"Kingsley, Florence Morse - At the End Of His Rope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kingsley Florence Morse)

exactly where I found it."
She rose slowly to her feet and looked meditatively about her. "I came by that
big tree; I remember the dead branch hanging down to the ground."
Ah, foolish maid! keener eyes than those pretty brown ones of yours have been
deceived by the wonderful likeness of everything to every other thing in the big
woods. The tree with the dead branch certainly led to a perfectly
familiar-looking bush; and the bush beguiled the weary little feet to an odorous
group of balsams, where bright-eyed squirrels chattered angrily at the wearer of
the jaunty red tam. And beyond the balsams there was a cup-like hollow where the
beautiful deadly "Fly Amanita" thrust its golden globes through the black-leaf
mould. Then the brambles clutched at her with their thorny fingers, and the
treacherous mud tried to hold her away from the ripe huckleberries. And all the
while the gnats and mosquitoes followed hard after— like the hosts of an
avenging fate.
But, yes; it was all perfectly plain and not at all far. She would soon catch a
sparkle of blue water through the trees, and then dinner and a long, delicious
rest in the hammock! The grewsome tales of wayfarers lost and starving in the
woods were— she decided— simply figments of weak and elderly imaginations; mere
bugaboos to keep small children within bounds. Any person of sound judgment and
educated powers of observation could easily—
"Gracious!" Miss Terrill rarely made use of such vulgar exclamations, but the
exigency of the occasion wrung it from her lips. The spool was again empty! She
looked wildly about her; there was no welcome glimmer of blue water, no
pervasive odor of a smoky camp-fire, no dinner, no hammock anywhere in sight.
"Well, there is only one thing to do," decided the girl after a second period of
reflection, during which the humorous nature of the adventure did not once recur
to her mind. "I will go back to the second spool once more, and try again. One
can always do what one must do," she added sententiously, and with the air of
one who combats an unpleasant suggestion.
Two hours later, as she wearily retraced her steps for the third time to the
spot where the second spool hung in the bushes, the situation had resolved
itself in her mind (she had been a "special" in mathematics) into the following
concise form:
"Let A represent the camp, and B the position of the second spool, one mile
distant from A. How many miles might a person travel in endeavoring to reach A,
supposing he started from B in a different direction each time?"
"If the traveler started out from B and traveled in a perfectly straight line
each time," she murmured— a diagram of the problem presenting itself with
appalling distinctness before her mental vision— "he might easily travel several
hundred miles without reaching A. If he traveled in curved lines— as he
certainly would— why—"
The undeniable conclusions were too harrowing to contemplate with calmness,
therefore Miss Katherine Carter Terrill sat down upon a mossy log and shed tears
for full five minutes. She beheld herself, as it were, the wandering radius of
an unknown circle, returning innumerable times to point B. and at last lying
cold and unconscious on the forest leaves, the fatal spool clutched tight in her
stiffened fingers.
"I shall never find it— never!" she wailed, grinding the innocent cause of her
misadventure beneath her boot-heels. "But, oh, how can I let that man find me,
as he certainly will, if I hold on to this wretched spool! I can't, if I have to