Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/30

16 it, Geoff; as if it had been there a long time while the bird was alive?"

He looked at the bird's leg to please her. There were marks upon it, indeed, as though something had been bound about the leg; but for how long he could not tell.

"Yes," he assured her. "Of course."

"This was there!" She unclenched her fist and showed him a tiny scrap of something which looked like oiled silk. He took it and saw that there was a series of perforations through it, making tiny letters which spelled words; and, feeling in his hands the tingle which one feels when fancying he sees another long supposed to be dead, he held the scrap to the light and read the characters.

"Send to Margaret Sherwood," he read. Then followed the address at which Margaret had been four years before. "Both reached Mason Land. Safe. Eric Hedon."

It was dated in August of the summer before. Geoff looked up at his sister, still tingling.

"What came with that?"

"That's oiled silk, you see, pricked through