left Jeanne’s plane and followed the trail winding down to the hunting lodge.

Had the spirit of Rosemary truly been with them, she must surely have been asking herself, “Why is Danby Force here? What does he expect to find at the lodge? Did he take the dark lady’s traveling bag? Is it hidden there? Will he find it? And if he does, what will he take from it? ‘Valuable papers’ were the dark lady’s words. Were there such papers? There is some relation between this fine-appearing young man and that lady. What can it be?” So the spirit of Rosemary Sample might have spoken to itself had it followed down the mountainside. But the spirit of Rosemary Sample was not there. Rosemary Sample, body, soul and spirit, was in the trans-continental plane speeding on toward Chicago. And beside her, now talking loudly and boastfully of his dangerous exploits as an amateur aviator, and now speaking in kindly and gentle tones of his mother, was young Willie VanGeldt.

“I should not care for him at all,” Rosemary told herself. Yet there was something about him, his light and good-natured views of life, his smile perhaps, something about him that claimed her interest.

“As if the stars had willed that for a time our lives should run together, like trains on parallel tracks,” she whispered to herself. Little did she guess the part that this youth with his wealth and his reckless ways would play in her life, nor that which she would play in his.

In the meantime Jeanne, Danby Force and their gypsy companions were wending their way down the trail that led to the hunting lodge.

“I shan’t detain you long,” Danby Force was saying to Jeanne. “It’s just a little thing I want to look into up here.”

Jeanne, whose curiosity had not as yet been aroused, scarcely heard him. She was awed and charmed by the grandeur and beauty of the mountains. To look up two thousand feet to the snow-clad rocks that were the mountain peaks, then to look down quite as far to the tree-grown canyons far below—ah that was grand!

When at last they came in sight of the rustic lodge, flanked as it was by massive rocks and half covered by overhanging boughs of evergreens, she stopped in her tracks to stand there lost in admiration.

“Ah!” she murmured, “What a grand solitude is here! Who would not wish to return many, many times!”

She was soon enough to learn that it was not solitude the interesting young man, Danby Force, sought. For, contrary to Rosemary Sample’s suspicion, he had not hidden the dark lady’s traveling bag. He had returned to seek it. How did he hope to succeed when, on that other occasion, all others had failed? Well may one ask. Yet Danby Force did not lack for hope. He believed in a kind Providence that sometimes guides an honest soul in its search for hidden things. With the aid of this Providence he might succeed where others had failed.