Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/187

 the big dog still insisted, so at last he opened the door.

He stood before the cottage, looking in every direction, north, south, east; the sun was in his  eyes so that he shaded them with his hand to look  across the open meadows to the west. Was that something moving, was it a distant, plodding,  weary figure slowly making its way up the slope? He could not be mistaken. It was Oscar!

With a shout of joy Hugh ran to meet him, but stopped short in surprise and dismay when he  came close. Oscar’s forehead was cut and had been bleeding; his cheek was discolored with a  great bruise; he carried neither pack nor gun,  and he limped as he came toiling painfully up the  hill.

“I had a fall,” he explained briefly, in answer to Hugh’s anxious questions.

Long after, Hugh learned the real details of the mishap, how Oscar had taken shelter from  the storm under a mass of overhanging rock, how  the fury of wind and water had loosened it above