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“This,” said Loren as he mounted a rock-shoulder stippled with lichen, “is where the wilderness begins.”

The slender-bodied girl in the brown hunting-suit, with orange-colored woolen stockings rolled over the tops of high-laced sealskin boots, turned a languid eye to the landscape confronting them. All she saw was a tranquil-looking lake studded with conical small islands and surmounted by a series of waves, motionless and purple-misted in the morning light, waves of somber pineland veined with the uncertain silver thread of a small river that finally lost itself in a spangle of other half-hidden lakes.

“I can’t see where it’s different,” she objected, “from all the rest of the country we’ve been coming through.”

“That’s because you’re not a woodsman,” proclaimed Loren as he put down his binoculars. “But once we pass Dead Indian Rapids we’re in a new world. We’re on our own, with the land of the white man left behind us.”

“In the clean North, as you call it,” suggested the girl.

“Yes, in the clean North,” repeated her companion, ignoring the faint note of derision. “For after this it means no more supply-posts and sawmills, no more outboard motors and gasoline-drums, no more slab-sided trading-posts and half-breed villages and vermin. From now on it’s paddle and birchbark and tent and open fire. It’s the unspoiled world as God first made it. And if you’re the woman I’m hoping you are you’re going to get a wonderful kick out of it.”

The amber-flecked eyes of the girl rested for a moment on the thick-shouldered man so valiantly belted and booted, so big and sure of himself in his leather-collared corduroy hunting-jacket, his waistline abristle with hunting-knife and holstered revolver and belt-ax and compass-case. Her shrug, as she studied him, was a barely perceptible one.

“Perhaps I’m not much better than Bennie,” she quietly observed.

Loren’s brow darkened.

“Benson had no right to turn back that way,” he averred. “And he had no right to call me a martinet.”

“He’s still my brother,” murmured the girl with the proudly poised head that glinted tawny chestnut in the sunlight.

“But the boy’s gone soft,” objected Loren, “and you know it. He’s done nothing but hell around and make trouble since he left Harvard. And he left Harvard because he had to. I was counting on a trip like this to harden him.”

“To harden us all,” supplemented the other. “But I’m beginning to agree with your Aunt Barbara that we’d be considerably happier without the mosquitoes and black flies. I also seem to share in her weakness for hot water and bathrooms. And I do wish your odorous Louis Charette would be more careful about washing his hands before he mixes our bannock. And I’d be grateful, now you’ve got us in your marvelous North, if you’d occasionally extend to me the privilege of doing my own thinking and moving about as I wish.”

The accruing note of steel in her voice held him arrested for a moment, but only for a moment.

“That, Lynn, is where you’re dead wrong,” he said with plainly achieved patience. “A tenderfoot can’t either think or wander about as she wants to, up here. We’re going back to the Stone Age, remember, where the petticoat can’t claim any special privileges. You’re in the wilderness now. And that means you’ve got to watch your step and listen to orders. You’ve got to follow the man who knows something about woodcraft.”

“And you’re the Big Chief of this safari,” suggested the quietly smiling girl.

“A camp has to have a head,” proclaimed Loren. “And if I’m responsible for all of you, out here, I naturally want to see my orders of the day respected.”

She smiled at the frown on his valorous broad face. He wasn’t ignorant, she remembered, of his impressiveness as a man of the open. He had killed salmon in Newfoundland and kodiak bears in Alaska and bull-moose in New Brunswick, and he was proud of his prowess. But she was seeing a new side of him. He had been fond of saying, back in the city, “For strength, strike North.” But day by day, she felt, he had been asserting his strength at the cost of her freedom. Day by day, on this strange excursion into the northern forest, she had found herself mysteriously diminished in importance and over frequently restricted in her movements. Yet life, back in her old world, had left her singularly free and given her a deluding air of importance. Two men had even contended for her hand. And Loren Stratton, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom as she glanced down at the proclamatory diamond-and-sapphire ring that glinted on her finger, had been the winner. She was duly and definitely committed to this man whom she couldn’t quite understand. She was, according to the code of their civilization, henceforward his.

“But I rather like to make my own decisions,” she languidly informed the man with the binoculars. It was woman, the weaker vessel, she was beginning to see, who profited most by civilization. In the woods, apparently, she was merely an animal, and not always an efficient one.

“You still think I’m wrong about Dead Indian Rapids?” suggested Loren. They were on their way down to the canoe flotilla that awaited them at the water’s edge.

“One of the guides said he could run those rapids,” contended the girl with the rebelliously squared under lip.

“But always at a risk,” Loren reminded her. “And instead of taking chances I prefer taking a half-day for the portage.”

“But why come so far, if you can’t face a thrill or two?” asked the bland-eyed Lynn Olivia Everett. “I thought people rather looked for danger on a trip like this.”

Loren’s laugh was an indulgent one.

“Our aim, in the wilderness, is to evade danger. And if you knew anything about this country you’d realize that it takes a great deal of planning and thought to keep a margin of safety between us and disaster.” He stopped short, with one arm pointing across the pine-clad hills. “In two hours’ time,” he told her, “you could get lost in country like that. You could get lost there, and never be heard of again.”

“I fail to see anything so frightful about it,” observed his companion, letting her gaze follow the silvery thread of a river that thinned and vanished in the purple-misted distance. “And I don’t see how you could really get lost there. I’d rather like——”

Loren cut her short.

“Don’t you, now? Then how about that radio message we happened to overhear in the Factor’s office two days ago? It said that over seven weeks of searching had failed to find a murderer hiding out somewhere beyond Big Wolf River.”

“A murderer!” murmured the indifferently smiling girl. “That doesn’t quite sound like the clean North you’re always talking about.”

“But it proves my point,” contended her companion. “This isn’t a park in the suburbs. Country like this could swallow you up and they’d never even find out where a neat little pile of bones, once known as Lynn Everett, lay between two nigger-heads bleaching in the sun.”

“Thanks for the pictures.”

But Loren disregarded her faint moue of revulsion.

“We’ll travel, you’ll find, week after week without seeing a single human being. We’re going through the loneliest country left anywhere between Labrador and the Pacific Coast. And we ought to enjoy it. But if you get off your trail you won’t find a Traveler’s Aid desk on the next hillside.”

She said nothing more as they made their way down to the water’s edge. She remained silent and thoughtful, even when she came to the birchbark canoe where a swarthy-skinned metis who answered to the name of Michel Cat dutifully awaited her. Loren, she still suspected, had brought her into that untutored wilderness to test her, to subject a somewhat enigmatic mate of the future to some sort of final ordeal by savagery. But without knowing it, apparently, he was subjecting himself to the same invidious test. And he was showing himself, for all his over-unctuous guardianship, oddly different in character from the man she had apprehended through the mists of civilization. She could forgive him for making her wear woolens; but she would not and could not be coerced like a child.

She sat on a shore-rock, morose-eyed and silent, as Loren strode back and forth getting his multicolored safari under way. He was, she could see, proud of that cortège and his control over it. He had even insisted, she remembered, that his slightly abashed guides should wear crimson toques and sashes. It was no longer the custom of the country, but it made the procession a more picturesque one. And he had confronted those guides, for the first time, with aluminum cooking-kits of his own devising, and fly-nets that were his own invention, and air-mattresses made to his orders, to say nothing of double-walled sleeping-tents of waterproofed silk that packed no bulkier than a side of bacon.

Lynn turned to the guide who stood with a paddle in his hand.

“Michel,” she said, “will you do something for me?”

“Of course, mam’selle,” was the quiet-toned answer. She knew, even before she turned the masked battery of her half-wistful smile on him, that Michel at a word from her would walk through burning forests. He even forbore to smoke his tabac Canadien in her presence, knowing how the fumes of that acrid-leafed sedative had proved offensive to her delicately chiseled nose.

“Will you pilot me down Dead Indian Rapids?” she suggested with an effort at casualness.

The faintest ghost of a smile flickered across Michel’s grim lips. He understood, without a shadow of doubt, the situation within the situation confronting him.

“If mam’selle so commands,” he solemnly asserted.

“Can it be done, in a canoe like this?” she asked as she watched the line of heavier birchbarks thread their devious way out through the conical small islands.

“With care, mam’selle, it can be done,” proclaimed the intrepid Michel.

Loren, in the last of the cargo canoes, was waving for her to get under way. But her answering arm-wave was a preoccupied one.

“Will it help any, if I sit in the bow and paddle?” she inquired. She nursed a wayward longing to look danger in the teeth, to sit face to face with every dancing and singing peril, to drink her liberating cup of excitement to the dregs.

“It will help greatly,” averred the mendacious Michel Cat. “But without a doubt, mam’selle, you will get very wet.”

“Who cares?” cried the girl with the unnaturally bright eyes.

She felt, as they pushed off from shore, oddly free and exhilarated, as though a chain of iron had been shaken from her slender young shoulders. She was once more her own mistress. She was once more dignifying life with the power of making a personal decision.

It was pleasant voyaging through those unknown waters and seeking a way of their own as the wavelets purled against the canoe-bow and a high white sun beat down on their leisurely swaying bodies. And she knew an even deeper satisfaction when she found that the conical small islands had finally hidden them from the rest of the flotilla.

They paddled on for an hour, frightening the “wavies” from echoing little bays and finally entering a river that ran smooth and amber-green between rounded rock-shoulders stippled with jack-pine.

“Do we go much farther, Michel?” asked the girl as she rested from her paddling. Those slender young shoulders, Michel discovered, were interlaced with steelier muscles than he had looked for there.

“About three miles more, mam’selle,” answered the grave-eyed Michel, “and then we come to the first white-water.”

“What is white-water?” asked Lynn, resuming her paddling.

“Where she run so fast, mam’selle, that she foam at the mouth. It is the rapids, showing her teeth, that we call the white-water.”

“Good!” cried Lynn, vaguely elated by the speed with which they were already sweeping between the abraded rock-shoulders. The amber-green water, hurrying on, boiled mysteriously about them. They arrowed through a narrowing “slide,” dipped and shuddered and recovered themselves, and pursued their way down a widening expanse of semi-tranquillity. But there came to the girl, through that momentary quietness, a faint and far-off roar of sound.

“It would be well to make ready, mam’selle,” said the quietly warning voice of Michel.

She knew what he meant. For even as she steadied and braced herself her squinting eyes caught sight of a drifting cloud of mist crowning the welter of rocks and pine-ridges ahead of her. The droning roar had grown less phantasmal. In another moment, she knew, they would be at the head of the rapids. They were now committed to their course. And there could be no going back.

They were in the midst of the rapids, in fact, before the slightly startled girl realized it. She could feel herself being flung down a narrowing channel of hissing and boiling water that broke white on the green-shadowed rock-points fringing their course. They swept down that liquid incline with the speed of a race-horse. She decided, as she felt the frail structure of swamp-elm and birchbark tremble and leap and tremble again under her body, that the roughly sewn bark of forest-trees was a precariously fragile thing to mark the line between destruction and escape, between death and deliverance. But she had little time to give to that thought. For another boiling and writhing cataract caught them up and tossed them down a mist-hung incline. They sped, twisting and plunging and tilting and recovering again, through a rock-shadowed gorge where the roar of sound grew more ominous and the lash of the flying spray became sharper. Michel, the girl could see, was doing what he could to keep the canoe in the center of the channel. But his strength, pitted against such tumult, seemed trivial. They went as the roaring hell of water went, shooting past patches of amber and white where the current broke over its hidden boulders, tossed forward like an eggshell from angry slide to slide. She had in her time, she knew, traveled faster by car and by plane. But this was not like swerving along midnight macadam or gliding through the upper air on wings remote from a stationary world. This was sitting face to face with speed. This was like lying naked in the lap of hurry. Spray whipped her face, thunder roared in her ears, shadowing rocks streaked past her in lateral and half-obliterated lines of gloom. She realized, as the water grew more tumultuous and the craft that held them staggered and trembled under the blows of the cellar-swells, her first shadow of fear. They might die, of course. But it wasn’t, after all, such an inglorious way of going out. It would be brief and brutal and final. Already, in fact, they seemed no longer related to the earth. They seemed lost and alone in a universe tumbling to pieces, tossed along space, blown like a curled bird-feather between contending forces.

Yet it was good to live. It was good to breathe in the sweet air of earth and see the blue of the open sky above you. She hoped, as they arrowed through a curling crest of back-water, that the worst was over, that the racing water-horses dashing along beside her were tiring themselves out. It seemed quieter, of a sudden, with less plunging and pitching, with fewer lashing showers of water in her face. But that hope died young. For as they swept about a rock-fanged curve she found another boiling and tumbling cataract confronting them. She saw racing and lashing water thundering down a twisted channel overhung with mist. She even felt the shuddering impact as a rock-point struck and gored into their side. But they raced on. They went on, helplessly and less buoyantly. And as they flashed on, down an amber-green flood spangled with foam, she realized for the first time that she was kneeling in several inches of water, that she was wet to the skin.

It made little difference now, she decided as they faced the final cellar, whether they were tumbled out or not. She even closed her eyes, as they took that final leap through a watery wall of green crowned with white, and felt, without seeing it, the forlorn leap and toss and shudder of the half-filled canoe.

It surprised her that they were still afloat. But a wine of triumph flowed through her wet body as she looked about and saw they were riding a diminishing series of small waves into quieter water. The river, widening out into a lake-like pool of quietness, was no longer a thing of tumult. Before them lay a series of dark green ridges stippled with pines, incredibly peaceful in the pellucid afternoon sunlight. They rounded a series of gravel-bars and swung into a quiet cove where a bleaching clutter of driftwood lay bone-white against the darker green of the fir-stippled river-bank. They floated on, without speaking, until the canoe pushed its nose hog-like into the ribbed shore-sand.

Then Michel, stepping out, helped the girl to her feet. She was glad of his support as she stepped ankle-deep in the water and made her way up the slope of sand. She stood there, glad to feel the kindly firmness of the earth under her. It brought strength back to her. It left nothing to be afraid of. And she laughed, a brief and brittle laugh.

“We made it, Michel,” she cried, breathing deep as the pure joy of safety after peril flowed through her body.

“As I said we would, mam’selle,” proclaimed the impassive Michel. He pulled the canoe ashore, emptied it, and studied with a saddened eye the rupture in its birchbark bottom.

“But it was a narrow squeak, wasn’t it?” exacted the luminous-eyed girl.

Michel shrugged a non-committal shoulder. Then he looked appraisingly about the sandy little cove strewn with driftwood.

“You are wet through, mam’selle,” he reminded her. “I will make a fire for you, a big fire. Then I will go away.”

“Why should you go away?” demanded the perplexed girl.

“That you may dry your clothes,” explained the somewhat abashed Michel.

“But I don’t want to be left alone.”

“It will be necessary, mam’selle,” said Michel, already busy with his driftwood. “I will go on to the portage-end and there patch the canoe. In two hours I will return for you.”

The glow in her body, Lynn found, was not a lasting one. She was glad to see the flames mounting through the sun-bleached driftwood.

“But what are those sticks for?” she asked as the guide fabricated a light framework beside the fire.

“Your clothes, mam’selle, must not dry on your body,” explained Michel as he bent over his work.

“So that’s it,” she said, with a gasp of comprehension. And as she stood watching Michel hurriedly relaunch the canoe she realized that chivalry could exist even in the wilderness.

“Don’t be too long,” she called after her companion.

“Voilà!” said Michel, without looking back.

She watched the canoe as it drifted about a rock-point and disappeared from sight. Then she slowly and methodically began to undress, carefully placing each sodden garment where the heat from the fire would play upon it. She felt, as the glow of the lengthening flames beat against her bare flesh, as though Time had turned back and she was merely a woman of the Neolithic age warming her bones in an empty world. She felt free and defiant and abundantly full of life. She also felt a trifle hungry.

But the thought of food reminded her of Loren. And Loren, she remembered, would no longer approve of her. Yet she had had her hour. And she was willing to pay the price for it. There were things in life that could not be lightly surrendered. And one of them, she felt, was freedom.

Supper, that night, should have been a happy occasion. For the tents had been pitched on a clean-floored slope of pine-needles, facing an island-dotted lake that glimmered opal and amethyst in the prolonging evening light. A breeze, scented with balsam, sighed through the treetops, and fish leaped in the slowly darkening pools.

But little of that background peace pervaded the group beside the camp-fire. Loren Stratton, still indignant and argumentative, was proclaiming that the morale of his forest-workers had been lamentably impaired and the rules of his camp had been openly flouted.

“I’m not against bravery,” he said as his eye rested on the perversely silent Lynn. “Every normal man likes courage. But to court danger, deliberately, when it can lead to no good end, isn’t the kind of courage we need here. It’s a sort of selfishness. And peril without a purpose impresses me as either idiocy or exhibitionism.”

Lynn sat motionless. But through her body arrowed a small and feral flash. “You seem disappointed that I survived,” she finally suggested.

“It’s a miracle that you did,” averred the indignant-eyed camp-leader. “But for the grace of God, we might be back in one of those river-pools dragging for your body,—or what was left of it.”

“Yet it was rather fun,” ventured the dreamy-voiced girl.

“Luck,” contended Loren, “may not always be with you.”

“But that’s what makes life worth-while,” countered the totally unimpressed Lynn; “being able to take a chance now and then. I came alive in those rapids, for the first time in all this trip.”

“But, Lynn, dear, you had us worried to death,” admonished the none too happy Barbara Crossley, frowning over the slate-gray boiled rice that should have been whiter than it was.

Lynn’s meditative gaze did not waver from Loren’s broad face. She was trying to remember how many years it was that she had known him. Yet, in a way, she had never known him. And she wondered how often it happened, when men and women married, that they belatedly woke up to the fact that they were worlds apart.

“Perhaps I wasn’t worth worrying over,” she pensively suggested.

“But I’m responsible for you,” proclaimed Loren. “I brought you up here, and I’ve got to take you back. I’m sorry, of course, that you’re bored by the best sample of wilderness life our continent can still show. I had hoped you would like it. I——”

“It isn’t the country,” was the delusively patient-voiced retort. “It’s more the chain-gang way we’re traveling through it.”

Loren’s color deepened.

“Would you like to turn back,” he demanded, “the way Bennie did?”

Lynn, oddly enough, lost a little of her own color.

“I’m not a quitter,” she quietly averred.

“Then I’ll have to ask you to remember,” announced Loren, “that we have twelve days’ hard going ahead of us. And unless we keep together, in country like this, there’s sure to be trouble.”

“Trouble from what?” challenged Captain Ronnie Bolton as he speared his last slab of golden-brown lake-trout on a camp fork.

Loren’s morose eye turned to the lean and grizzled old sportsman who took his hardships altogether too lightly.

“From anything that can happen in a wilderness like this,” Loren solemnly asserted.

“What can happen?” demanded Bolton as he helped himself to more fish. “The Indians needn’t bother us,—if there happen to be any left in the neighborhood. There’s no danger from wild animals. And——”

“I question that,” interrupted the camp-leader.

“D’you mean a black bear might come up and bite me?” derided the older man.

“Yes, if it happened to be a she-bear and you came between her and her cubs.”

“But I don’t get between she-bears and their cubs, any more than I get between milk-cows and their calves. It’s all merely a matter of horse-sense. I’ve traveled in this country from Labrador to the Rockies, and the worst I ever saw a black bear do was to steal a blueberry pie off a shack windowsill. And instead of being treed by a bull-moose, I’ve worn out more than one pair of snowshoes trying to keep in sight of ’em. And I’ve never seen a timber wolf that wasn’t nine-tenths coward. And I’ve traveled for six weeks at a time through these northern woods with no deadlier weapon than a camera and a belt-ax. And the worst bite I ever got was from a black-fly.”

Loren’s movement was an impatient one.

“How about muskegs?” he demanded.

“Sane people avoid muskegs in this country, the same as we avoid automobiles on Fifth Avenue.”

“Then how about getting lost?”

“That shouldn’t worry one much,” contended the calm-eyed Captain. “The one thing to do is to stay cool and keep your feet dry. There’s always water and fuel and shelter enough around you. And food too, if you know how to find it. But if you’re a tenderfoot you’d better just sit down on a tree-stump and wait until you’re picked up again.”

Loren’s laugh was a derisive one.

“You mean, lie there like a golf ball in the rough, until you’re found? Where would that get you?”

“Well, if you wanted to keep busy you could work your way down one of the watercourses. For water, eventually, always leads to a camp or habitation of some kind. The trouble is, in our day, there’s so damned few corners left to get lost in. We’re making this old world of ours dishearteningly safe. And I don’t altogether blame Lynn for shooting the chutes this afternoon. I’d have had a try at ’em myself, if I’d been twenty years younger.”

Loren’s face darkened again.

“Then I’m wrong the way I’m running this trip?” he somewhat indignantly exacted.

“No, Lorrie,” was the patiently tolerant reply, “you’re only wrong in the way you’re trying to run Lynn. She did her stuff and got away with it. She’s here, safe and sound and with what looks like an exceptionally good appetite. And that ought to be the end of the matter.”

But it failed, in one way, to be the end of the matter. For as they continued their ever-tortuous trek deeper and deeper into the unbroken wilderness the morosely thoughtful Lynn became more and more conscious of a spirit of restraint that was new to her. It remained with her even after they had crossed the provincial divide and journeyed on to the Bittiwabi and Little Wolf Lake, where the latter marked the end of their hegira and the establishment of a more or less permanent camp. She found scant satisfaction in the thought that she was remoter from her old world than ever before. It gave her no joy to remember, as she dragged a trolling-spoon through teeming pools and eddies, that she was fishing in waters where a white woman had never before ventured. She found no rapture in watching the pallid blue of the sky above the spruce-tops or listening to the far-off bark of a fox and sleeping in a double-walled tent through which the midnight murmur of lake-water came thin and sweet. She should have been happy, she told herself, but always at the core of her contentment was a small canker of unrest.

Yet the North, she knew, was doing something to her, something subtle and subliminal and dangerous. It was giving her a feeling of restlessness, but it was also giving her a feeling of largeness and strength and moral release. She had wondered, more often than once, if it were merely the effect of sun and air and woodland quietness. For she found herself beginning to suspect the civilization she had left behind her of being a startlingly flimsy affair. It seemed an array of makeshifts, cluttered up with too many codes and conventions, racing about too madly to know its own grotesqueries. And, now that she was out of them, they seemed of ever-dwindling importance. She had been a little tired of it all. She had been waiting, without quite knowing it, for something to stir her into a revived vitality. And this strange traverse of forest solitudes had seemed to carry a promise of freshness and a hint of freedom.

But Loren, she realized, was in some way neutralizing that promise of release. He was still a disciple of his codified civilization. He remained, for all his passion for bear-steaks and the frontier ruggedness of his green and yellow mackinaw, still urban in thought and feeling. He believed in order and dignity and the Ten Commandments and the Republican Party. He believed in himself and the domination of the male and dry blankets and the advantages of carrying a road-map and meticulously adhering to officially typed instructions.

Yet that, to Lynn, was what took the savor out of existence. And it was the confirmation of an earlier suspicion. For she had known the same spirit of resentment, touched with disappointment, when aboard his yacht in the Caribbean. There, in his white cap decorated with its intimidating club insignia, he had seemed to revel in the language of the sea, irritating her with his talk about “grommets” and “foregaffs” and “jackyards” and “binnacles” and “scupper-valves.” Life should have been pleasant on that clean and compact structure designed solely for pleasure. But she had felt constrained. Watching Loren as he paced his polished deck, she had known her first small qualm and nursed her first faint doubt. He could give her comfort, she realized, but he could not give her contentment of mind. It should have been wonderful, in those southern waters, cruising leisurely from port to port. But it had seemed, at times, a trifle like imprisonment. For Loren was very much the master of his own ship. He impressed her, for the first time, as disquietingly possessive, as too ready to impose his will on her. He had been kind enough, in his way, but his kindness carried with it a tinge of condescension. Even when she had accused him of going nautical on her he had smiled forgivingly, with the deliberated indulgence of the stronger for the weaker. But she had, she contended, a strength of her own. She could never be spinelessly docile. It was merely the ancient fight that she had never entirely fought out with her father unexpectedly renewing itself. It was the old contest, on a new field.

Yet with Loren, she remembered, it had never been an open battle. It had been more a silent and subaqueous contest of wills, a guarded jockeying for position,—with Loren too often the victor. And love, she began to see, could not thrive on a diet of petty defeats. Freedom, after all, might be only a shifted fetter, but, winning or losing in that fight for her changing place in the changing sun, she nursed a persistent and sometimes a perverse craving to make her own decisions. And no woman’s happiness could be safe, she began to suspect, with a man who was for ever restricting that woman’s initiative.

She was beginning to know Loren, she told herself, as she had never known him before. And Loren himself was not unconscious of some perplexing change in his abstracted but mutinous-minded charge. It was like a water-lead slowly widening before an Arctic traveler, a lead that in some way must still be bridged.

Lynn’s unrest, in the face of all his efforts to make their camp a comfortable one, was a daily perplexity to him. He even intercepted her, one morning after breakfast, as she wandered aimlessly along the trail between Sugar-Loaf Hill and the brawling stream that Captain Ronnie Bolton had reported as swarming with rainbow trout.

“Where are you off to, Lynn?” he inquired.

“Nowhere in particular,” she as casually replied.

“Could I come along?” he asked, disturbed still again by the sense of barriers slowly but surely growing up between them.

“I think I’d rather be alone,” she said with disheartening quietness.

He stood silent a moment, studying her with a fixed and somewhat frustrate eye. Then he looked out over the blue-misted pinelands. “I thought you were going to like this sort of thing,” he finally ventured.

Her brief laugh was edged with ice. “And I’m afraid I’m proving rather a disappointment to you.”

Yet even as she stood there uttering those estranging words, he realized, she looked singularly lovely in the revealing morning light. She seemed, in her slenderizing woodland costume, strangely supple and cool and self-sufficient.

“You don’t seem to have forgiven me for that flare-up about Dead Indian Rapids,” he found himself saying. “But you ought to remember the facts behind it. When you’re fond of a person you naturally don’t want anything to happen to him.”

Her lucid and level gaze remained for a moment on his face.

“Yet things happen to us when we don’t altogether expect it,” she told him. And her words, obviously, added nothing to his happiness.

“But you’re the woman I’m going to marry,” he reminded her, disconcerted by the remoteness of her smile.

“Am I?” she asked as the last glimmer of her smile faded away.

He looked down at the ring he had given her. She still wore it, but it no longer seemed a sign and symbol of capitulation.

“I don’t think you’ve been yourself,” he complained, “since you came into these woods.” He looked at her without flinching. “Do you want to go back?”

She met his gaze for a silent moment, and then slowly nodded her head. And still without speaking, and with equal deliberation, she drew the diamond and sapphire ring from the third finger of her left hand. Loren, as she held it out to him, determinedly backed away from it.

“I don’t mean that,” he said in an abruptly sharpened voice. The thing that most depressed him, apparently, was her sustained air of the judicial.

“But I think you’d better take it back,” she quietly suggested.

“Why?” he demanded.

“Because I’m afraid it isn’t going to mean much,” was her slightly retarded answer.

His face darkened, ominously, but he remained in control of his feelings.

“No,” he proclaimed, “I won’t take it. You can throw it in the lake, if you want to. But I won’t take it back.”

She glanced, over her shoulder, at the water that glimmered quicksilver-bright between the clustering dark spruce-boles. Then, with a small sigh, she looked back at Loren. It impressed her as odd that such a wide and sun-bathed world of peace should have to be used as a stage for their small and trivial enmities.

“What’s more,” continued Loren, gathering courage from the fact that she was slowly and frowningly restoring the ring to her finger, “we’re not going to decide things like that out here in the wilderness. We’ll see things straighter when we’re back where we belong.”

She was more disturbed, he could see, than she pretended. Her hands, he even observed, were a trifle unsteady as she turned away from him.

“Where are you going?” he questioned as she started down the shadow-dappled trail.

“Where I can be alone,” she answered with an enigmatic note of weariness.

He watched her until she reached the bottom of the sparsely-treed hollow. He continued to watch her as she mounted the uncertain path between the towering broom-top spruces. He saw her stop, and look back, and once more pursue her leisurely way through a scattering of jack-pine along the ridge-top.

His frown deepened as he watched her across the quiet and clear-aired valley. Then, still frowning, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted after her.

“Don’t go too far,” was his warning call.

She heard him, apparently, for, without looking back, she lightly waved one hand above her head. But a moment later she had passed the crest of the hill and disappeared from sight.

The slender-bodied woman in the tan doeskin hunting-suit found herself happy in the mere act of going on. She was glad to immerse herself in silence, to dip into solitude very much as a fly-nettled deer dips into lake-water. She found relief in mounting rock-mottled slopes and threading a way down thinly-treed hillsides and brushing through blueberry scrub and bracken-beds and skirting beaver-ponds suddenly grown silent in the echoing white light of mid-morning.

She stopped, for a moment, to watch a red-headed woodpecker pounding noisily on a dead fir-trunk. Then she went on again, taking in deeper breaths of the crystal-clear air slightly aromatic with sun-bleached moss and leafage. There was, she realized, something keen-bladed and tonic in the opaline northern sunlight that made exertion a joy to the untrammeled body. She felt that she could go on for ever, without thought of fatigue. It was like adventuring into the unknown, giant wave by wave, with the repeated speculation as to what would lie before her, just over the next crest of uncertainty.

It was necessary, of course, to remember her landmarks. There were no road-signs, she remembered, along the route she was following. And there were no friendly-fronted way-stations where one could look for directions and apply for refreshment. She was, as Loren had reminded her, in the open wilderness, the wilderness that ran by diminishing timberlands and tangled waterways and trackless tundra right up to the Arctic Circle.

The thought of its dimensions rather frightened her. It brought her up short, looking back for the broom-top spruce that so conspicuously crowned the top of Sugar-Loaf Hill. That, she knew, was the one landmark that would make it possible for her to orient herself.

But she saw, to her bewilderment, that Sugar-Loaf Hill was no longer in sight. Here and there, along the horizon, her questioning eye could make out an occasional spruce-top standing out above its fellows. But they had no meaning for her. And there were too many of them.

Her heart contracted a little as she wheeled slowly about, meditatively boxing the compass in her search for something familiar, for something significant. Then, with a deepening frown, she looked up at the sun. But the sun was too high in the heavens to be of much help to her. She could not be sure which was north and which was south. She could not even be sure from which direction she had progressed to the point where she stood.

She ran about in small circles, searching the ground for footmarks. But she failed to find any. Then she stood motionless, trying to quiet her over-quickened heart-beats. She stood there, staring about her, trying to assure herself that everything would come out right.

But she knew she was lost. She knew it, even as she argued with herself that such things didn’t and couldn’t happen to sane and self-reliant people. She must get back to camp. She would get back a little late, perhaps, and tired, but none the worse for her adventure. And she would start at once.

But she had no knowledge of which direction to take. There were no landmarks. And there was no discernible trail back. There was nothing about her but roughly timbered slopes and mottled ridges of rock that basked in the high sun of noonday and a circling horizon of blue-misted and infinitely remote hills fringed with pine. And in the midst of those hills, repeating themselves on every side of her as monotonously as ocean waves repeat themselves, she had to face the fact that she was unexpectedly but utterly lost.

Yet not utterly lost, she contended with herself, refusing to surrender to panic. She would not give up as easily as that. For that, she had learned from her fellow-campers, was the fatal thing about such situations. One was never lost in the woods, she remembered, until terror came to shake judgment from its throne. It was one’s duty, she told herself, to remain cool and collected. She had faced dangers before, in the waters of Dead Indian Rapids, and she had survived them. And she would survive this.

Yet she couldn’t accept Ronnie Butler’s advice about sitting down on a tree-stump and waiting to be found. It would be impossible to remain passive, at such a time. Every over-tensioned instinct, in fact, called and clamored for action, even though she knew that Loren would soon be out looking for her. And as evening came on he would almost glory, she felt, in organizing his searching-party and scouring the hills for her. She was, in a way, still his property. He had brought her there, she remembered with a tang of bitterness, to appraise her in the acid-bath of the primitive, the primitive that had seemed to accentuate his masterfulness as abysmally as it had betrayed her own weakness. He would, this time, be more triumphant. He would carry her, duly chastened, back to his solemnly organized camp and solemnly upbraid her for her carelessness.

But Loren hadn’t as yet found her. She was still a lost tenderfoot, she remembered as a second wave of depression swept through her. She was alone there, and she had her part to do, to help any possible searchers, before it was too late.

Her first thought was of a signal-fire, a fire that would send a billowing blue-gray column of smoke skyward and bring her friends tumbling out after her. But she had no lighter and no matches to start such a fire. When she came to think of it, in fact, it struck her as fantastic that anything as trivial as a match, a mere shred of wood or paper from which a tiny flame might be conjured, could become so momentous a factor in life. But, being without any such magical little fire-stick, the fire was plainly out of the question.

So the next reasonable thing to do, she concluded, would be to climb to higher ground and call. A shout, from the top of a hill, would carry far in that opaline air. And it was consistent, when in trouble, to call for help. Even children did it.

Yet she found herself, in her abrupt determination to carry out that plan, pushing over-frantically through the brambles and underbrush that stood between her and the less thickly wooded ridge above her. And that, she remembered, was wrong. It was tearing her clothing and taking her strength. It was a betrayal of fear.

So she steadied herself, with an effort, and picked a more deliberate path up the broken hillside. “It’s all right,” she said aloud as she went. But her voice, for all its fortitude, held a quaver.

Once on the summit, she raised her hands to her lips and faced the receding tiers of timberlands that took on a faint tinge of blue along the remoter horizon. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, again and again. She called and waited and listened, facing one way and then another. But the diminishing echoes only added to the loneliness. There was no answering shout, no repeated signal-shot from a friendly rifle. There was only silence, silence and the faint smell of sun-scorched rock-moss on the air. And she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was lost.

She was alone, in an unmapped and monotonous wilderness, without food or weapons or shelter. Yet she still compelled herself to calmness, rehearsing in her own mind what little she knew of forest lore. She was lost for the time being, but she must, by some means or other, find her way back to camp. Or if not back to camp, to some one who could come to her help and take her there. She had been lost once before, skiing in the Swiss canton of Glarus, where she had wandered about the upper valley of the Linth for three forlorn and frosty hours before being rescued by a very gay and dashing company of Chasseurs Alpins on a trek from Saint Gothard to Klausengrass. And the country about her seemed a kindlier one than the snow-clad Alps. It looked anything but malignant. A warm sun shone down on ridge and hollow. The air was balmy and balsam-scented. The sloping forest-floor between her and the next valley was as clean and orderly as a cathedral aisle. At the bottom of that valley she could see the broken thread of a stream, small and silvery, and the remoter gleam of a small lake through a dusky framework of fir-tops. The one thing that depressed her was the apparent absence of all life. Nothing moved or stirred about her. She seemed the only living thing in that aching wilderness of solitude.

Yet it was best, she told herself, not to let thought dwell on that. She would get out of it, in time, and once more see camp-smoke and hear the companionable call of human voices. She would get back, tired and footsore, perhaps, but no more done out than after thirty-six holes of golf. Yet her fate, in this case, was entirely in her own hands.

So she still again went over, point by point, the things that could and should be done. Her first duty was to keep cool and husband her strength. She must, before everything else, take it easy. She must pick her path with deliberation, lining up conspicuous treetops and rock-shoulders, to mark a straight course and avoid that circling tendency which brought trouble to the tenderfoot. She had no way of knowing, from the noonday sun, which was north and which was south. She had heard them say that moss grew thicker on the northerly side of forest-trees. But the trees she examined held no trace of moss. And it didn’t much matter, after all, so long as she advanced in one definite direction.

It was best, she also remembered, to follow the watercourses. It was the streams that led to the rivers and the rivers in turn to settlements. But she must keep her feet dry. For one’s feet were one’s instruments of delivery, in cases like this. And it would be well, as she went, to keep an eye open for food, for edible berries or roots. Willow-bark, she had somewhere heard, was capable, in a pinch, of sustaining life. And stump-fungus could be eaten, if it was necessary in a last resort.

She stared frowningly about, looking for the line of least resistance. She had clung to the hope, before beginning that careful survey of the horizon, that some far-off plume of smoke might yet disclose itself. But no evidence of life accosted her. And her heart sank, in spite of all her earlier resolutions, as she started down the hillside toward the distant silver ribbon of water. She would be glad of water, for she was thirsty. And it would mean sound and movement in a world that stood depressingly static about her. Her impatience to reach water increased, in fact, and her stride quickened. It was not until she found herself running, crushing knee-deep through bracken and bramble, that she pulled up with a gasp of self-reproof. She was, she remembered, breaking the first rule of the wild. She was tiring herself out, needlessly. And she was damaging the clothing that would be sorely needed when the chill of evening came on.

The thought of evening coming on, and of evening deepening into night, did not add to her happiness. Those deep-shadowed slopes, she knew, would seem less kindly with the sun away, would loom more menacing in the darkness of midnight. And she must find shelter of some sort before daylight deserted her. That thought, in fact, accelerated her pace, until she found herself running again. She stopped only when she was out of breath. Then, after resting and realigning her landmarks, she picked her way wearily toward the stream.

She was glad when she got to water. She was glad to fling herself down on a pebbly bar and suck the cool liquid up in her parched throat. She liked the lyrical sound of the stream as it rippled over moss-darkened stones. It made her feel less lonesome. She bathed her arms and neck in it, noticing for the first time the briar-scratches and the insect-bites on her skin. Then she drank again, and rested for a minute or two, and finally struggled to her feet. It was wrong, she knew, to waste time. She might have far to go.

She forgot her weariness, in the presence of that friendly stream, which she followed as closely as the broken terrain would permit. Once, where swampy land confronted her and she had to detour laboriously over a wooded hill, she nursed the feeling, as she went, of parting hands with a light-hearted companion. She was happier when she had fought her way down a slope thick with underbrush and established contact with her stream again. It was, she reminded herself, her final avenue of escape, her roadway of deliverance. An hour later, on a distant hill, she caught sight of a deer, a deer that stood stately for a moment and then disappeared in the shadows. She was startled, still later, to catch sight of a porcupine gnawing on an alder-root. That made her think of food. She wondered when and of what her next meal would be. But she went on, shutting the thought of hunger out of her mind.

She went on, winding through resinous spruce-boles, climbing water-worn boulders and sun-bleached driftwood. She went on, circumventing tussock-stippled muskegs, running quick-footed across cut-banks where sand and stones avalanched in her wake, pioneering through fly-infested thickets, mounting rocky slopes and descending into hollows again. She went on, until the accumulating weariness of her body asserted itself and she was forced to rest. Sometimes she squatted on a windfall, sometimes she lay full length on a clean-floored slope of pine-needles. But it was never for long. A steadily lowering sun kept warning her that all such rest was a luxury. So, gathering her strength, she struggled to her feet and once more followed the slowly widening stream that wound through hills more and more densely wooded. The shadows of that heavier timber depressed her. She stopped occasionally, to look at the sun, frowning over the discovery that it was dipping closer and closer to the blue-misted line of the horizon. For she knew, at last, that there was a limit to her endurance. Her steps had become uncertain. Her breathing, never altogether a panting and never altogether a moaning and yet a mixture of each, both quickened in rhythm and heightened in tone. Hardheads and hogbacks and gneiss-ridges, all of solid rock, began to waver and dip before her misted gaze.

Yet she refused to stop. She staggered on, roweled by the fear that, once sunk to earth, the last of her will would crumble and some final wave of weariness would leave her lying helpless and hopeless in the open, with midnight closing about her. She went on, wavering a little as she went, wondering if the next step was to be her last.

She had no memory of finally sinking to the ground, on a soft-floored slope of blueberry scrub. She merely knew that the mattressing moss and twigs made a comfortable place to rest, in the gathering darkness. Fear itself finally dissolved in the lethal tides of fatigue. And she fell asleep, with the stars shining down on her oddly relaxed body. She slept, without stirring, until a flush of rose showed in the eastern sky and a trio of morning mosquitoes buzzed about her ears and breakfasted on her bramble-scarred skin.

She sat up, with a frown, wondering at the stiffness in her legs and the feeling of lightness in her head. Then memory came back to her, followed by an icy fountain-spray of fear. She rose to her feet, staring about with a half-smothered whimper of horror. But she met and mastered, in the end, those ghostly battalions of terror. Her steps may have wavered, but her face was calm, as she made her way slowly down to her companioning stream. She felt stronger when she had drunk from one of its clear-watered pools. She even took up a bit of driftwood, after bathing her face and arms, and searched wistfully about the shallows for a fish that might possibly be stunned and captured.

She found none. But the earlier gnaw of hunger centering in her stomach-pit eventually dissolved into a vague want permeating all her being. And this, she found as she once more got under way, she could forlornly satisfy by chewing on twigs of black-birch.

So she went on, stolidly, mile by mile, nibbling on her birch-twigs as she went. She rested, when weakness overtook her, and gathered her strength and went on again. It couldn’t be long now, she told herself, before she stumbled on a camp or trapper’s cabin.

Then she stopped, half-way up a lightly wooded slope, leaning against a spruce-bole as she studied the cruel ascent before her. And as she stood there, staring upward, a small new tide of courage coursed through her. For watching her from the crest of the hill she saw a police-dog. She saw it quite plainly. She could discern the alertly pointed ears, the wide-set eyes in the gray face narrowing to a straight and darkening nuzzle, the gaunt gray shoulders so suggestive of strength and watchfulness.

Her heart lightened, foolishly. For where a dog was, she knew, there was sure to be a master. And she had wandered, without quite knowing it, into her trail of deliverance.

But this dog, she noticed as she looked again, was oddly lean in body and disconcertingly gray in color. He was not like other police dogs she had known. Yet she called out to him, coaxingly. When he made no response to her calls, she summoned up energy enough to move toward him. Then she stopped and whistled, still coaxingly. But instead of responding to that whistle, the watching gray animal turned and skulked away.

When she reached the crest of the hill, panting with exertion and excitement, she saw the vulpine gray body far down in the next valley. And she realized her mistake. She knew, with a creeping chill of the limbs, that it was a gray wolf.

She was glad to fight her way on again, changing her course so that it would carry her far from the skulking gray shadow and back toward her abandoned stream. She went on, without stopping, until the sun swung lower over the spruce-ridges and the ringing in her ears grew louder than the clatter of the stream over its gravel-bars. But her knees, she found, were refusing to support her.

She sank, in a heap, on a curving slope of sand that fringed a widening pool at the foot of a small waterfall. Her weakness, she felt, was due to hunger. She had seen wild berries, here and there, but the fear they might be poisonous had kept her from eating them. She wondered, as her jaded eye studied the pool, why no brook-trout lurked in its shadows, brook-trout which the once scorned Louis Charette had the habit of rolling in corn-meal and frying in butter until they were a golden brown. But she could see none. And another drink from the stream, she told herself, might ease the renewing gnaw of emptiness in her stomach.

It was as she crawled out on the faintly ribbed bar of sand toward the water that she saw the footprint.

It was the footprint of a man, a man wearing shoes. They were well-made shoes. And as she sat up, staring frowningly about, she saw still more of the prints.

They merely dazed her at first. And then, once she had absorbed their significance, they reassured her. They took the gnawing ache from the pit of her stomach. They made the world about her seem less desolate. They gave her, in time, strength to struggle to her feet and go on again. They dissolved the acids of fatigue and brought hope back to her.

Her heart lightened, half an hour later, when she stumbled on a narrow path, devious but unmistakable, between the pines. She was no longer alone in the world. And just as the late northern twilight was deepening into darkness she caught sight of the log cabin.

It was a small cabin, in a clearing between two shouldering rock-ridges, and it reminded her of a print that had hung in the playroom of her childhood home, a print framed in walnut and enscrolled with the ever-alluring legend: “A Trapper’s Home in the Adirondacks.” For, like that trapper’s home, it seemed oddly peaceful and oddly hidden away from the rest of the world. Yet it bore a reassuring aspect of competence, from its neatly piled store of fire-wood and its smoke-stained frame for drying fish to the wash-bench beside its open door and the three huckaback towels swinging from a clothes-line of plaited buckskin. It meant shelter and food. It meant deliverance. And it meant companionship in the darkness that was deepening about her.

“Halloo there!” she called out, eagerly, almost exultantly.

It was the sort of cabin, she felt, in which one could have faith. It suggested order and fortitude and intelligence. It reminded her of an Alpine hospice high in the Oberland, with only the snow and the mountains missing.

She waited, patiently impatient, for some answering call. But the silence remained unbroken. And a small cloud chilled the earlier open glow of her triumph. So she shouted again, louder than before, louder and less musical. But still no friendly figure appeared.

She hesitated for a moment or two in the half light, puzzled by the depression that slowly but surely invaded her heart. Then, drawing a deeper breath, she made her way guardedly yet resolutely down the path that led to the clearing.

The cabin, she found, was empty.

It was empty, but over it hung an unmistakable aroma of occupancy. Some one, beyond a doubt, lived there, had recently been there. From the open door she saw a neatly made pine table, a sheet-iron camp-stove, a rustic chair upholstered with rawhide and draped with a wolf-skin, a wall-bunk neatly covered with woolen blankets. Above the wall-bunk she discerned three carelessly crowded book-shelves, and in the corner beyond it a gun-rack and a litter of fishing-tackle. On the side-wall, between a zinc-covered grub-box and a clothes-press, hung an orderly row of pots and pans. And on the floor lay two soft-toned rugs of deerskin.

She stood motionless in the doorway, blinking thoughtfully in at the nickeled reading-lamp on the white pine table and the German chronometer on the wall above the grub-box. Such things, she knew, did not belong to Indians. And no lone-fire half-breed, she also knew, would keep a copy of the Atlantic Monthly on his bunk pillow. The owner of that cabin, she concluded, was a man of discernment and education. And that thought, apparently, gave her courage to step in through the door and cross to the stove.

She stood there for another moment, without moving. Then, leaning over the stove, she touched it and found it cold. That discovery seemed to puzzle her, for a moment later she went back to the door, frowning deeply as she stared out through the gathering darkness. There she repeated her longdrawn “Halloo!” But no answer came back to her.

It was then that she noticed, for the first time, a roughly made ladder that led to a leafy arcade between two near-by trees. She saw, as she peered up through the bough-raftered gloom, that this ladder swung from a platform on which stood a rustic walled hut, little bigger than a sentry-box. It was too high for a food cache, she felt, and too elaborately constructed for a fire-ranger’s lookout. But, half-hidden as it was between the sheltering branches, it obviously commanded an unobstructed view of the lower valley and gave the impression of a craftily placed watch-tower. And she wondered, as she turned back to the cabin, for what her unknown wilderness-dweller might be watching.

But she wasted little time on the matter. The thought of fire and food claimed her attention, and she soon found herself groping frantically about in a search for matches. She discovered them, at last, neatly hidden away in a small tin box, though the unsteadiness of her hand as she lighted the nickeled reading-lamp momentarily bewildered her. Her eyes, as she frowningly lowered the wick, fell on a blue-bound copy of Maria Chapdelaine. She took the book up, absently, and opened it. The pages parted on two faded and folded newspaper clippings which she glanced at with a listless eye. She noticed, through a mist of weariness, that it was merely the story of a murder, a murder in which, all things considered, she had no shadow of interest. Things like that, she remembered, belonged to cities and civilization. And it was the saving of life and not the taking of life that most appealed to her at the moment.

To live, she would have to eat, and eat soon, she reminded herself as she turned to restore the clippings to their place. But from the book, as she opened it, fell a folded sheet of note-paper.

She reached for it, with an unsteady hand, and blinked indifferently down at the neatly penned lines that disclosed themselves as she unfolded the letter.

The words, long-circuited through the mists of weariness, meant little to her. Some of them she did not even bother to read. But she wondered, vaguely, who Davis might be. She also wondered, as she restored the letter to the blue-bound book, why any one should be so weirdly named as “Wildcat Generoso.” But it wasn’t of much importance. The important thing, at the moment, was to start a fire and cook a meal that would take the quavering out of her knees. So, stumbling a little from weakness, she crossed to the sheet-iron stove. In it, when she opened its front door, she found fire-wood neatly laid over a cushion of kindling and shavings. And, a minute after she had touched her lighted match to the shavings, she could hear the pleasant sound of the mounting flames shot through with the crackle of burning wood.

It was the grub-box, however, that most interested her. For in it she found bacon and flour, salt pork and beans, sugar and tea stored away in tobacco-tins, milk-powder and a box of sea-biscuits. The biscuits were incredibly hard and dry. But a gasp of relief escaped her as she caught up one and began munching at it with an almost animal-like ferocity.

She felt better when she had drunk from the half-filled waterpail and eaten her second biscuit. She found the strength to set about preparing a hot meal, benumbed as her body still was by a vague but clamoring emptiness. She sliced bacon and put water on to boil and brewed tea. Then she put four of the sea-biscuits to soak and later fried them in the bacon fat left in her skillet. She sighed, quaveringly, as she sat before her strange-looking meal.

She ate ravenously but steadily. She ate until nothing remained on the table-end before her. Then she sat, torpid with food and fatigue, mistily wondering when the cabin owner would return home. It was a law of the wilderness, she had somewhere heard, that food and shelter should never be denied to the traveler in distress. But eventually, of course, she would be willing to pay for what she had used. She would see to it, in the end, that the score was in some way evened up. She wasn’t sure how it could be worked out. But it didn’t, after all, much matter. What mattered more, she remembered even as her eyes grew heavy and her head nodded with drowsiness, was the fact that her lighted lamp was attracting an armed flotilla of insects. So she roused herself, with an effort, and turned down the lamp-wick until the last of the yellow flame flickered and went out. Then she groped her way stumblingly to the wall-bunk, padding along the low side-board until her outstretched hands felt the grateful softness of the folded blankets. It was, she discovered as she flung herself on it, an unexpectedly comfortable berth. And a moment later she was lost in the sleep of utter exhaustion.

Lynn’s awakening, the next morning, was a retarded one. Sleep fell away from her slowly, leaving her in a No-Man’s Land of drowsiness from which she seemed reluctant to emerge. She lay there, with her eyes closed, weaving the tangled threads of memory into conscious thought. Yet somewhere at the back of those languid efforts lurked a trouble, a thin but persistent impression that she was not so much alone as she imagined.

She nursed the feeling, even before the first drowsy lift of her lids, of some unknown presence beside her. As the last fogs of slumber drifted away, in fact, she lay there fortifying herself against a shock which she knew must eventually be faced. Yet she waited, without moving, until the tension of the prolonging silence grew too sharp for endurance. Then, drawing a deeper breath of resolution, she opened her eyes.

She was right. She discovered, the next moment, that she was no longer alone. But no cry broke from her lips as she looked up and saw the stranger standing motionless between the open door and the sheet-iron camp-stove. He was peering down at her, with a face oddly puckered by perplexity, by perplexity crowned with a touch of incredulity. And he must have been studying her, she surmised, for some time.

“Where did you come from?” he demanded, more quietly than she had expected.

Instead of answering him, she sat up on the bunk and studied the angular brown face as intently as he had been studying her. He was a white man, she saw, and he looked reasonable and reassuring. His appearance, she remembered, was a matter of considerable importance to her. It was more important, when she came to think of their solitude, than the character of one’s table-companions at the beginning of an ocean voyage. For on his face, she told herself, she would be able to read the verdict of safety or peril.

But this faintly smiling stranger, she felt, was one of her own kind. He looked intelligent. He also looked troubled, which she accepted as a point in her favor. He was not like a woodsman, for all his worn khaki and northland shoe-packs and woolen socks and the rifle that rested in the crook of his arm. His eyes were deep-shadowed and ruminative. His mouth, she noticed, was sensitive, yet slightly grim with an acid line of humor.

“I’m afraid I’ve been using your things,” she ventured, with a smile that was plainly forced. For she was, after all, completely in his hands. But it was comforting, she decided, to find that he was a man of sensibilities. She even concluded, as she studied the lean and enigmatic face above her, that she was not afraid of him.

“But who are you?” he was still demanding.

She laughed, shortly, at the still incredulous light in his eyes. The one thing that disappointed her, apparently, was his persistent note of wariness. So she sobered again as she told him, quietly enough, that her name was Lynn Olivia Everett.

“That doesn’t mean much out here. It might just as well be Gulp or Pow or Ook or Pung.”

“But I’m not from the Stone Age.”

“Then where are you from?” he questioned.

She told him, as she moved from the wall-bunk to the roughly made chair of spruce-slabs, that she had rather foolishly wandered away from Loren Stratton’s newly established camp on the Bittiwabi and got lost in the woods.

He frowned over that, the lines about his mouth growing grimmer than ever.

“You did considerable traveling,” he said, without enthusiasm.

“I’m strong,” proclaimed the intruder. Her repeated laugh, though musical, was also defensive.

“So I see,” he acknowledged, equally on the defensive. He glanced estimatively about the cabin. Then he crossed to the door, staring out at the distant spruce-ridges. As he stood there, ignoring her, she remained vaguely grateful for the impersonal note that had been sustained between them. It seemed to fortify her in her defenselessness. His continuing frown of trouble, however, was proving a slight disappointment to her.

“This really saved my life,” explained Lynn, with a frown of her own. But she was able, the next moment, to turn on him the full battery of a customarily triumphant smile. “I hope you’ll learn to forgive me for commandeering your food and blankets this way.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said, with altogether unnecessary curtness. He turned, as she rose to her feet, and studied her again. Then he crossed to the open doorway again and stared out. He seemed, to the watching woman, to be wavering between two possible courses of action. She even surmised, from his face, that he was fighting against a temptation, that he was hesitating over a decision not entirely satisfactory to his own judgment. And it was a matter of considerable importance to her that he should decide in the right way.

So she smiled up at him, courageously enough, as he turned back to her.

“I seem,” she murmured, “to be entirely in your hands.”

She spoke softly enough, but he gave her the impression of steeling himself against some invisible threat.

“I was wondering,” he bluntly averred, “what I’m going to do with you.”

Her smile became more nebulous.

“Have you any doubt about that?”

His thin face hardened, but not, apparently, at the challenge in her voice.

“A bigger one than you imagine,” he solemnly asserted.

That seemed to surprise her.

“Can’t you take me back to my friends?” she asked almost impatiently.

He inspected her for another prolonging period of silence. He wasn’t to be, after all, as reassuring as she had hoped.

“No,” he finally said, “I can’t take you back there.”

“Why not?” she demanded, wondering why he kept his rifle so foolishly in the foreground. There wasn’t, all things considered, anything especially dangerous about her.

“For reasons I don’t care to go into,” was his altogether unsatisfactory reply.

“But you’ll be well paid for your trouble,” she suggested, her color deepening a little.

“I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question,” he said as he leaned his rifle against the clay-and-moss-chinked cabin wall.

“Then where are you going to take me?” she challenged, startled by an absence of chivalry that left her both shaken and indignant.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here,” was his altogether unexpected answer.

She forced a laugh at that, a laugh that died away of its own inertia.

“But my friends will be out searching for me. They’re doing it now. And they’ll keep at it, I assume, until they find me.”

“This is a bad country to get lost in,” was the most he would admit.

“So it seems,” she said, her voice hardening.

But he smiled, rather wintrily, in the face of her anger. “I found that out,” he told her, “long before you did.”

She no longer drew comfort, however, from his once comforting remoteness of manner. She even knew, as she stared at him, the first ghostly fear born of her helplessness.

“But you can’t pretend to say you’d—you’d keep me a prisoner here?” demanded the woman with the abruptly embattled eyes.

“That all depends on you,” was the answer, as deliberate as it was quiet-toned. “It may not sound fair, but having come into this camp of mine, you’ll have to stay here until I’m ready to let you go.”

“Why should you want to keep me?” she demanded.

His eyes met hers. He impressed her, as he stood before her in the modified cabin light, as pathetically alone in a pathetically restricted world of his own. Solitude, she remembered, did strange things to men’s minds.

“Why should you want to keep me?” she repeated, perplexed by this aura of hungry misery that hung about him.

He withdrew his gaze from her face. And over his own face, a moment later, a shutter seemed to go down. “I’ve my reasons,” he retorted, “and they happen to be good ones.”

It took time, apparently, for her to digest this.

“But I can go back by myself,” she proclaimed, “I can go on my own hook, the same way as I came.”

He smiled, almost pityingly, at her threat.

“You’d be dead in two days,” he told her, “no matter which way you traveled.”

“Perhaps,” she ventured, “that would be preferable.”

He smiled again. But, a moment later, he was entirely sober.

“You won’t be ill-treated here,” he quietly averred. “And, if you play fair, you’ll be free enough.”

“And if I don’t?” she challenged.

His meditative eye met hers. But his quietness did not desert him.

“I could shoot you, of course, but that would be disagreeable. And, once we understand each other, quite unnecessary.”

“Is it a habit of yours,” she demanded, “to kill off the people who prove an inconvenience to you?”

“That,” he retorted, “is a point I prefer not to discuss.”

But to that retort she devoted a moment of silent thought. His wince, at her question, had not entirely escaped her. She even garnered the impression of something both momentous and mysterious being withheld from her.

“How could you keep me here,” she finally asked, “against my will?”

“I’ve a chain and padlock on my Peterborough canoe, down by the river. If I had to, of course, I could chain you up. But that would be harder for us both.”

Her laugh was brief and bitter.

“It sounds incredibly medieval,” she observed as he stood blocking the doorway.

“But the only workable plan that presents itself,” he quietly amended.

“And when my term is up?” she questioned.

“That all depends. I intended getting out of here, before the freeze-up. I’ll probably strike north into the Watagama country. When I go I’ll give you the canoe and a map that will make it easy enough for you to get down to Laird’s Outpost. Or, if you prove that you’re to be trusted, I’ll take you down myself and leave you within five miles of the Post.”

“Why not all the way?” she asked.

He shrugged, but left the question unanswered. Yet into the hazel-flecked eyes of the woman so closely watching him there crept a small and slowly deepening look of suspicion.

“Are you afraid to be seen?” she challenged. For she was remembering, through the fogs of weariness and hunger and worry, a couple of newspaper clippings that she had so listlessly put back in a book,—clippings that told, oddly enough, of a murder.

“Suppose we drop all this,” said her captor, with paraded impatience.

But she had no intention of dropping it. “I know why you’re here,” she proclaimed with a sudden light of understanding. “You’re hiding away. And you’re afraid the rest of the world will find out where you are.”

He neither affirmed nor denied it. But his smile was a wintry one.

“Well, since you share my secret,” he told her, “you must also be prepared to share my company.”

“Then you have killed somebody,” she cried out, with a head-nod of conviction. It was the first time, she remembered, that she had ever conversed with a murderer. Yet there was nothing, she claimed, conspicuously malignant about him. He was merely pathetic, a rather harried and hunted animal, hiding away from the long arm of the law, resolved, at any cost, to save his neck from the gallows and drag out a ghostily empty existence in the waste places of the world.

“The important thing,” announced her captor as he removed the shells from his rifle and stood the firearm in a remoter corner of the cabin, “is that I may not have to kill you. Provided, of course, that you do what I say.”

Her blood chilled a little as she caught the note of grimness in his voice. She was not so safe, after all, as she had imagined. If she had found shelter, in her extremity, it was little better than the shelter of a bear’s cave.

“I’ve usually done only what I care to do,” she found the courage to assert.

“Then from now on I must have your promise to do as I propose,” said the cabin owner as he crossed to the stove and thrust some lighter fire-wood through its opened door.

“Are promises worth much,” she demanded, “when it’s so clearly a case of claw and fang?” And, seeing his frown as he swung about on her, she loosed still another shaft. “They do this sort of thing in China, I believe. But I didn’t think it was done nowadays by white men.”

She was rewarded by a quick flush of anger.

“Don’t run away with the idea,” he cried out, “that you’re being abducted. You’re not necessarily going to be hanged and drawn and quartered. You’re merely going to live in this camp until I can work out a plan for getting you safely back where you want to be.”

“Which certainly isn’t here,” was her prompt retort.

“But since you are here,” he proclaimed, “you’ll do what I say.”

She faced him without flinching.

“Who’ll make me?” she challenged.

“I will,” he said with a deluding note of quietness.

Her embattled eyes met his, for a moment of silence.

“Because I haven’t been brought up on bear-meat,” she finally observed, “you seem to think I’m quite spineless.”

“I’m not worrying about your anatomy,” he retorted. “But that Park Avenue arrogance won’t get you far in this camp.”

She came to a decision as she stared at him in the modified light of the cabin. The promptness with which she arrived at that decision both stiffened her body and took a little of the color from her face.

“But I have no intention of staying in this camp,” she asserted, her shoulders squared.

He must have anticipated her movement toward the door, for he fell back, blocking the oblong of light with his body.

“Kindly let me pass,” she commanded. She saw, for the first time, the knife with which she had cut the bacon for her supper, the well-whetted butcher-knife on the dish-littered table, within two paces of her. She saw it, but refused to think of it.

“Not when you’re being idiot enough to walk out to certain death,” he said, holding his ground.

“Kindly let me pass,” she repeated, her voice oddly hardened.

“You’ll stay here,” was his curt ultimatum.

“Will I?” she cried, without giving much thought to what she was saying. For her attention, at the moment, was centered on the knife, the knife with which she must in some way fight herself free. And she realized, as she caught it up, that there was no essential difference between her and the murderer standing between her and her liberty. Her breathing quickened and the blood sang in her ears.

“Will you let me pass?” she demanded, the knife in her hand.

“Never,” answered the man in the doorway, singularly undisturbed by the poised steel blade.

Her temper, she knew, had always been unpredictable. She had seldom, since her earliest childhood, been coerced into doing the things to which she stood opposed. She had rarely been crossed and never commanded. If she had not always achieved freedom, she had at least looked for fair play. Chivalry, she had been taught, was an attribute of civilized man. And through her body, at this abrupt affront to her womanhood, she could feel the telltale flash of resentment, the wine of recklessness that still again brought home to her the narrowness of the gulf between urban sedateness and savagery.

For she struck at him blindly, her face a trifle contorted with passion, her eyes flashing fire. But the very blindness with which she struck was her undoing, since her enemy, so quietly watching her, both foresaw and forestalled that frenzied arm-movement. His defensively crooked forearm, flung up at the right moment, struck sharply against her wrist-bone. Before she could raise her hand for a second blow the strong brown fingers were clamped about her wrist. Then with his free hand, and with humiliating ease, he wrenched the knife from her grasp and flung it out through the open cabin door.

“This won’t get you anywhere,” he warned her, holding her out at arm’s length.

“You murderer,” she gasped as she writhed and twisted in his clutch, striking at him with her bare hands.

“Aren’t you about as bad?” he demanded. He refused, apparently, to be infected by any trace of her fury. But when she pressed forward, beating against his body with her clenched hands, he became less passive. He caught her by the shoulders and shook her.

“Be sensible,” he warned her.

But she refused to be sensible. She clung and clawed at him with the ferocity of a trapped ferret, writhing and twisting as she linked her knee about his, striking at his face as they fell together. She still tore at him as they went down in a heap, upsetting a chair as they rolled about the floor in an odd tangle of limbs. The man knew, by this time, that her ferocity was not to be laughed at. It was more, he saw, than a foolish ruffling of feathers. And the entire encounter, he realized, was a humiliation to each of them.

He decided to end it. But that decision, for all his strength, was not entirely in his own hands. For her slender brown fingers, sunk deep in his hair, clung abandonedly to what they could hold. It was all he could do, as he leaned across her panting body, to capture her two hands and tear them free. He forced them back and down, until they were pressed close to her sides. And as he held her there, exhausted and helpless, he stared with a sort of startled bewilderment into the face so close to his own.

On that face, as he looked, he saw hate and aversion. About the parted and tremulous lips, within six inches of his own, hovered a telltale afterglow of passion. And in the amber-flecked eyes he could still see a sullen and unrelenting defiance.

She refused to be mastered. He realized that as he stared down at the smoldering eyes and the still belligerently squared lips. There was, he saw, a continued challenge in her very non-resistance. And he resented her obstinacy, her submission without submissiveness, her power of frustrating him at every turn.

Yet she was a woman, he remembered as he gazed at the rounded hollow of her throat where a hidden pulse so quickly rose and fell. She was a woman who had come to him, alone and lost and helpless. And he should have been kind to her. She needed his care, just as he had needed her companionship. But she had withheld herself. From the first she had flouted and defied him. And she was defying him now, by her very passivity. She was not only defying him; she was humiliating him and turning him into something he had no intention of being.

He tried to lift her to her feet. But she hung limp from his hand, making no effort to hold herself up. He bent over her for a second frowning period of silence, as resentment sharpened into anger. He caught at the loosened neck of her waist, in a sudden effort to swing her up from that posture of helplessness. But the twisted cloth parted, under the strain, and she fell back, her body shaken by a tremor of revulsion.

“You animal,” she gasped. She lay, for a moment, with closed eyes. Then she turned her face away, to hide the tears of helpless rage that were staining it.

He leaned above her, his own eyes stunned with a new bewilderment. It was the sight of white flesh, the accusatory white flesh of her bared shoulder, that seemed to shock him into a knowledge of the excesses to which he had been driven. He stepped back from her, abruptly sobered.

“You’d better get up,” he said.

He spoke thickly yet quietly, as though the final indignities to which he had subjected her had wiped clean the slate of his resentment. A dulled look of contrition even came into his face as he turned away from her.

“You’d better get up,” he said for the second time, more gently than before.

But she refused to move. She lay there, panting and disheveled, staring at him with eyes oddly luminous, reminding him of the eyes of an animal caught in a trap’s jaw. He had both expected and hoped, in his mood of revulsion, that anger would make her a thing of ugliness. And it depressed him now to find her looking so feminine and fragile, so vulnerable and slender of body. Yet he was even more depressed by the frown of fixed loathing on her face.

She remained passive as he lifted her and placed her in a chair. She sat watching him as he restored the overturned chair to its feet. She remained equally silent as he fell to pacing back and forth across the narrow cabin floor. He stopped and looked at the disordered wall-bunk, and then at the stove, and then at the intruder with the still tremulous lips and the bosom that rose and fell above the torn waist-top.

“Now that we’re down to bed-rock,” he said in an abruptly hardened voice, “we’d better get ready for breakfast.”

She looked at him with unseeing eyes as he stooped to draw an ax-hewn cedar-chest from under the wall-bunk and from that rustic treasure-box disinterred a towel and a tooth-brush. To these he added a small comb, obviously his own, from a shelf above the wash-bench.

“I said we’d get ready for breakfast,” he repeated.

She spoke then, for the first time.

“I’m not going to eat with you,” she quietly but quaveringly proclaimed.

His earlier look of grimness returned to him.

“Oh, yes, you are,” he announced. “You’re going to eat at this table, and you’re going to sleep in that wall-bunk. You’re going to stay in this camp. You’ve stumbled into a bear-trap and there’s no use thrashing around until I can devise a way of setting you free. It may be too bad, but you’re here. And if you try to get away before I say so, I’ll bring you back. And if I can’t do that I’ve still the choice of shooting you down in your tracks.”

She smiled at that, joylessly, but he ignored it.

“I’ll be watching, remember, every moment and every move. And if you try to leave this wall-bunk, I’ll come and sleep beside you.”

She continued to look at him in silence, a little of the color coming back to her face.

“What a coward you are,” she finally observed, her note one of meditative contempt.

“Then don’t make me any worse,” he warned her.

“I couldn’t,” she said with a lip-curl of scorn.

That angered him a little, for he turned on her with a gesture of patience exhausted.

“Take off those shoes and stockings,” he commanded.

“Why?” she asked, without moving.

“Because I say so,” he proclaimed.

“Why not make me take off everything?” she inquired, still in a tone of mockery.

“I might do that,” he reminded her, “if you keep on being unreasonable.”

“It would be like you,” she murmured with embittered languor.

“Perhaps,” he admitted, disentangling his glance from hers. “But you’d better go down to the river and bathe and make yourself respectable.”

“Water alone mightn’t do it,” she mocked.

“Make yourself a little more respectable,” he repeated. “And while you’re doing it, since you decline to give me your promise to play fair, I’ll keep your shoes and stockings here with me.”

Her eyes, for the second time, made him think of a trapped animal.

“But are you playing fair?” she cried in a voice made tremulous with helplessness. For he was cleverer, she saw, than she had counted on. And her hope of an early escape, when he had spoken of the river, died almost as soon as it was born. In that forest, she remembered, she would be defenseless without footwear. It was his trick, she realized, for anchoring her there.

“I’m playing as fair as you’ll let me,” he claimed as he turned back to the stove. His hand, when he struck a match, was not so steady as it might have been. “And the sooner we get down to brass tacks, the better.”

She sat regarding him with a cold and hostile eye.

“I’ve no wish,” she proclaimed, “to understand any one so poisonous.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed as he filled his kettle and put more wood in the stove. “But you may as well understand the conditions you’re facing. You were empty-headed enough to get lost in this God-forsaken wilderness. And you’re alive because you found food and shelter in this cabin. This is your base, and any time you leave it you’re standing face to face with death again. But this cabin, for the time being, also happens to be my home.”

“You mean your hideout,” she mordantly amended.

“Call it that if you care to,” he said, untouched by her taunt. “But whether you like it or not, you’re in my hands here. And you’re not going to make it any easier for yourself by hating me.”

“I wish,” she said with unexpected passion, “that I’d never seen your cabin.”

That clearly enough struck home, for a flush darkened his face as he turned to her.

“So do I,” he said as his embattled glance locked with hers.

She had not, apparently, expected that. She sat silent, watching him as he cleared the dishes from the table, the dishes that she had so imperiously used and left unwashed.

He found her, when he looked back at her, slowly unlacing her high-topped hunting-shoes of sealskin. He accepted it, in his blindness, as a gesture of capitulation.

“We’d get along much better,” he ventured, relenting a trifle, “if we had a little more faith in each other.”

Her gaze, lucid and unflinching, met his.

“I’d much prefer having you hate me.”

He was human enough to resent that.

“So your actions seem to indicate,” he proclaimed. His face hardened again as he bent over the cedar-chest and rummaged through its contents. “But you’d better go and bathe now. And here’s a cake of soap. You seem to need it.”

If the expected blaze of anger showed in her eyes, he made a pretense of not seeing it.

“That,” she cried as she flung her shoes at his feet, “is about what you’d expect from a murderer.”

He turned, as though to retort to that charge. But before he could speak she had gathered up her things and passed out through the narrow cabin door.

He stood, for a moment, looking down at her shoes. Then he stepped to the doorway, watching her as she moved through sun and shadow, following the winding woodland path that led to the river. She went slowly but with her shoulders well back. Her ankles, he noticed, glimmered strangely white in the mottled sunlight.

Lynn’s mood, as she made her way down to the river-bank, was still an insurrectionary one. She was glad to be alone and feel the friendly sun on her body as she bathed in a pebbled cove where the amber-tinted back-water circled and dimpled between two sheltering rocks furred with juniper. But, bruised as she felt in both body and spirit, she found something stabilizing in the impact of cold water against her flesh. It quieted and steadied her. Even her movements, as she dressed, became more meditatively deliberate. Her earlier impulse to escape, to escape at once and at any cost, slowly but surely slipped away from her. And if the thought of her predicament could still send recurring small waves of helplessness through her tingling and protesting body, she resolved that her captivity should be merely a matter of time.

She must be discreet, she told herself, and await her chance. She could not always be watched. And, in preparation for the right moment, she must hide away a little food, and a weapon of some sort, if possible, and gather what knowledge she could of the neighboring forest-trails, and smuggle out a camp-blanket to protect her against the coldness of the nights. And, once clear of her brutish captor, she would once more know the feeling of freedom.

But the silence of the river valley, as she stood watching the flow of the amber-tinted water, tended to depress her. It was a strangely desolate country. And a trouble, thin and undefined, insinuated itself into her meditations. It was not until she mounted a hill covered with a scattering of jack-pine and caught sight of the blue-gray wood-smoke going so companionably up from the cabin chimney that she fully realized the source of her restlessness. She was lonesome. But she was also hungry. Some deep-kenneled hound of appetite was stirring within her and belling for breakfast. She could see where her captor had carried his camp table out to the open and covered it with a square of white canvas. She could see the table where it stood in a small grove of spruce-trees, half in sunlight and half in shadow. She could see the dishes so carefully disposed about the white canvas and the two rustic camp-chairs as carefully placed at either end of the table. There crept out to her the smell of frying bacon shot through with the aroma of boiling coffee.

Her delicately chiseled nostrils expanded a little. She winced, without quite knowing she was doing so. But she remained where she was. To go meekly back to the cabin, she remembered, would seem too much like abject surrender. And to surrender, after what had passed between them, would seem too final a sacrifice of dignity.

Yet a wistfulness came into the amber-flecked eyes as she sniffed for a second time at the mingled fragrance of coffee and bacon. She watched her enemy as he reentered the cabin and came out again carrying a platter of steaming food. She saw him bring out a smoking skillet and a platter of pancakes and what seemed to be a can of maple sirup. And, as she looked, she moistened her rebelliously squared lips.

The next minute, however, she stood secretly humiliated at the thought that the sight and smell of food could prove so important to her. It both depressed and bewildered her to remember that the call of the spirit could be thus corrupted by the mere wants of the body. She prided herself on being something more than a whisky-jack in petticoats. And she turned deliberately away, seating herself on a fallen spruce-trunk. She refused to be conquered by a frying-pan. She declined to be tamed by hunger.

Yet she was far from happy. She even fought back a tear or two of exasperation as she sat watching a red squirrel scamper about over the pine-needles and stop to nibble on a disinterred nut. She remembered, with a series of ghostly small pangs, different opulent and delightful meals that she had eaten in different parts of the world. And the Fates, she concluded, were not treating her fairly.

She was almost glad when her captor came striding out to where she sat with her back to the waiting table. He was unexpectedly matter-of-fact about it all.

“Breakfast’s ready,” he announced.

“I don’t think I care for any,” she said as she stared down at the shoes which he had dropped at her feet.

“Then suppose we go through the motions,” he casually suggested. “I can’t be seated, of course, until you are.”

That surprised her a little, coming as it did from a murderer. He had, after all, his wayward streaks of humanness. And he had been civilized enough not to spy on her. There was even a rough downrightness about him which might in a way be accepted as reassuring. And she was conscious of him waiting, remotely patient, as she laced up her shoes and rose and crossed with defensive slowness to the table at the edge of the birch-grove. But she had no intention, she inwardly reaffirmed as she pinned together the torn top of her waist, of being tamed by a coffee-pot.

She was breakfasting that morning, she told herself, with a murderer. But he was also, she grudgingly admitted, a surprisingly competent cook. She did her best to eat with dignity.

He glanced guardedly up at her.

“You look better,” he ventured.

“That river water,” she averred, “was rather cold.”

“But it brought your color back,” he proclaimed. He wondered why the dusky rose of her cheek should deepen a little as he looked at it. His voice, when he next spoke, was expediently remote. “Can you swim?”

“Of course,” she answered as she poured sirup over her pancakes.

“Then I needn’t worry about you,” he said as he refilled his coffee-cup. “But there’s a better place for bathing around the first bend. You’ll find a bench and a diving-board there. And a slope of sand for taking a sun-bath. Or, if you’d rather have a shower, you can go two hundred yards up that stream and come to a cascade that falls over twenty feet of jade-green rock. It smacks against you like buckshot, and turns your skin pink. It’s great.”

But her mind, at the moment, was not dwelling on these ablutionary details. A camp robber, hopping about for crumbs, reminded her that she herself was merely a stray animal who had been taken in to be fed and sheltered. She was being fed, but she was a prisoner there. And she wondered when her chance to escape would come.

It came, in fact, much earlier than she had expected.

For her captor, two hours later, seemed momentarily willing to leave his prisoner to her own devices. He disappeared in the direction of the river, carrying his rifle with him. He went hurriedly, as though in quest of some wandering deer or bear that had escaped her vision.

Lynn suspected, at first, that it was merely a maneuver to try out her intentions. But when she heard a rifle-shot, from a short distance down the wooded valley, she knew that a ponderable space separated her from her enemy. And she lost no time in acting on that knowledge.

She hurried into the cabin, where, after a quick survey of its contents, she snatched a belt-hatchet from its wall-peg and a blanket from the bunk. She next pocketed matches and a clasp-knife. Then into a buckskin bag with a draw-thong she crowded dried fish and bacon and sea-biscuit. She looked about for a compass, but in her hurry failed to find one. Yet she took time, before tying her blanket-roll over her shoulder, to reopen the bag and thrust into it three slabs of unsweetened chocolate.

It seemed a lot to carry. But she would need it, she felt, before she had fought her way out to Laird’s Post or some other encampment, white or red, where she could be taken in. Even an Indian, she remembered, would be preferable to this brutish autocrat of the wilds who had made her his prisoner.

She slipped away, striking southeast over the wooded hills. She went resolutely and without one backward glance, depending on the frequent rock-ridges to hide her trail as she went. A thin sense of elation even took possession of her, for she knew, as she moved on through the whispering forest, that she was free again.

She went on without stopping, until she came to a brawling brook, from which she appeased her thirst. Then she opened her grub-bag and ate a frugal lunch of dried fish and biscuit, nibbling at a half-cake of her chocolate as she once more took up her course. She picked her way with circumspection, keeping the declining sun always over her right shoulder.

It seemed a familiar enough proceeding. But the country into which she was advancing grew perceptibly rougher. The steeper valley-slopes began to tire her and she had difficulty, at times, in picking a trail. Yet she went on, dogged and undismayed. Before nightfall, she knew, she could find some sheltering coign where she could make a fire and sleep warm in her blanket.

She hesitated, however, when she came to a broken rock-wall that crossed her path between an open lake on the left and a series of rush-fringed muskegs on the right. It was not an easy wall to climb, but she had small choice in the matter. So she started determinedly up the rough slope where the dappling of rock-face and shadow in the slanting afternoon sunlight made her think of a Maxfield Parrish painting.

Just how she missed her footing, as she stepped from stone to stone, she never quite knew. But she found herself, stunned and shaken, once more amid the boulders at the wall-base.

She realized, as she tried to struggle to her feet, that her left ankle was useless. It was broken, she suspected from the accruing pain that brought a tremor to her lips and a gasp of dismay to her throat. She was glad to lie back, full length on the valley-rubble, waiting for the throbs of anguish to diminish. Then she made a second effort to get to her feet.

But it was beyond her. She fell back with a cry of helplessness and made an ineffectual effort to unlace her shoe. Then, with her hands clenched close to her side, she lay there, staring back at the misted red ball of the sun as it sank behind the serrated black fringe of the spruce-lands.

And it was there that the man from the hideout over the hills, trailing her mile by dubious mile, finally found her.

He found her late that night, just as the long northern twilight was deepening into dusk and the moon-howl of a gray wolf sounded over the darkening hills.

“And now,” Lynn suggested with embittered listlessness, “I suppose you’re going to shoot me.”

He laughed, apparently with relief, but essayed no immediate answer to that acrid challenge as he bent over her. He busied himself, for a minute or two, examining the injured ankle. She moaned aloud as he drew off her shoe. She shut her teeth on a second moan as his cruelly strong fingers explored the swollen flesh.

“I doubt if there’s a bone broken there,” he announced. “But I’m afraid you won’t walk for a week or so.”

She failed to show any active interest in that decision.

“Hadn’t you better shoot me?” she suggested, turning away from him.

He laughed again, as curtly as before.

“Haven’t you had about trouble enough?”

“But what are you going to do with me?” demanded his helpless and unhappy prisoner.

Her captor was surprisingly matter-of-fact about it all.

“In the morning,” he announced, “I’ll carry you back to camp. And in the meantime, we’ll see if we can’t get comfortable.”

“What can we do?” she asked out of her mists of misery.

“We’re going to sleep here,” he casually explained.

And he was busy, a moment later, bringing wood and building a fire. Then he found water and brewed tea and prepared food for her and bound a compress about the aching ankle. Beside the fire he built an open-fronted wind-break, which he floored with carefully feathered pine-branches and roofed with larger tree-boughs resting side by side along a cross-piece four feet from the ground.

It was very comfortable, Lynn found, lying there in her blanket on a mattress of laminated pine-sprays, facing a blazing fire beyond which the stars shone in the high-arching northern sky. The far-off moon-howl of the wolf no longer disturbed her. What disturbed her more was the discovery that her enemy, stretched out on the other side of the fire, was sleeping without a blanket.

Several times, during the night, his movements about the fire roused her. Once, in fact, he stooped under the wind-break and leaned in quite close to her, apparently listening to her breathing. It struck her as odd that those casual actions should combine to touch her with a ghostly spirit of guardianship.

It struck her as equally odd, the next day, that a lean and hard-sinewed stranger should be carrying her across the wooded hills, very much as a wounded soldier might be carried back from a shell-swept No-Man’s Land. She went passively and without protest, knowing that her last bolt had been shot. It was not easy, she realized, to parade hatred for a fellow-creature when you were clinging helpless to his shoulders, just as it was rather unnatural to show enmity for a man who was doing what he could to relieve your pain.

Yet close as they seemed, during that long and toilsome journey back to the cabin between the hills, Lynn remembered how some silent abhorrence, as thin and tough as a sheet of steel, would always stand between them and keep them apart. If, back at the camp, her captor was unexpectedly considerate in the gentleness with which he daily bound and trussed her injured ankle, she was grateful for the way in which he respected her obvious wish to be left alone.

But, as the ankle grew stronger, her sense of desolation grew deeper. She was lonesome. And, at the end of four days, she was glad when she was able to hobble about again, with the help of a crutch which her quiet-eyed captor had fashioned for her.

“In another four days,” he said at the end of their first lunch together in the mottled sun and shadow of the birch-grove, “you won’t need that crutch.”

Her frown deepened as she stared down at her worn clothing.

“But there are other things I’ll need,” she reminded him. “What am I going to do for clothes?”

“You’ll get along with much fewer than you imagine,” he informed her.

“But a woman has to keep covered.”

“I’ll see that you do,” was his unnecessarily prompt reply.

“With what?” she challenged.

“Can you sew?”

“Of course,” she answered with the faintest shadow of a smile, knowing there was her neatly stitched waist-neck to attest to that fact.

“Then I’ve some things that can be made over,” he told her. “And there’s always fur. And if your shoes give out I’ll make you a pair of moccasins. You’ll get along, in fact, much more comfortably than you expect.”

“My expectations,” she retorted to that, “are distinctly restricted.”

He felt the barb, obviously, for his face hardened.

“Women have lived in the woods,” he proclaimed, “a good many centuries before they thought of being cooped up in Park Avenue apartment-houses. And by conforming to the customs of the country one can get along quite nicely.”

“But I’m not a squaw,” she curtly explained.

“Unfortunately not,” he answered. “Otherwise my problem would be a much simpler one.”

She felt the intended sting of that, plainly enough, for she sat silent a moment. And when she was silent, he had learned, she was not happy.

“I’m sorry I’ve proved such a trouble to you.”

“The worst,” he said with his acrid smile, “is yet to come.”

“Could anything be worse than this?” she countered.

She knew that opposing him would achieve no good end, just as angering him might prove a costly triumph. He was, for the time being, her master. But, until her trail had crossed with his, she had been a free woman. And she hated him for the way in which he had cheapened her.

“We’d get along much better,” he suggested, “if you’d agree to my conditions.”

“You mean promise to remain here willingly?”

That, he said, was what he meant.

“I never shall,” she proclaimed.

“Why?” he asked, noticing how the sunlight nestled in the tawny and tangled mat of her hair.

“Because I still happen to prefer my own world,” she answered as she stared across the receding hill-tiers.

“Naturally,” he agreed. “And your price for getting back to it is merely a promise to play fair.”

She declined, however, to discuss any such compromise. She was not afraid of him. Her hands were clean. But he, she remembered, was secretly afraid of her. And the time might come when she was not entirely at his mercy.

“We don’t, apparently, seem to understand each other,” he ventured out of the silence that had fallen between them.

She smiled at that. “We might get along a little better,” she suggested, “if I knew something about you, and why you’re here.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” he retorted. But the barricaded look that came into his eyes did not escape her. She saw, in fact, that he preferred to remain within his shell. And there was a reason, she remembered, for his reticence. A fugitive, after all, couldn’t afford to talk too much.

“But I don’t even know your name,” she reminded him.

“Is that necessary?”

“I suppose not,” she said with unexpected spirit, “if we’re to identify ourselves with the animal kingdom.”

The note of scorn in her voice obviously nettled him. For his name, he grudgingly admitted, was Adam Bronson. But neither your name nor your origin, as he had already once reminded her, meant little in isolation such as theirs. And a refugee from justice, she surmised, would naturally protect himself with an alias.

She accepted the name, however, with the same quiet stoicism that she accepted the situation. She had, she saw, no choice in the matter. The conditions he had imposed on her were basically unfair. But he showed himself, in small things, anxious enough to treat her fairly. He seemed stiffly intent on respecting her privacy, or what remained of her privacy. He made no complaint in surrendering the wall-bunk to her and sleeping, apparently none too comfortably, in the crazy treetop hut with the carefully padlocked door. Yet from that treetop perch, she suspected, he could still watch her smallest movement. During the day, however, he interfered as little as possible with her freedom. But always, she knew, she was under his eye, no matter how long or short the leash. When they ate together, at the table in the restricted cabin, he made a creditable enough effort to keep a flow of talk going between them.

“You make me think of Peter Pan,” she told him one morning at breakfast, “with that tree-shack of yours. Why do you go to a place like that to sleep?”

His eye, for a mordant moment, rested on her face. “Before you came,” he reminded her, “I slept in that wall-bunk.”

The note of reproof did not entirely escape her.

“Wouldn’t you like it back?” she asked with her heat-lightning smile.

“And what would you do?”

She glanced at the roughly made ladder.

“I could go up to your cave on stilts.”

“That happens to be my personal and private workroom,” he solemnly informed her.

“All right, Bluebeard, I’ll respect it,” she announced with a note of asperity. For she was never, she realized, to be without a sense of tension and restraint there. Always, apparently, there would be concealments and restrictions. And she had once been singularly free. She had been so free, in the past, that she found it hard to mask her resentment against captivity. She found it equally hard to think tolerantly of her captor, her captor who remained quietly and determinedly wary. His past, she soon discovered, was to remain a closed book. No matter what her approach, she found, she was unable to lead him out. He declined to be trapped into personalities, just as he opposed all speculations as to the future. He seemed satisfied to live only in the present.

“You must have been very lonely here?” she suggested one evening beside the camp-fire he had built in the clearing.

“Terribly,” he said, momentarily off his guard.

“But killers can’t be choosers,” she was cruel enough to proclaim.

And he remained stubbornly silent, she noticed, for the rest of the evening.

On another occasion, when he stepped hurriedly into the cabin to get his rifle, one morning before she was out of bed, he found it impossible to ignore the punitively glacial eye with which she greeted him at the breakfast table.

“There was a deer over there on the hill,” he penitently explained. “And that meant fresh meat for both of us.”

“Then the game laws are among the other things you don’t respect up here?” she mordantly suggested.

He sat silent a moment, with his color slowly deepening.

“I don’t see why you have to be so depressingly high-minded,” he almost angrily proclaimed.

“I don’t quite know,” she parried, “what you mean by high-minded.”

“I mean, since we’re where we are, this punctilious attention to a lot of outmoded niceties and reticences.”

“Don’t be too sure about them being outmoded,” she said after a moment of thought. “A woman, to remain civilized, has to keep her self-respect. And she wants that self-respect respected, if you get what I mean.”

“I get it, all right,” was his quick retort.

“The difference, really, between what we’d call a gentleman and a boor,” she quietly proceeded, “is whether a man does that or not. Respect our self-respect, I mean. And we still have the privilege of hating the person who insists on humiliating us.”

That held him silent for a moment.

“I’ve never wanted to humiliate you,” he protested.

“No, but you’ve compromised me,” she reminded him, since he had given her the opening. “The right sort of woman wants a clean name, just as she wants a clean body. Yet I’m living with you quite alone here. And that’s something that can’t be laughed away.”

“Perhaps,” he ventured, “it will never be known.”

“But there’s humiliation in even having to nurse such a secret. Surely you see that?”

He had failed to see it, apparently, for he sat plunged in troubled thought as his abstracted gaze rested on a camp robber hopping about the dooryard.

“I’ve had time for considerable thinking since I came out here,” he said when he looked up. “And I’ve concluded we can scrap a great many conventions and restrictions without losing much. Men and women, I mean, would be saner and simpler in their contacts if they’d only bring about a sort of armistice of honesty.”

She smiled at that, coming as it did from a killer.

“I’m afraid the Adam and Eve simplicities are a little beyond our reach,” she told him. “But even though we didn’t go native, we might at least be honest and open with each other.”

“That would help a lot,” he asserted.

“But,” she promptly challenged, “can you afford to be honest and open?”

He nodded understandingly.

“Only when the wind is northeast by east,” he said with his brief and brittle smile. Yet the wistfulness of his face and the look of hunger in his brooding and unhappy eyes brought a wave of sympathy to the woman so intently watching him. He seemed indescribably alone in a world of his own.

“Who’s Davis?” she abruptly inquired.

She could see the familiar shutter come down over his face. His voice, when he spoke, was a bantering one.

“D’you mean Jefferson Davis, or Richard Harding, or the old sea-fighter who discovered Davis Strait?”

He was, of course, evading her. But the issue was too important to be laughed aside.

“I mean the Davis you know,” she proclaimed.

“I don’t happen to know any gentleman by that name,” he solemnly asserted.

She stared, for a moment, at her empty coffee-cup.

“I’ve been wondering,” she said when she looked up, “why your name of Adam Bronson should have rather a familiar ring. Isn’t it something out of fiction?”

She wondered why he should laugh at that.

“Have you heard it before?”

“I seem to have,” she admitted. “But I can’t be sure.”

“And you obviously don’t care much for fiction?”

“I’ve a liking for truth.”

“But truth doesn’t always add to our happiness,” he quietly reminded her.

His happiness, she was on the point of proclaiming, didn’t seem any too conspicuous. But she declined, on second thought, to make the thrust. It seemed too much like kicking a dog already down.

“I wish,” she said with abrupt and childlike candor, “that you weren’t a murderer.”

His laugh, she felt, was a defensive one.

“And I wish,” he proclaimed with unexpected harshness, “that you’d never come here.”

“But when a thing’s done,” she protested, “it’s done.”

He looked away, as though reluctant to meet her gaze.

“That’s what makes me hate myself,” he said with an unlooked-for note of misery in his voice.

But, although nothing more was said on the matter, she found her thoughts, that day, centering again and again on Adam Bronson. And when evening deepened into night and she was alone in the cabin, she made a diligent search for the letter and the newspaper clippings in the blue-bound copy of Maria Chapdelaine. After going through the volume, page by page, she saw that both the letter and telltale clippings had been removed from their earlier hiding-place.

Lynn, for all her efforts to understand Adam Bronson, found much to perplex her in that strangely contradictory captor of hers. When he casually handed out to her a polo-coat of llama wool which he suggested she might make over into a garment for herself, since she so obviously was in need of clothing, she rested a ruminative eye on that soft-fibered coat and speculated as to how it had come into his possession.

“Yes, I stole it,” he said with his clipped smile, startling her by the closeness with which he had read her thoughts.

“You seem to have the habit,” she suggested, “of taking what you want.”

“From which I seem to derive little benefit,” he reminded her.

At another time, when he was cursorily occupied in cooking a panful of thick-meated black bass, smoking as he worked, she turned to him with a suddenly perplexed eye.

“Why do you smoke Russian cigarettes?” she asked.

“Are they Russian?” he parried.

“They are,” she proclaimed. “And they’re not usually smoked by backwoodsmen.”

“I never claimed to be a backwoodsman,” he retorted. His face, as he turned back to his skillet, remained clouded. “And if you’ll be good enough to get water from the spring, we’ll sit down to breakfast.”

Yet after that morning meal, restless with a new curiosity, she wandered rather far afield from the cabin in the clearing. She pioneered tentatively along the upper stream, studying each new vista that opened up before her. When she came to a stop, on a moss-covered ridge, she realized that she had lengthened her leash by a mile or more. Freedom, she reminded herself, once more lay before her in those unknown and purple-misted valleys. There was nothing to keep her from going indefinitely on. But on to what? she asked herself as she stared into the lonely wilderness that faded dark ridge by ridge into a still lonelier horizon. And she shuddered with a homelessness that was too deep to be put into words.

She was almost glad when she looked back over her shoulder and saw her captor’s face showing above the crest of the hill. He did not call out to her. He seemed more worried than angry as he strode up to where she awaited him.

“Is this playing fair?” he demanded.

“You haven’t much faith in me, have you?” was her counter-question. She was smiling a little at the implication in his breathlessness.

“Perhaps I haven’t,” he agreed. “But you want to keep on living, I imagine, as much as I do.”

“I wasn’t trying to escape,” she said quite simply. He would be a good-looking man, she decided, if he could only get rid of that harried air which fluttered like a pirate’s flag at the masthead of remorse.

“Then why did you come out here?”

“Merely to be alone,” she answered.

“I’ve tried to leave you that way.”

“It’s different,” she claimed, “out here. It’s like getting outside a cell.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said.

She did not answer him at first. She merely turned and studied him, for a moment or two. She was thinking how different all living might be, in surroundings like theirs, with a man and a woman who didn’t hate each other. She wondered how much of their earlier life and training, in those valleys of forgetfulness, would be remembered.

“But if I did get away at last,” she suggested, “couldn’t you trust me to keep your secret?”

His face hardened. “I prefer having you here with me,” he said.

“Which is flattering,” she agreed, “but not terribly comfortable.”

“We’ll go back now,” was all he said. He said it quietly enough, but it was, she knew, a command.

On the way back to the cabin, however, she preceded him instead of following squawlike at his heels. When he helped her over a blow-down, she observed, his frown was an unnecessarily ferocious one.

“I’m not dangerous,” she quietly assured him, smiling at the quickness with which he had dropped her hand.

“Perhaps I am,” he said with one of his unpredictable flashes of anger. And her face promptly sobered.

Like all killers, she felt, he had and must have his essential background of brutality. Yet she wondered, as she watched him once more going about his meager camp duties, why she should nurse a vague feeling of pity for him. No man brooding over a guilty secret, she knew, could be entirely happy. He was afraid of the future, just as he was afraid of his past. He had only the present. And his efforts to be satisfied with the passing moment seemed merely a mask on the face of desperation. He had a conscience. And men with consciences could never make good killers.

But the thing that most impressed her was a teasing and continuing sense of his remoteness, of his friendlessness. When he went solemnly off for his periodic supply of fish, that afternoon, leaving her alone at the cabin, she realized that she had done little to make life easier for him or for herself. And in that she was obviously wrong. The most sensible line of procedure, under the circumstances, was to swallow her pill, make the best of a bad bargain. Her predicament was, in a way, like imprisonment. But nothing was to be gained by quarreling with her jailer. And much was to be gained, each passing day, by living in peace with her surroundings.

It even occurred to her there was something that she had overlooked. Back in her old world, she remembered, she had not been entirely without the power to make herself appealing to men. And nothing was to be lost, after all, in keeping her captor from too openly despising her.

So she surprised Bronson, the next morning, by helping with the breakfast dishes and putting the cabin to rights. Then she surprised him still more by asking if she might borrow his shaving-mirror.

“I’m sorry it’s so small,” he said as he handed it to her.

“It’s quite big enough,” she answered as she carried the metal-framed looking-glass out to the open. There she sat down in the sunlight and lost herself in a study of her own face.

“This is simply terrible,” she said in a slow and quiet-toned dismay.

To Bronson, as he watched her frowning over her own reflection, she seemed more feminine than ever before, more feminine and mysterious. She lost her aura of boyishness and became perplexingly enfolded in the draperies of womanhood.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Everything,” she averred, still bent over her mirror. “I’m a sight.”

“You look pretty good to me,” he protested, without smiling. His gaze, at the moment, was resting on the half-shadowed roundness of her throat, where the sun-browned line of the neck melted and merged into the widening slope of the half-bared shoulder. And he was inwardly remarking that a woman’s neck, with its shadowed and tenderly curved hollow between chin-tip and shoulder-slope, could be a singularly beautiful thing.

“But this hair of mine is a disgrace,” she said with a spaniel-like shake of the head.

“I have scissors, if you want it trimmed,” he said after a moment of indecision.

“Who’d do it?” she demanded.

“I suppose I’d have to,” he solemnly acknowledged.

But the suggestion failed, for some reason, to meet with her approval. She was bending once more over the mirror.

“And what can I do without powder and cold-cream?” she demanded. “And without lip-stick?”

“I think you do very nicely,” he maintained.

Her glance at him was almost a commiserative one.

“You say that because you’d like to see me half Choctaw,” she asserted as she turned back to study the curving line where the tan ended just under her collar-bone. “But there’s a thing or two every woman needs, even in the wilderness.”

“And there’s a thing or two we’ll have to do without,” he amended, no longer looking at her. She turned about, arrested by some newer note in his voice. And all trace of resentment had vanished from her eyes.

“You know,” she said after a moment of silence, “you’re really being unexpectedly patient with me. And kind. You’ve done so much more than you should have done.”

“There’s not much I can do,” he protested, embarrassed by that unexpected note of intimacy.

“But I’d like to be a better campmate,” she found the courage to avow.

And when, with heightened color, he somewhat stumblingly acknowledged that that might make it easier for them both, a small but fortifying sense of power crept through the woman with the quietly smiling eyes. She could afford, she realized, to be frank with him. They were safe in their remoteness from each other. She even remembered how, earlier that summer, she had sat in her waiting car, at a railroad crossing, and gaily waved to an engine-driver as he thundered past. She could do that without danger, knowing that he was intent on grim errands of his own. They could come together for a moment, because they were such worlds apart. Remembering his remoteness, she could be light-heartedly intimate. Being inaccessible, she could toss him a kiss and go on her way. But ten minutes later when a garage-idler had essayed to eye her with a close and estimative stare, she had proved a lady entirely sheathed in ice.

So a new though restricted and slightly constrained companionship developed between Lynn and her captor. He would go on, she remembered, to some grim end of his own. He was alone, in that fear-haunted world of his. Yet he had never, apparently, grown inured to solitude. She realized that fact by the relaxed look on his face whenever she returned to the cabin after one of her temporary absences. But he permitted, day by day, a gradual lengthening of her leash. He even took her to Lake Ambigo, in the canoe, and showed her where blue herons waded and where musky-smelling water-lilies might be gathered. If, when they picked late-ripening wood-berries together on rocky hillsides well beyond the river, he saw to it that she never wandered unduly from her base, he tried to excuse that watchfulness with the claim that a tenderfoot could so easily get lost in such territory. But always, she felt, he was in some way on guard.

The truth of that came home to her when, one still and opaline morning, she made her way out to the river cascade where she took her daily shower. Exhilarated by the pelt of the amber-green water against her tingling body, she ventured farther out along the smooth-worn gneiss-ridge, where the mid-stream spill thundered more boisterously over its broken causeway and a moving rainbow arched above the mist-cloud as she went.

But the force of that mid-stream torrent was a trifle stronger than she had expected. It both dazed and stunned her. It even left her uncertain of her footing. She poised and teetered, for one uncertain moment, on the wet and slippery rocks. Then, before she could recover herself, that curving curtain of amber-green streaked with white buffeted her from her feet.

It swept and tumbled her into the lower basin at the foot of the waterfall.

She screamed as she went down.

She screamed sharply and involuntarily, for the second time, as she found herself tossed helpless into the slow-eddying whirlpool.

Bronson heard that cry, and a moment later was at the riverside, where he caught sight of a white tangle of limbs circling slowly about the eddy.

He plunged, fully clad as he was, into the water, and brought the stunned white body ashore.

He left her lying on a slope of sun-warmed sand while he ran to the cabin for brandy and a blanket. He wrapped her in the blanket and, still shaken and out of breath, tried to make her drink a little of the brandy.

But she refused it, preferring to lie silent in the warming sun. He sat beside her, constrained and equally silent, until he observed that her eyes were open and that she was studying him with a small frown of perplexity.

“You ought to get those wet clothes off,” she quietly suggested.

His face, at the sound of that reassuring message, cleared a little.

“Are you all right?” he questioned.

“Of course,” she answered with stabilizing casualness. “But I wish you’d get some dry clothes on.”

He refused to change, however, until he had brought her hot coffee, which she meekly and dutifully drank.

“Hadn’t I better carry you back to the cabin?” he suggested.

The remoteness of his voice brought the ghost of a smile playing about her lips.

“No,” she answered as she swathed the blanket more closely about her. “I can manage quite nicely alone.”

She remained, for the rest of the day, oddly quiescent and preoccupied. But, shaken as she seemed, she declined to follow Bronson’s suggestion and rest in her wall-bunk. At dusk, in fact, they dined solemnly together, as though no untoward event had ruffled the even course of their existence.

Lynn’s rescue from the river, uncommented on as it remained, seemed to mark a Great Divide in her relation with Bronson. For the second time, she had every reason to assume, he had saved her from death. And that knowledge left her a trifle more ready to accept the armistice which had been suggested by her enemy.

She even fell to questioning the extent to which he remained her enemy. And she found consolation in the fact that she was able, however casually, to lighten that woodland fugitive’s loneliness. It added to her peace of mind to discover, day by day, that they could talk more naturally and easily together. She even ventured on a determined but belated campaign to come into a better understanding of that incongruous captor of hers.

Yet there were limits, she soon learned, that still had to be respected. If her preoccupied companion so far forgot himself, now and then, as to laugh at some of the things she said, it was often a perfunctory laugh. But his was the hand that fed her, and his the roof that sheltered her. And she owed him something. She felt, when she found herself able to amuse him, that she was repaying a little of her debt.

Yet it beguiled her into telling more about her past life than she at first intended. Bronson listened closely, she observed, to any casual information she might drop about the world she had left behind her. And some of his guesses as to her background were surprisingly accurate.

“You don’t, I find, entirely belong to Park Avenue,” he ventured one morning as they trekked cabinward carrying two rogans of wild honey with them.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because you’re too hard-muscled,” he explained, remembering how she had taken her part in felling the hollow tree that housed their honey. “You’ve plainly lived a great deal in the open.”

“We’ve a home,” she acknowledged, “near Mountain Lakes. That’s in the Piccattinny hills not far from Morristown.”

“And one of several?” he suggested.

“Yes; we seem to wander around a great deal.”

He appraised the brown-shouldered figure on the narrow trail in front of him.

“And ride and swim and play golf and tennis and even have a try at polo?”

“Of course,” she acknowledged.

He strode behind her for a minute or two of silence.

“And you live with a sufficiently autocratic father who,—well, who finds you rather a handful?”

“Why with a father?”

He waited a moment before speaking.

“I know you’re not a married woman,” he finally asserted.

She did not look back at him.

“Why do you say that?” she asked, her voice defensively remote.

“I simply know it. And I’m glad of it. But I’ve been wondering why you wear that inappropriately ugly ring.”

He failed to see her nebulous smile as she glanced down at the ridiculous-looking diamond and sapphires.

“That,” she replied, “seems to be the token and symbol of my captivity.”

“Oh, no, it’s not,” he said with unexpected vehemence. “You’re not the sort that surrenders to captivity.”

“Haven’t I done it with you?” she parried.

“Not by a long shot,” he retorted as they entered the clearing.

And she wondered at the abruptness with which he turned into the cabin to put soda and soap on his bee-stings.

Yet Bronson, she began to suspect, stood a little closer to her lost world than he was willing to admit. For he so far forgot himself as to announce, one day as she sat in the canoe-bow while he paddled her along the shadow-dappled pools of the river, that she had a profile remarkably like Katherine Cornell’s.

“And that,” he indolently added, “is the loveliest profile in the world.”

Yet the matter ended there, for as they rounded a cedar-stippled point they came face to face with a bull-moose, knee-deep in the water. And, in the excitement of watching that lordly monster mount the bank and crash off through the forest-growth, Katherine Cornell was forgotten.

It was two days later, when they sat in the prolonging dusk beside a birch-wood fire, watching the evening light change from opal to amethyst along the loon-haunted surface of Lake Ambigo, that Bronson once more stumbled out of his reserve.

“Why is it the smell of wood-smoke,” asked the indolent-eyed Lynn as she gazed into the birch-fire, “always stirs something ancestral in us?”

Bronson studied the woman who sat studying the fire. And she, he remembered, had much the same power as wood-smoke.

“I suppose,” he finally answered, “it’s because the pagan still pretty well predominates in us. And also because we happen to be over-mechanized.”

“But you’ve escaped that,” she reminded him.

“Only temporarily,” he retorted.

“Then you’re going back, some day?”

She could see the familiar shutter come down over his face.

“We were talking about being over-mechanized,” he said by all too obvious way of escape. “And in that connection, did you ever try to picture a happy family sitting about a steam radiator?”

She nodded understanding.

“Inside us there’s always a ghost, apparently, calling for older and simpler ways of doing things,” said Lynn as she leaned back on her folded camp-blanket.

“Yes,” agreed Bronson. “Take that row of horse-carriages you New Yorkers keep for hire in the Plaza.”

That speech brought a frown to an otherwise placid brow.

“You seem to know New York rather well,” she suggested.

“One reads about such things,” he parried.

“Of course,” she acknowledged, remembering that any allusion to his past was a source of discomfort to him.

When an unwelcome change in the weather brought two days of driving rain and Lynn grew palpably tired of reading and tired of the cramped quarters of the cabin, Bronson surprised her by fashioning a checker-board from a plaque of fir-wood rubbed smooth with sandstone, carving checker-men out of red cedar and staining half of them black with ink from his treetop retreat.

He almost forgot the cloud that hung over him, she felt, when they played together, with the kettle on the camp-stove singing companionably behind them. And although he played incomparably better than she did, he was guilty, she observed, of an occasional blunder in his moves, to the end that the game might not prove a too one-sided one. She found something quietly reassuring in that premeditated surrender of strength on his part. It held, she knew, a promise for the future. For he had, in the final issue, some unquestionable strain of gentleness in his make-up. He could be exceptionally kind, on the whole, for a killer. But always in the background, of course, lurked a shadow and a threat that could never be entirely forgotten.

The thing that continued to perplex her, however, was an accruing sense of completion in a situation so manifestly incomplete. She no longer worried about Loren or speculated as to whether or not his searching-parties were still scouring the woods for her. He seemed to belong to another world, a remote and phantasmal world where urban cliff-dwellers lived in towers of stone and steel and motor-cars purred along asphalted avenues and iron-grilled doors sheltered one from the street-tumult and a finger-tip on a bell-button brought prompt and silent service. It was a world of upholstery and warmth, where things came on a silver tray and one never carried water in from a woodland spring, a world where one bathed in a polished sarcophagus of softly tinted marble instead of balancing on a cascade-worn gneiss-ridge while one’s body was pelted into a tingle by a twenty-foot waterfall. But there was a glow in that rough-and-tumble way of beginning one’s day. And about this newer world, Spartan in its simplicity, was an unexpected sense of peace, the peace of shadowy woodland and sun-washed hills by day, of starlit silence and cool air by night. Serenity,—that, she felt, was the word for it, the serenity of the North, where life and death seemed equally remote, where one waited for nothing, where one wanted so little, drowsily satisfied with the final issues of sun and air and hunger and sleep.

She could not, however, share in her warder’s enthusiasm for fishing. Bronson always seemed more at peace with his own soul, she noticed, when he was trolling for bass along the limpid water of Lake Ambigo or casting for trout along some tempting series of splay-pools. But his absorption in such things seemed beyond her understanding. Bronson, when she told him this, proclaimed it was due to the fact that she had never yet learned the game. And he decided to teach her.

He was not, however, quite satisfied with home waters for that first lesson.

He put up a midday lunch and assembled tackle and led his quiet-eyed pupil along the north shore of Lake Ambigo and on through a belt of heavier timber where the shadowed silence made Lynn think of a never-ending cathedral-nave. Then, emerging on more open country, they followed for two or three rough miles a twisted stream made amber-brown by cedar-roots. If she wondered why her guide should follow this particular course, which they were so frequently compelled to cross and recross, she said nothing about it. But Bronson, obviously, was determined to keep her feet dry. For on three different occasions he found it necessary to carry her, in silence, from one bank to the other.

He was, she once more discovered, very strong. She also discovered that it was not altogether unpleasant to feel those sinewed brown arms about her. This might have disturbed her, had she not been able to fortify herself with the recollection that there was a permanent and palpable barrier, as keen as a naked sword-blade, between them.

They trudged on, through cedar and spruce and jack-pine, past rapids and shallows, until they crossed a second sprawling laurentide and came to a second and more turbulent stream. They followed this stream until it broadened and deepened into a broken chain of pools fringed with clumps of alder. There, in a more open and meadow-like terrain, they rested and ate their lunch and watched an eagle soaring high in the arching azure that so imperceptibly paled as it approached the serrated line of the horizon.

Lynn, narcotized with the balsam-scented air and open sunlight and the drone of rapids, lazily watched Bronson as he jointed a rod for her, and, since it was high noon, looped on the line two small and somber flies. He dropped them, experimentally, on the dark pool-surface beyond a screening thicket. He seemed to drop them carelessly and casually. But that movement was followed, an instant later, by a flash and splash and a quick wrist-twist from the angler. Then came an arrowing rush across the pool, an arching of the rod and a series of resisted small stampedes, a mysterious taking in and letting out of line, and the final slipping of a landing-net under a glistening bright body mottled with red and orange.

Bronson smiled as the girl stood leaning over the lithe and lustrous body with the lilac shadings along its vermiculated back.

“Now,” he suggested, “I’ll show you how to cast. But before I begin I’m going to bind up that upper right arm of yours with this belt of mine.”

“Why?” asked Lynn as she submitted to those strange ministrations.

“To keep you from using anything more than your wrist and forearm,” explained her mentor as he passed her the flexible three-ounce Leonard. “Now hold the hand-piece of the rod firmly in your fingers, with your thumb extended along the upper part of the rod and your forefinger on the line here so you can control it by pressure. Try a short line first, until you gradually whip it out by a series of casts. But that won’t do. In your back-cast you must allow time for your line to straighten out before you give your rod its forward sweep. It’s all done by wrist-motion, remember, and it mustn’t be jerky.”

“I’m terribly awkward,” she said with a little laugh of excitement as he patiently unknotted the tangled line.

“No, you’re very quick,” he maintained. “You’re just a little too quick, in fact. Try being a trifle slower and more deliberate. The fish, you see, are not in the air. They’re in the water. So keep your flies on the surface for a moment. And keep them moving in imitation of an insect’s struggles. Now try it again.”

She tried it once more, but without marked success. So he coached her again, suggesting, as he cautioned her into quietness, that nothing was to be gained by saber-drill. He even placed his bigger brown hand over the girl’s, the better to school her in the different movements and the timing of the several periods in her casts.

Then they moved on to a fresh pool, keeping well screened behind an alder-clump over which she could comfortably cast. And Lynn’s heart beat fast as she swung the flies lightly out over the dimpled pool-surface.

“By jove, you’ve got him!” cried Bronson as the girl thrilled with the electric shock of a flash and strike and then a quick rush across the dark-watered pool. “Reel in your line a little. And watch your fish. Throw your tip forward and keep him under the bend of the rod. If you give him slack he’ll shake the hook out of his jaw. Now work your way up into the open there, away from these bushes. Watch him—watch him—he’s going to make a rush for that brush across the pool. Give him the butt of the rod, to turn him.”

She turned him, apparently, but nothing perceptible happened.

“What’s he doing now?” she asked in her perplexity.

“Twitch him a little. He’s gone into deep water to sulk. But watch him for his leap.”

He leaped, not once, but many times, with Lynn doing her breathless best to keep the withy rod tight, reeling in when she could and surrendering line when she was compelled to. She waited, with her jaw set, tense and tingling, but determined on success. She lured him back to deep water and kept her line tight and shortened his rushes and wearied his sinewy rainbow body and finally broke his spirit. And when a landing-net was slipped under him and he was lifted out on the bank, lustrous and curved and iridescent, Lynn realized for the first time in her life that there was something in fishing.

She fished with varying success, until her creel was nearly filled and her arm was tired. And she insisted, that evening back at the cabin, on cleaning and cooking her catch with her own hands.

“For once in my life,” she proclaimed as they lingered over their supper, “I’m not altogether a parasite. And that’s the sweetest fish I ever ate.”

Bronson, as he lighted a cigarette, studied her with a meditative eye.

“So there’s something in it, after all?” he quietly suggested.

“In what?” she asked.

“In going back to nature,” he explained, “and not bothering about the rest of the world.”

That speech both sobered her and brought a pucker of thought to her brow.

“But we’re rather late in starting,” she contended. “We have to think about the rest of the world.” She bathed him in her lucid and level glance. “Did you ever happen to eat an aquarium brook-trout that’s been brought up on beef-liver?”

“No,” acknowledged Bronson, “but I’ve dined on tamed wild-duck that’s been fed on field-corn.”

“Well, that’s about the same thing,” announced the earnest-eyed woman confronting him. “For, as you know, neither of them is worth much. They’re not wild. The tang of the open isn’t there. And everything falls flat.”

“The inference being,” suggested her companion, “that any wildness we might attempt would be a great deal of a sham?”

Her face, at that, clouded and cleared again.

“I can’t answer for you, of course,” she acknowledged. “But I naturally know my own background. And being what I am, I’d never prove much of a primitive. I’d never altogether forget the past.”

“Have you ever tried?” he asked.

“Frankly, I haven’t,” she confessed. “And even though I did, I’m afraid I’d be terribly like a mallard that’s dropped down among the barnyard fowl.”

He nodded and smiled, understandingly.

“You mean you’d hear a honk in the sky,” he conjectured, “and at the call of the old life you’d be off with a clap of the wings?”

She seemed about to assent to that. But instead, she rose from her chair and crossed to the cabin door, where she stood looking out over the evening forest.

“You know, all this is rather dangerous,” she said with unexpected frankness.

“Why should it be?” he demanded.

She laughed lightly yet defensively as she turned and faced him.

“Because I’m beginning to find out,” she quietly admitted, “that I rather like you.”

He rose from his chair and stood rigid a moment, his morose eyes on her face.

“It’s saying things like that,” he somewhat quaveringly proclaimed, “makes it dangerous.”

She stood, faintly smiling and silent, as though waiting for him to say more. But the moment passed. And a new composure came into her eyes. She turned back to the door, staring out over the serrated black line of the spruce-hills against the paling gold of the sunset.

“I wonder when the honk will come?” she asked with a relieving effort at levity.

But he signally failed to share in her lightness.

“The sooner the better,” he said with altogether unnecessary savagery.

She wheeled about and smilingly inspected him.

“Then you don’t like me?” she demanded.

His face, as he stared back at her, was as ferocious as one might expect from a killer.

“Too damned much!” he cried. And having delivered himself of that proclamation, he strode out of the cabin slamming the door as he went.

Lynn told herself that she could never entirely forget the past. But there were moods and moments, she found, when her background faded into daguerreotypic dimness. There were times when she felt oddly paganized, when her older world of law and order and traffic-lights seemed very far away and her newer life seemed to see only the unblinking green lamps of impulse and desire.

Yet that newer life was far from Lydian. An ever-sharpening edge to the morning air warned her that summer was merging into autumn. And when late one evening, she beheld Bronson trudging back to camp with a bear-carcass over his shoulder, she realized how close they stood to the primitive. He reminded her, as he moved across the last hilltop bar of light, shaggy and bloodstained under his burden, of a Bronze-Age hunter returning to his cave. To his cave, she later amended, and also to his cavemate. For that bear-meat would be needed for food, he explained, just as the fur that covered it would have to be scraped and cured and softened, for the possible making of cold-weather clothing.

She did what she could, in the sordid work of tanning hides and smoking meats. But she was far from adept at such tasks. One morning, in fact, her knife slipped, as she was gutting fish for their noonday meal, and left her staring rather helplessly down at a lateral gash in her leg, just above the knee. It was Bronson, however, who stood the more frightened of the two. He finally applied iodine to the wound and bound it up, neatly enough, with sterilized gauze from his first-aid kit. But his face, before that operation was completed, had lost a great deal of its color. And even his hands were none too steady, Lynn observed, as he wound and knotted the cotton bands about a column of ivory whiteness overlaid with a tint of gold. And then she remembered. The sight of blood, she recalled, would naturally be a shock to him. For there must have been an occasion, she told herself, when he had seen altogether too much of it for his own happiness.

“I’m sorry this is upsetting you,” she said when he had finished.

“Why should it?” he demanded, promptly on the defensive.

“Because it must bring back unpleasant memories,” she ventured, spurred on by the altogether unnecessary savagery of his voice.

And Bronson, apparently in silent rebuke, absented himself from the camp for the remainder of the day. The next morning, in fact, he betrayed every evidence of having passed a none too comfortable night. He expressed no visible relief at the discovery that she walked with only a slight limp. Even when he sat down to breakfast he impressed his companion as singularly preoccupied and self-estranged. His earlier veil of remoteness hung about him more opaque than ever.

“Why are you treating me like this?” Lynn demanded. And the quaver in her voice was a womanly one.

“I’ll answer that question,” he said with challenging bluntness, “when you answer one of mine. Why did you stay here?”

That question both startled and perplexed her. Even her color heightened a little as she looked up at him.

“Didn’t you make me?” she asked.

“Not altogether,” he answered. “That was rot, of course, about chaining you up like a bear-cub.”

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “I was more afraid of you than you imagined.”

“Are you still afraid of me?” he questioned.

She met his gaze without flinching.

“No, I don’t think I am,” she said after a moment of thought. “At least, not in the way I once was.”

“I’m rather glad of that,” he acknowledged. But it took an effort, apparently, for him to meet her gaze.

“Why?” she asked. His hesitation did not escape her.

“I didn’t want you to go back hating me.”

She wondered at the valedictory note in that, just as she wondered why, at times, she had almost forgotten she was a prisoner. Yet the thing that perplexed her most, when she came to think of it, was her slowly deepening mental lethargy, her wayward contentment with the passing moment. Life, with no yesterdays and no to-morrows, had begun to impress her as a bewilderingly simple affair.

“I don’t hate you,” she told him. “I feel sorry for you.” And he smiled somewhat drearily at both her retort and the quietness with which it was uttered. She could see him draw a deeper breath as his gaze went out over the pinelands.

“You’ll never know,” he finally observed, still avoiding her eyes, “what your being here has meant to me. I was a pretty lonely man.”

“I know.”

But he contended, with a head-shake, that she didn’t. “I was more desperately lonely than you imagine.”

“But among other things,” she reminded him, “you saved my life. And, in certain ways, you’ve been unexpectedly kind.”

“Not as kind as you think,” he said almost harshly.

A moment of silence, uncomfortable to them both, prolonged itself between them.

“I hope,” she finally said as she stared out over the blue-misted hills, “that they never find you.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Your enemies,” she answered. Then, after a moment’s pause, she added: “And also my friends.”

His frown deepened over that.

“One shouldn’t have friends,” he proclaimed. “It’s the people closest to us, after all, who make life hardest for us.”

“But that’s the price of friendship,” she argued. “For where you don’t care, where your feelings aren’t involved, you naturally don’t suffer,—or do the opposite.”

He stood up and walked to the cabin corner and back again. Then he turned to her, the last vestige of happiness drained from his face.

“That’s the trouble in this case,” he said, startling her with the grimness of his voice. “I’m going to suffer,—and I guess I deserve it.”

She obviously misread his meaning, for the pity in her eyes perceptibly deepened.

“What can you gain by going back to that?” she asked. And she began to understand why it had seemed important, day by day, that she should add a little to his meager store of happiness.

“I can’t gain anything,” he retorted. “The whole thing’s hopeless. But I’m terribly afraid of your hate.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’m much worse,” he cried, “than you imagine.”

“Does it matter much?” she asked, her own smile a rather dreary one.

“I’m afraid it does,” he answered. “But I’m finally seeing the light.”

“What does that mean?” she demanded, startled by the intensity of his tone. He could look at her, by this time, with an unwavering gaze.

“I’m going to take you back to civilization,” he proclaimed. “And the sooner we start back the better.”

She sat silent and a little stunned, searching his face with her cool but questioning glance.

“Isn’t that dangerous for you?” she finally asked.

“No more dangerous than for you to stay on here,” he answered.

And that answer plunged her into still another period of thought. She had the feeling of a shipwrecked sailor who had climbed on a raft and found the raft going to pieces in mid-ocean. There had been a recurring though delusive coloring of relief in knowing she was saved and safe. But her deliverance had come at a cost. For there was humiliation, she found, in the discovery that her savior now wanted to get rid of her.

“How long have I been here?” she abruptly inquired of her companion.

“What difference does it make?” countered Bronson, perplexed by the sudden panic in her eyes. But it made, she remembered, a great deal of difference. The wires were down, completely down, between her new and her old world. She had refused to look back and had been afraid to look forward. She had clothed herself in a makeshift contentment. Yet never once, she realized, had she entirely forgotten. And the chain of the past, she saw, could still clank phantasmally at her heels.

“They’ll think I’m dead,” she said in little more than a whisper.

“That’s what I’m hoping,” retorted Bronson, “they’re thinking of me.”

“Our cases, I think, are different,” she was heartless enough to remind him. Yet she was reminding herself, at the same moment, how more than once she had said to herself, in the stillness of their woodland cabin: “That’s a murderer, sitting there across the table from me.” She had even found herself speculating, more and more, on the nature of that unknown crime. She had busied herself in dramatizing conditions and situations, trying always to impose on the fabricated scene some extenuating factor, some excuse to take the horror out of the thing.

“I hope you’ll remember that,” Bronson said with unexpected bitterness, “when you get back.”

From that thought, however, she could wring small satisfaction.

“But have you ever stopped to wonder,” she asked, “how I’m going to explain all this when I do get back?”

“What is there to explain?”

“That we’ve lived here together, for nearly four weeks.”

The light in his habitually hard eyes softened a little.

“Not quite together,” he solemnly informed her. “And it was five weeks yesterday.”

A frightened look came into her face. She was more thoroughly lost than she had imagined. And her captor hadn’t been quite fair with her. He wasn’t, even now, being quite fair with her.

“Have you kept me that long?” she found herself asking. She made an effort to speak lightly. But there was a quaver in her voice.

“It was too long,” he morosely admitted.

She found the courage to face him again.

“Do you mind waiting,” she quietly inquired, “for a day or two?”

That request seemed to surprise him.

“What good will it do?” he asked.

“I’d like time to think out a thing or two,” she told him. “And I wonder if I could be alone to-day?”

“Of course,” he said, unconscious of her small and valorous smile.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, with her back to him.

“I think I’d like to go fishing,” she announced, with her voice once more under control. “I’d like to go out along that stream where we caught the trout, and stay there until I get my house in order again.”

“I understand,” he said. But she knew, as he laid out her tackle and helped her make ready, that he didn’t understand. He suggested, however, that she take his holstered hunting-knife and food and matches in the grub-bag which he showed her how to hang from her belt. He even suggested, after warning her to be careful about marking a trail, that it would be better if she took his lighter repeating rifle along with her.

“Would you trust me that far?” she asked as she watched him loading the firearm.

“I think so,” he said with paraded nonchalance. But he refused to meet her eye. He even declined to say good-by to her. He busied himself, as she moved through sun and shadow down the winding trail, in hanging out the camp-blankets and putting the cabin to rights.

Lynn, dipping deeper and deeper into the solitude she craved, found it no easy matter to put her house in order. She was too oppressed by a sense of roots about to be torn up to find the thought of fly-fishing appealing to her. She craved something more aggressive and tiring. There was consolation, she found, in going on from hilltop to hilltop, in immersing herself in the whispering quietness of the pinelands. There was even a sense of adventure in coming to a more open valley that was new to her, though she stopped, from time to time, to line up her landmarks and leave a tree-blaze at some questionable turning.

She went on, following a devious game-trail that grew wider and wider as she went. She went on until her legs grew tired and a pang or two of hunger told her it was time to rest and eat. So she came to a stop beside a small lake of emerald-green, where a lichen-covered rock sloped down to a deep-watered pool in which, as she leaned over the shore-ledge, she could see her own reflected face. It impressed her as a friendly spot. And it seemed still friendlier after she had made a fire, a large and quite unnecessary fire which sent a column of blue-gray wood-smoke ascending into the echoless clear air. She lay back, after eating, indolently watching that dwindling gray column. She had, she remembered, thought out none of her problems. But she felt more at peace with the world. She was even tempted, when she heard the splash of a fish in the pool below her, to joint her rod and essay a tentative cast or two along the limpid dark lake-water.

A strike came, at her third cast, but her line slackened in the excitement and she lost her fish. She was casting again, more deliberately than before, when her half-averted glance became conscious of a shadow moving toward her along the sunlit game-trail. She knew, a moment later, that the moving shadow was a man.

She assumed, at first, that it was Bronson. And in her resentment at the thought of being followed she decided to ignore him. So even when she knew him to be within six paces of her she swung her rod-point back and then forward again and seemed intent on the fly that flickered and dragged for a moment along the emerald-green lake-surface. But her thoughts failed to remain long on her fly and its movements. For the quietness was broken by a quick and authoritative voice, a voice that was strange to her.

“What are you doing here?” demanded the man behind her.

Her body thrilled and chilled at the unexpectedness of it all. But she kept herself sufficiently under control to give him merely a cursory side-glance over her shoulder.

“I’m fishing,” she said with all the casualness she could command. And she once more swung her barbed line out over the lake-water.

But, quick as her glance had been, she had made several discoveries. One was that she had been overtaken there by an entire stranger. Another was that the stranger was tall and sinewy and carried both a rifle and a bandolier of cartridges. In his polished belt-holster, she also noticed, he carried a large and efficient-looking revolver. And on his face, as well, he carried a frown of bewilderment as he studied the slender-shouldered figure with the flexible three-ounce Leonard rod. He stepped forward, still frowning, the better to confront her.

“How’d you get here?” he questioned, losing a little of his asperity as he glanced into the hazel-flecked eyes.

“I walked,” answered the languidly smiling Lynn. But the brain behind the arrogantly indifferent face was as busy as a beaver. “We’ve a camp over there,” she added with a none too definite arm-movement toward the East.

“I’ve no report of campers in this territory,” said the man with the rifle. “Where’s your license?”

That gave her a bad moment as she slowly reeled in her line.

“It’s over at our camp,” she smilingly explained.

“Can you take me to that camp?”

She knew another moment of hesitation, even worse than the one that had preceded it.

“I think so,” she conceded, “if you’ll wait until I finish my fishing.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give much time to waiting.”

“Why not?” asked Lynn. Then she inspected him with an apparently indifferent eye. “Just who and what are you?” she demanded.

“I’m a provincial officer,” was the curt-voiced reply. “And I’m after a killer who’s hiding away in these woods.”

She could feel her heart stop and then pound on again.

“A what?” she cried, trying to make her gasp seem like one of incredulity.

“There’s a murderer under cover somewhere in this district,” said the man of law. “And it’s no place for you or any other woman to be wandering about alone.”

She knew the murderer who was in hiding there. And she knew that that murderer must in some way be shielded.

“I’ve always managed to take care of myself in these woods,” she informed her questioner.

He assessed her equipment, not overlooking the repeating rifle on the root-slope beside her.

“I imagine you would,” he said with his first trace of a smile. “But looking after campers is part of my job out here. And I’ll feel better when I know you’re back with your husband.”

It would be best, she decided, to let the “husband” pass. “But I wanted to have my swim,” she proclaimed, ready to snatch at any excuse for solitude. “And I like to swim without clothes on.”

“Oh, no,” was his quick retort. “You can’t do that. You simply can’t take chances with a killer loose in these hills.”

She did her best to remain casual.

“Tell me about him,” she suggested as she bent to unjoint her rod.

“There’s nothing to tell,” was the slightly impatient reply, “except that he’s murdered a man and wouldn’t hesitate to do the same with you or me, once he thought he was cornered.” The bronzed brow darkened with determination. “And we’re going to corner him.”

“Where did he come from?” questioned the thoughtful-eyed woman.

“The important point,” countered the other, “is where he’s heading for. He’s——”

The speaker abruptly broke off, his eyes narrowing as he turned and stared up the long valley-slope. Lynn had no knowledge of what he might have seen or heard along those remoter hill shadows. But his suspicions were plainly aroused. She perceived the hardness that came into his face and the hunter-like stiffening of the sinewed frame into immobility as he watched. There were enemies abroad, and it was his duty to discern them.

“What is it?” she asked as little thrills of apprehension eddied along her spine.

“I don’t know yet,” retorted the ranger, still watching, as intent as a pointer with game up-wind, “but I’m going to find out.”

He moved to a higher point along the rock-slope, staring once more into the sun-bathed distance where the remoter pine-ridges were beginning to take on the faint purplish tinge of afternoon.

“Wait until I get back,” he commanded as he circled out to the game-trail that lost itself between alder-thicket and spruce-clump. “And keep under cover,” he called curtly back over his shoulder as he went.

Lynn stood watching him until he was out of sight. Then with a gasp of determination touched with desperation she caught up her belongings and lost herself in the underbrush. She edged guardedly away, moving in a line directly opposite to that taken by her enemy, crouching low as she went. She pushed through brush and bramble until she was out of the valley and over a shielding crest stippled with jack-pines. Then, making sure of her direction as she searched for landmarks, she ran openly and steadily.

She ran as much as she could along the bald rock of the hogbacks, remembering that on a path such as that she would leave no telltale footprints behind her. She avoided the game-trail that she had followed on her outward journey, resting only when she came to cover heavy enough to keep her completely hidden. But always, as she established contact with her trout-stream and picked up an unmistakable landmark or two, she worked her frantic way closer and closer to Lake Ambigo and to Bronson’s cabin and Bronson himself. It was not easy going. But she wasted no regrets on its difficulties. That vigilant-eyed man-hunter, she remembered, would be a trained tracker. And the more trouble he had in following her the better. For her one thought now was to protect a fugitive who impressed her at the moment as standing singularly unprotected.

She realized, for the first time, what it meant to keep under cover, to skulk from shadow to shadow. She began to understand, after glancing back the twentieth time to make sure she was not being followed, what it meant to be a fugitive. She and Bronson, she saw, were finally birds of a feather. And it came home to her how little joy there was in being harried by fear, in being unable to walk openly in the kindly light of the sun.

There had been, she concluded, too much silence and stealth between them. They must, in their new extremity, come to some understanding of candor. And her campmate, if he could not be saved from his enemies, must at least be saved from himself.

The late afternoon was thinning into evening by the time Lynn skirted Lake Ambigo and picked her way through the shadowy pines toward the cabin so artfully hidden between its sheltering hill-shoulders. She was glad to see familiar landmarks once more about her. She felt less haunted and homeless as she crept down the valley-slope and saw the shack in the clearing and the drifting plume of smoke above its chimney-end.

A wave of relief went through her tired body as she caught sight of Bronson moving about in the thinning light. But she stopped short as she watched him, disturbed by the sense of desolation hanging over that quietly moving figure. He was, she could see, solemnly engaged in scaling and gutting black bass for their coming supper. She noticed how he washed the white bodies in a bucket of spring water and placed them side by side on a wooden slab and then washed his hands and dried them on a piece of sun-bleached bagging. He seemed, as he stood there in the twilight, very much alone, with a vague and undetermined aura of pathos about him. He made her think of a lone-fire Indian, too stoically resigned to life in a land that was both hostile and inhospitable, too preoccupied with the paltry tasks of finding food for his body and wood for his fire.

He did not look up, however, until she stood quite close to him. And even then she waited in vain for some friendly word of welcome. He merely swept her face with a quick and searching glance.

“You’ve decided on something,” he quietly proclaimed.

“Somebody else has decided it for me,” she corrected.

“What does that mean?” he asked as he took up the fish prepared for the skillet.

“It means you’re in danger,” she said, doing her best to speak as quietly as her companion.

He stopped at the cabin door and looked back at her. “From what?” he asked with his valorously indifferent smile.

She turned and stared out over the darkling pinelands, wondering why they should take on an aspect of the sinister.

“There’s a man out there,” she said a little breathlessly, “a provincial officer. He saw me and talked to me. And he’s looking for you.”

Bronson, as he stood frowning in front of her, refused to be infected by any shadow of her anxiety.

“Why didn’t you go with him?” he asked. “Why did you come back here?”

“I had to warn you,” she explained. “He was within six or seven miles of this camp. And there’s danger, even now, that he may be following me.”

“Did you want him to?”

“No, I did everything I could to cover my trail. But he knows, now, this territory isn’t as empty as he thought it was. And you’ll never be safe here, after that.”

Bronson turned away, to put his fish on the fire. Then he came back to her. He was still perplexingly passive in both speech and movement.

“Why didn’t you want him to find me?” he asked.

“I knew what it would mean,” she answered, a new trouble creeping into her eyes as she watched him put fresh wood on the fire and turn to light the lamp on the carefully laid supper-table. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

He failed, until she crossed to the door and glanced out, to understand her question. Then he merely smiled his cryptic smile.

“In this trackless country we’re more the needle in the haystack than you imagine. They might comb these hills for a year without getting a trace of us. They failed to find you, remember.”

Yes, they had failed to find her. But that seemed of less importance, at the moment, than the fact that they would eventually find this lithe and lean-shouldered man so casually frying fish in a camp skillet.

“What can you do?” she demanded.

“That all depends on you,” was his altogether unexpected answer. She felt sorry for him, much as she admired his courage. They were closing in on him, at the very time he was refusing to look that fact in the face. “But let’s eat our supper,” he said with his ever-engaging smile, “before they carry us away in chains.”

Little was said during that belated meal. But fire and food played their part in bringing back to Lynn, for all her weariness, a shadowy sense of well-being. She was, she remembered, neither entirely homeless nor alone in the world. It might not last for long, but she still had walls to shelter her and a campmate to console her. She was glad, she told herself as she studied Bronson’s thoughtfully silent face in the lamplight, that she had added a little to his happiness. It puzzled her that she should crave to add still more.

“You won’t be able to take me out, now, by way of Laird’s Post,” she finally reminded him.

“Why not?” he asked, without looking up.

“It would be too much like giving yourself up.”

He lifted his eyes to hers, at that, and studied her for a moment of silence.

“From now on,” he quietly proclaimed, “it’s you I’ve got to think of.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s you I’ve got to give up.”

But he wasn’t thinking of her, she told herself, otherwise across the abyss that separated them he might have caught and understood some glimmer of her secret feeling. For she was wondering, at the moment, if it were possible for them to go on together, to slip away, side by side, into the unknown North, and remain there with no yesterdays and no to-morrow. There were ways, she contended, whereby forlornly desperate castaways such as they were could be fittingly and finally linked together. They might somewhere in the wilderness come across a wandering missionary who could legally make them man and wife. Or they might devise a ceremony of their own, as the earlier red-skinned dwellers in that forest had once done. But it would have to be a beautiful ceremony, something to remember without shrinking and shame, something to fortify them in their loneliness and purify them in the wayward hungers of the body.

“You can’t stay here,” she found herself telling him.

“It’s you who can’t stay here,” he promptly amended. And the wistfulness of his voice sent a wave of pity, and something more than pity, through her.

“Why not?” she asked, in little more than a whisper.

He turned slowly about, a slowly deepening look of hunger in his eye. Then, with his body subsiding as hope subsided in his heart, he shook his head slowly from side to side.

“That would be too much to expect,” he rather quaveringly announced.

“But if I said I was willing?” she suggested, wondering why he was no longer looking at her.

Still again he shook his head. “I’ve already made mess enough of your life,” he protested.

And she was able to smile at his grimness.

“What difference does it make, now?” she asked. He turned, she noticed, and studied the firelight in the open stove-front.

“You’d hate me,” he averred. “And that’s the one thing I’m trying to avoid.”

“And suppose I told you,” she ventured, “that you’d been unexpectedly successful in those efforts?”

He rose from his chair, wheeling sharply about on her. He even took a step toward her. But, a moment later, he had pulled himself up short.

“Do you mean that?” he demanded. “No matter what I am?”

“Does that matter much, out here?”

A look of recklessness came into his face. “Does anything matter?”

But she declined to accede to that.

“It matters, of course, whether we are at peace with our own souls or not,” she began. “If we do things contrary to our code we——”

But that was as far as she got. For she suddenly remembered that she was talking to a murderer, to a man who, after all, could never be at peace with his own soul. He must have seen the shadow that crossed her face and tried to grope for its meaning. For his own face, as he sat facing her, suddenly hardened.

“There’s something,” he proclaimed, “that I’ve got to tell you.”

“I’m listening,” she said, depressed by the discovery that moods and moments, like flowers, could wilt between one’s fingers. For already some ghostly promise of glamour had slipped away between the moss-chinked walls about her.

“You think it was a murder brought me here,” he said, doing his best to speak quietly.

“Wasn’t it?” she asked, a sudden absurd apprehension showing in her eyes.

“Not in the way you imagine,” he retorted.

She searched his face for a moment, sitting very still.

“You mean you’re not in hiding here?” she asked, her voice almost querulous with a note of incredulity.

“Not as the killer you think I am,” he slowly acknowledged.

“But I saw those clippings,” she cried. “And I thought——”

She stopped, perplexed, staring at him.

“And I was cowardly enough to let you keep on thinking.”

She looked frowningly about the cabin and then turned back to him. It surprised him to see the slow pallor that had crept up under her woodland tan.

“Then what are you?” she questioned.

He sat silent, watching the steam that went lazily up from the camp-stove kettle.

“It’s not going to be easy to explain,” he finally said. “But I want you to be patient with me, until I make it as clear as I can.”

“I’m being patient,” she asserted, the quick movement of her hands oddly at variance with the words of her mouth. And it was a very beautiful mouth, where the softly curved line of the lips, fore-shortened in the lamplight, melted into the more imperial and imperious line of the chin.

“Did you ever feel,” asked the unhappy Bronson, “that life was crowding too close, that it wasn’t giving you room enough?”

“Room enough for what?” she questioned, discouragingly grim of brow.

“Oh, for living and breathing in,” he answered with a little gesture of inadequacy. “Well, I was like that. I——”

“Wait,” she commanded, a mounting horror in the amber-flecked eyes. “Are you trying to tell me you’re not a murderer?”

“All I murdered was the truth,” he compelled himself to acknowledge. And he saw, as she sat before him, that she looked very lovely, lovely and remote and inaccessible, in that dignifying new pallor of brow and cheek and neck.

“So you lied to me?” she challenged with a small but unmistakable catch of the breath.

“Obliquely,” he agreed, “but still rather abominably.”

She drew herself together, like a swimmer leaning over cold water.

“I still don’t understand,” she protested, fighting against a feeling of betrayals within betrayals. “I thought you’d come here because you’d killed somebody.”

“I know you did,” he said, puzzled by the ever-growing horror on her face. “And I let you keep on thinking it. But I’m not a killer.”

“Then what are you?” she repeated, a look dangerously like loathing in her eyes.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, not without a note of acid, “but there’s no blood on these hands and no price on my head.”

It seemed strange to the stunned woman in the chair that a mood so warm and recent could recede so quickly. It was not that the fires of sacrifice had been swept from the altar; it was the altar itself that had crumbled.

“So you lied to me?” she repeated. The roots of her suspicion, obviously, had struck deeper than he had dreamed. She was finding it hard to accept him as anything but an outlaw.

“You gave me the opening, and I played up to it. And that’s what I’ve got to explain to you.”

“But you’re not explaining,” she cried with her first showing of anger.

“I started to,” he quietly reminded her, “when I asked that question about life crowding you too closely. For that’s what life had been doing to me. I’d a book to finish and I wanted six or seven months of solitude.”

“Then you’re an author?” she said with an unconcealed note of contempt. Bronson was able to smile behind his wince.

“Coming from where you did,” he continued, “you ought to have known something about me. I used to think, in fact, I was more or less of a public character.”

“I’ve always preferred knowing authors through their books,” she informed him.

“Then I’m sorry this adventure’s been so contrary to your taste,” he was human enough to retort, nettled as he was by that repeated note of contempt.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t,” she was human enough to admit. “But that doesn’t count now.”

“I don’t think you understand,” he went on with plainly coerced patience. “I was supposed to be successful, but I was really at the end of my rope. Spiritually, I mean, if you care to call it that. For months I’d been needing half-a-year away from bells and wheels and excitement and insomnia. But I hadn’t the courage to make the break. I used to wander about the city at night, when I couldn’t sleep, pretending I was seeing life in the raw and thinking I was gathering material. I’d an underworld friend called Lefty Phelan, and Lefty was trying to teach me how to meet racketeers and gangsters and beer-runners on their own ground. So I turned into a sort of night-crawler. I was rather tired, you see, of the other sort of life. I wanted roughness, the same as you did when you came up here to camp. But I never realized how unhealthy and absurd it all was until one night in a speak-easy I sat in on a gang murder. It was a double murder, in fact, and it took place within ten feet of me. I wasn’t in any way involved, remember. That double killing didn’t touch me. But the whole thing had happened right under my nose. I knew too much.”

“So you ran away?” was the scornfully quiet suggestion.

“No, it wasn’t exactly flight,” said Bronson after a moment’s thought. “I wouldn’t say I was afraid. It was more a sort of helplessness. We naturally think of the police, at such a time. But the police couldn’t help me, any more than I could help them. My friend Lefty wouldn’t even let me go to them. All I’d get, he contended, would be a machine-gun broadside from a disappearing gang-car. And if I waited around, he argued, I’d most surely be taken for a ride. I’d seen too much. I could tell too much. And those gunmen don’t mince matters, at a time like that. I said I wasn’t afraid of them. And I wasn’t, in a way. But it meant extra worry and uncertainty, when I had about all I could carry, along that line. It seemed like the final straw. And I found the courage, in the end, to head for something more peaceful.”

“The courage?” she echoed with a faint lip-curl of scorn.

“You can call it what you like,” he retorted. “But, after all, I’d my hide to save. And my book to write. And I tried to tell myself it could be a sort of final test of manhood, to go up into the wilderness and with my own hands keep myself alive there for half-a-year. I’d camped and hunted and fished, of course, in these northern woods, but never this far up. I thought, at first, it was going to be the finest thing that ever happened to me. But I didn’t know what it meant, living quite alone, month after month. I didn’t realize how you could hunger, after the first few weeks, for a little human companionship. But I had to stick it out. And when everything was at its worst, you happened along.”

He noticed as he stopped speaking, that she was no longer looking at him. Her eyes, oddly abstracted, were peering through the narrow cabin window where the black fringe of the pinelands stood out against the moonlit northern sky.

“It’s all rather horrible,” she said, making no effort to conceal a repeated small body-movement of disgust.

“That I’m not a murderer?” he questioned, disturbed by the horror that had accrued in her unfocused eyes.

“No, what you’ve done to me,” she cried, dismaying him by the depth of her own dismay.

“But I’m trying to be honest with you now,” he protested, “no matter how it hurts.”

Her swerving glance was both quick and contemptuous. “When it’s too late,” she reminded him. Her tightly clenched brown fist, beating against her knee, impressed him as almost childlike. “Why couldn’t you have told me?” she demanded. “Why couldn’t you have been honest, from the first?”

“Because I wanted to keep you here,” he said almost fiercely.

“Was that fair?” she exacted, the earlier grimness still in her voice.

“I’m afraid I didn’t stop to think about that. I’d been alone so long that I got rather Indianized. The Indian, when he’s hungry, doesn’t think much about game laws. And I was almost as much at the end of my rope, when we came together, as you were. Only, of course, in a different way. It was like a man dying of thirst, and trampling down a flowerbed to get to spring water.”

“When any woman would have done,” she interrupted in a voice barbed with scorn.

“No,” he retorted, untouched by that barb. “Not any woman. You see, you were so incredibly different. You seemed, that morning, almost like an answer to prayer.”

“I didn’t imagine I was that important,” she said, the protective touch of acid still in her voice.

“But you were,” he told her, unexpectedly humble. “And all I remembered was that I wanted you here tremendously.”

She studied him, with no relenting light in her eye.

“Why did you want me here?”

That question, which should have been so easy to answer, seemed to give him difficulty.

“Why does any man want any woman?” was his inadequate counter-question.

“That’s simple, I suppose, if we go back to the Stone Age. But marriage by capture seems to have gone out, of late.”

He was beginning to harvest, from the bitterness still in her voice, some final inkling of how he had hurt her. Yet her red and rounded under lip, for some unknown reason, was trembling a little.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a disappointment to you,” was the most he could say. And she sat facing him, with unseeing eyes, for a full minute of silence.

“Can’t you see,” she finally cried, “how much worse all this makes it?”

“Worse for whom?”

“For both of us.”

His laugh, for all its grimness, was a defensive one.

“And now you hate me because I’m not a murderer?”

“It’s not that, exactly,” she said with a dishearteningly judicial quietness. “And it’s not easy to explain. But perhaps I can make it clearer by telling you about one night in the English Channel between Cherbourg and Southampton. Our liner struck a trawler, in the fog, and three dozen of us tumbled out of our berths and crowded to the rail. We gathered there, wondering if we were going to sink or not. We were there, in a half-naked crowd, but nobody worried about what clothes we had on or off. It wasn’t until we’d been told we were quite safe, until we knew there was no actual danger, that we remembered about not being dressed.”

Bronson’s repeated laugh was as grim as before.

“If that means a promise of peril can justify a passing indiscretion,” he proclaimed, “I can still go out and kill somebody.”

But his embittered humor brought no answering smile from her.

“Haven’t you killed about enough?” she tremulously inquired.

“I suppose so,” answered the other, with a head-droop of hopelessness. Then he looked up, torn by the silence that was prolonging itself between them. “But what can I do?” he asked.

“You can take me back, I suppose,” she said with quarantining listlessness. She stirred a little, staring down at her worn clothing, so grotesquely soiled and tattered and patched. And the body within that clothing felt equally abused and bruised. “It’s a long time to be lost,” she observed, more to herself than to her companion.

“I suppose you’d like to go soon?” ventured the grim-lipped Bronson.

“The sooner the better,” she answered, her voice already crowned with a note of remoteness.

“You’ll have to go out,” he reminded her, responsively impassive, “by way of Twisted River and Laird’s Post. But I can’t, of course, take you all the way.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Simply for your own protection. When you go back, of course, you’ll have to go as a Robinson Crusoe of the woods, and one who never found a Friday.”

A faint coloring of scorn was once more on her face.

“You mean I must say I’ve been living alone here?”

“You’ll have to say you found a trapper’s shack here, an empty shack with food and fuel enough to keep you alive. Then when you grew stronger, or when your sprained ankle got better, you struck south and kept on going until you stumbled on the Post. That,” concluded Bronson with a smoldering sort of quietness, “will at least keep your name untarnished.”

Her lucid and level gaze did not add to his happiness.

“Aren’t you a little late in thinking about my untarnished name?” she quietly inquired.

“I’m merely trying to make amends,” he answered in an unexpectedly humble voice. He crossed to the door, looked out and turned back to her. “There’s another way, of course, if you prefer it. If you want to get off at once you can probably go back with that provincial officer you talked with to-day. He’ll be close enough, in the morning, to hear a series of signal-shots. And once he’s answered them and picked you up the rest ought to be easy.”

She sat, with a deepening frown, thinking that over.

“But I told him I was a camper,” she finally admitted, “with a husband just over the hill.”

“Why?”

“I thought I was helping you.”

“Then you’ll have to lie again,” proclaimed Bronson, “to help yourself.”

She nodded understandingly.

“I suppose that’s best,” she conceded, her abstracted gaze wandering about the cabin that no longer seemed like a shelter.

“We haven’t much choice,” averred Bronson. He said it curtly enough. But, having said it, he turned away, ostensibly to gather up the camp dishes that littered the lamplit table. For he still had a reticent man’s horror of parading emotions which were no longer entirely under control.

“And what will you do?” he heard her asking. Her voice, in some way, sounded like a voice that was coming over a thousand miles of wire.

“I don’t know yet,” was the slightly retarded reply. “But I don’t see much use in going back now.”

“You mustn’t always be cowardly,” she was cruel enough to remind him.

He looked at her with his grimly restricted smile.

“Perhaps it’s lucky for you I am a coward,” he abruptly announced.

“Perhaps,” she agreed. She succeeded in making her own smile an indifferent one. Then she looked once more about the cabin. “But you don’t belong here. You can’t,” she contended, “slack off like this for ever.”

He plainly was not asking for her pity.

“This isn’t altogether slacking off,” he retorted. “I’ve worked harder, out here, than I ever did before. In a place like this, in fact, it’s only by work that you survive.”

“But only your body survives.”

“Isn’t that enough?” he demanded as he reached for his steaming tea-kettle.

She had no answer for his question apparently. She sat silent for a moment or two. Then, from force of habit, she reached for her towel and stood beside him, drying the dishes as he washed them, and placing them on their allotted shelves. She wondered why she should stand depressed by a feeling of frustration. It was the last time in all her life, she remembered, that they would go through those homely rites together. She watched her quietly moving companion as he hung up the dish-towel and banked the fire in the stove. She watched him as he moved the lamp nearer the head of her wall-bunk and placed the customary three matches beside the lamp-base, in case she should need a light in the night. He was looking about for his coat when he stood suddenly arrested, in an attitude of listening.

“What is it?” she quickly inquired.

He crossed to the door, smiling a little at her movement of alarm.

He motioned for her to join him at the open door.

“Listen,” he said, staring out into the darkness that was not altogether darkness.

Lynn, through the forest stillness, could hear a strange sound. It was too sonorous for a bellow, and too cavernous and full-bodied for a wail. But it was a cry of want. It was a call for companionship. It was both a challenge and a pleading, prolonged and primordial.

“What is it?” she repeated as that far-off sound rose and died away again. It stirred her mysteriously. It both fired and frightened her. It was something, she felt, that must be answered, and answered without equivocation.

“It’s a moose-call,” explained Bronson, without looking at her. “You see, it’s getting round to the mating season.”

Lynn stood looking out into the night as he crossed to the wall-bunk and took up his coat. She even stepped out through the door, as the call was repeated, moving forward with the abstraction of a sleep-walker. Then she came to a stop, with her hands slightly upraised, peering through the darkness. It beat against her like a wave. It made her think of distant drums, commandingly rumbling.

It was the silence, she told herself, the forest silence all about her, that did strange things to both her hearing and her heart. It seemed to catch her up, as she still again heard that prolonging call through the starlight, and fling her back to the Age of Bronze. It both dazed and humbled her. It made her afraid of herself. But it left her still more afraid of something tragically incomplete.

Bronson brushed by her, as she stood there. He passed perilously close to her, on his way to the ladder that led to his sleeping shack. She turned and reached out a hand to him as he went. But he failed to see it. Then she whispered his name. He had been cruel to her, but she no longer hated him. There was nothing, now, that mattered much. They were in a world of their own, a world of emptiness and uncertainty. And she was suddenly and abandonedly afraid of its desolation.

She moved slowly over to the rough ladder and clung to it with unsteady hands.

“Don’t go,” she called, low-voiced through the darkness.

But he was still being cruel to her. For her cry was swallowed up in the resolute slam of the shack door above her.

Lynn shivered as she leaned against the ladder. He had not, she began to suspect, even heard her. And the forest silence hung heavy about her as she turned, at last, and went desolately back to the empty cabin.

Lynn wondered, the next morning, why her early river plunge failed to bring its usual reaction of well-being. In the air, windless and crystal-clear, was a tang of frost, and the birch-leaves, she noticed, were beginning to take on their first tinting of yellow. The river water, with needlings of ice along the shore-shallows where the sun had failed to reach, was so cold on her body that it made her gasp. But the glow that it brought to her, after a vigorous toweling on her sheltered rock-shelf, was of the flesh alone. It was foolish, of course, to be swayed by such moods. But there was sadness, she told herself, in doing things for the last time.

Both she and Bronson were strangely silent as they ate breakfast together. The thoughtful-eyed woman realized, as her campmate set so methodically about preparing her pack, that they now faced each other across a new and more imminent barrier. She was even glad when he explained to her that it would be best for him to cross Lake Ambigo and climb to the top of Twisted Rock, the highest peak in the neighborhood, before firing his signal-shots. Their sound would carry better, he claimed, from that bald and lofty eminence. And if he failed to get the expected response, he would build a signal-fire there that could be seen for miles around.

Lynn, alone in the cabin, sat perplexed by a mist of unreality already settling over her strange weeks of exile. She was no longer a captive. In a few hours, she remembered, she would be a free woman. But she was less happy, she found, than she had expected to be. And her unhappiness, she surmised, was based on adjustments which would not be easy to make. For involved in her restoration to a world of logic and order and idleness—and the idleness must not be forgotten—were difficulties which could not be lightly overlooked. Her explanations, she told herself, might be credible; but they would never be creditable. Even that stern-eyed provincial officer who was being summoned back to her would not be easy to confront. Her story to him, and to the peering group she pictured at the rail-head, would have to be a hand-picked one. She was, from that time forward, a woman with a secret.

She sighed as she got up from her creaking cedar chair and crossed to the door. There she stared about the cabin yard, the trodden little clearing where the tree-shadows were shortening and a few leaves of gold fluttered down in the quiet air from the grove of white birches at the hill-bottom. It looked meager and empty and meaningless. She felt sorry for any cabin dweller who would stay on there, until the last of the yellow leaves had fallen, until the snows of winter drifted about those lonely hills, until——

But all thought on the subject abruptly ended. For clear as the beat of a jungle-drum, through the quiet air, came the slow and measured reports of Bronson’s signal-shots. There were six of them, carefully timed and solemn, as mournful, to her listening ears, as the tolling of a bell. It was her call to a lost world. It was, in a way, her farewell cry to the wilderness.

She waited, scarcely breathing, wondering, in case an answering signal came back, if she could catch the sound of it in that low and sheltered valley. She waited until the accumulating conviction that the shots were to remain unanswered brought a frown to her abstracted brow. Then, faint and far-away, she caught the small sound of a series of concussions. They came thinned by distance, remote but unmistakable. They came to her oddly mysterious and oddly significant, like the languid throb of a distant tom-tom. It was, she remembered, her summons back to life.

She sighed still again as she crossed to her cedar chair and sat down in it. Everything she did that morning, she told herself, was being done for the last time. She looked at the sheet-iron camp-stove slightly reddened with rust, at the portable sheet-iron oven beside it, the oven in which she had learned under Bronson’s instructions to bake her three brown-crusted loaves of bread. Then she looked down at her hands, sun-browned, so plainly calloused and scratched and marred. When she went back, she remembered, she would be like those hands, war-scarred and stained, a little the worse for wear, a reversal of all she had once been. She had, she knew, lost something. And it would take time and care, infinite care, to build up a faith in herself so abruptly taken away from her. After this, she was afraid, she would always be strangely and secretly alone in the world.

Yet she wondered, as she looked musingly about the cabin, if it would, after all, make so much difference in her life. Time, in that respect, was more merciful than women imagined. And it was character, she tried to tell herself, that triumphed over circumstances. What had happened was merely a hiatus in the smooth and orderly flow of her days, a short and tumbling cascade that may have startled her as the descent of Dead Indian Rapids had startled her, but soon fading away into a murmur and a memory. For at heart, she contended, she had remained unchanged.

But had she? That question, as she stared at the narrow wall-bunk that had harbored her night after night, held her arrested. Had she? she repeated as her abstracted eyes wandered on to the rabbit-skin leggings which Bronson had fashioned for her, and then on to the home-made checker-board beside the ax-hewn chest of red cedar.

Yet that question remained unanswered. For her eyes, as she sat there, suddenly steadied and hardened. She leaned forward, her lips slightly parted. Then her breathing quickened and deepened. For clearly, across the valley, she heard the repeated sound of a call.

It was a lusty and full-throated call, the shout of a man challenging the incredible. It was not Bronson’s voice. It came, in fact, not from the direction of Lake Ambigo, but from the higher ground to the west. And in it was a timbre, a note of power and authority, not unfamiliar to her ears.

Yet she sat without moving. She waited, in a listless inertia of suspense, until the heavy steps sounded in the dooryard and the still heavier shadow blocked the doorway itself.

She knew, even before she looked up, that it was Loren. He was there, ruddy and thick-shouldered, with a rifle in his hand and a belt-ax and grub-bag on his hip, his once immaculate hunting-togs woefully abraded and stained. He was there, staring down at her, large and adequate, yet groping rather helplessly for the adequate word.

“You’re alive!” he gasped. His hands, she noticed, were shaking a little.

“Of course,” she said, with a quietness that troubled him for a moment. But bewilderment was lost in the tumult of stronger feelings.

“Good God!” he cried not ungratefully. And he repeated that cry, rather foolishly, as he sat down on the wall-bunk and mopped his face. Then he looked frowningly about the cabin. “Tell me how it happened.”

“How what happened?” she asked, retaining her outward air of calmness.

“That you’re here,” he said, with his first actual show of impatience. For her lack of gratitude was plainly beginning to puzzle him.

“It’s very simple,” she told him. “I got lost.”

“Lost?” he echoed, his thoughts not entirely on her words. He was staring at a pair of shoe-packs, unmistakably masculine, behind the camp-stove.

“Yes, I got lost in the woods,” Lynn went on, without moving, “and I couldn’t find my way back to camp. I couldn’t find my way back to anything. I—I was almost ready to give up, when I found this cabin.”

“Whose is it?” asked Loren. He looked up at her, puzzled by the prolonging silence.

“It belongs to a man named Bronson,” she quietly affirmed.

“You mean he’s here?” cried her rescuer.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s here.”

If Loren held himself in, he did it with difficulty.

“Who fired those signal-shots?”

“He did.”

“Why?”

Her smile was a revealingly embittered one.

“He wanted somebody to take me off his hands,” she explained. “He was signaling for help.”

Loren’s frown remained a troubled one.

“Who is this man?” he demanded.

The question, she felt, was a foolish one. It was foolish because it covered so much and yet so little.

“He’s rather an interesting person,” she answered, daringly yet determinedly casual. And her rescuer rose to it as a pool-trout rises to a fly.

“You mean you’ve been living with him?” gasped Loren. “For over a month?”

“I had to,” she told him. If she resented the keenness with which he searched her face, she remained outwardly unmoved by it.

“Why do you say that?” he questioned, obviously determined to be patient with her.

“Because he kept me here,” she answered. It was no time, now, to hold back the truth. But the truth, she realized, would not be easy to understand.

“Kept you here?” repeated Loren, hard-eyed with indignation. “Do you mean against your will?”

That question seemed to require some thought.

“Not entirely,” she finally forced herself to say. And, as she had expected, she could see the ebb of color from the other’s broad face.

“This is a nice situation,” he proclaimed, once more on his feet.

“Not if you understand it,” she quietly corrected. But her tone produced no answering quietness in her companion.

“I’d rather have found you dead,” he cried out across the waves of self-pity that flowed between them. She too caught some inkling of that widening separation, and a wave of pity for this man who had once meant so much to her softened her half-averted face. But equally hers, she remembered, was the tragedy of being uncomprehended.

“Aren’t you being unnecessarily theatrical?” she asked in a voice that was still studiedly emotionless. But the other seemed not to hear her. His color deepened again as he stood inspecting her with a heavily startled eye. She seemed, in her frayed and altered clothes, like a stranger to him. And the change, he felt, was more than a surface one.

“You don’t seem to have given much thought,” he charged, “to all the worry and trouble you’ve caused.”

“I’m sorry about that,” she admitted. “But why are you still worrying?”

He stood once more studying the cabin, point by point, until his gaze finally rested on the wall-bunk.

“Because of where it all leaves you,” he asserted, his voice unsteady again.

“Don’t be small-souled,” she said with unexpected sharpness.

“Small-souled?” he cried. “I merely want to be respectable. And I expect the woman I marry to be the same.”

Her smile was like heat-lightning along a darkened sky-line. “You apparently haven’t much faith in me?” she suggested, perilously impassive.

“It’s not a matter of faith,” he contended. “It’s a case of cold facts, facts we’ve all got to face. And I’m wondering what your story’s going to be when you get back.”

“Back where?”

“Back to your own people,” said the stalwart-figured man with the magazine rifle in his hand.

“I hadn’t thought much about that,” she half-wearily admitted.

“Nor about me,” he charged, his lips slightly tremulous as he watched her slowly withdraw the ring from her finger and place it on the table-top between them. Then she looked up at him.

“This time,” she said, “you’ll have to keep it.”

“Why?” he asked.

“After this,” she explained with a newer note of steel in her voice, “I can’t of course expect you to marry me.” She looked down at the narrow band of white about her finger, where the ring had been. “And I can’t marry you.”

That held him silent a moment. His eyes went from her face to the faceted diamond that flung a twinkle of light up at him. But he let the ring lie where it was.

“Then what are you going to do?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.” And the unexpected note of humility in her voice dismayed him, even as her earlier casualness had angered him. He pushed a chair back, to make room for his strides.

“I want to see this man Bronson,” he proclaimed. “I’ve still something to say about all this.”

“What good,” she inquired, “will talking do?”

“It’ll be more than talk,” cried the other, shaken by that implication of finalities. “He got you into this. He did this. And he’s going to answer to me.” Then he added, exasperated by the unexpected smile on her half-averted face: “If he hasn’t already slunk off!”

“He’s not the slinking kind.”

Loren stood arrested, stabbed by the knowledge that the face confronting him in the modified light of the cabin, the face so altered and yet so familiar, was a hauntingly beautiful one.

“Even though I do swallow this,” he challenged, “how about Bennie?”

“Where is Bennie?” she asked, less remote.

“He’s combing the Elk River district with a forest patrol plane, trying to pick up some trace of you. He’s the only one who’s agreed with me that you might be still alive. And he came out, when I sent for him, and worked like a soldier.”

“Could we get in touch with him?”

Loren’s laugh was curt and harsh.

“I don’t think we’d better. He’s your brother, remember. And ten to one he’d put a bullet through this man Bronson.” That thought, apparently, was fuel to the dwindling fire of his anger, for the newcomer’s face suddenly hardened and darkened as he shouted: “And if Bennie doesn’t, I’ll do it myself.”

Lynn made no response to that, for the simple reason that before her lips could frame the intended words a quick step sounded on the trodden soil of the clearing and a shadow darkened the doorway. Bronson stood before them, his rifle in his hand.

His quick but casual glance traveled from the newcomer to the quiet-eyed woman. Then it went back to the thick-shouldered man with the scowl of hate on his face. Then it returned, composed but perplexed, to the cameo-like profile that stood out against the dusk of the low-ceilinged room.

“Who’s this man?” challenged the cabin owner.

But neither of the other two, oddly enough, seemed ready to answer that question.

“What does he want?” Bronson demanded, still curtly impatient.

“I don’t think he quite knows,” answered the woman with the enigmatic smile. “But apparently it isn’t me.”

The caustic note in her voice perplexed Bronson for a moment. But only for a moment. He moved toward her, frowningly thoughtful. Before he reached her side, however, he stopped short and turned to face the other man.

“What is it you want?” he asked. And the tone of that question, unconcerned and estranging, was prompt enough in bringing the second man’s anger up to the boiling point.

“I want you,” cried Loren. His voice was thick and his puckered under lip was purple and tremulous. His hands, slightly unsteady, leveled the rifle at the other’s breast. He was wheezing a little. “Back up against that wall.”

“What for?” asked the still frowning Bronson, without moving.

“To keep a bullet from going through your yellow carcass,” was the prompt and quavering response.

“Don’t be an ass,” said Bronson, disconcertingly cool-eyed. “You ought to know that things like this aren’t settled with shotguns.”

“Yes, they have been,” contended the other, his rifle still leveled and his face still dark with anger. “Did you keep this woman a prisoner here?”

“I did,” answered Bronson, the last of the perplexity fading from his eyes as his troubled glance went from one face to the other.

“Why?” barked the man confronting him.

“I prefer making my explanations to her,” was the dangerously cool-noted reply.

“The assumption being,” cried Loren, “that your claim on her comes first?”

“I have no claim on her,” said Bronson. “Have you?”

Loren must have grown into a realization that there was something foolish about his leveled rifle-barrel, for, truculent as his frown remained, he slowly lowered the firearm.

“That’s for her to decide,” he said with a head-nod toward the silent Lynn, “when she wakens up to what you’ve done to her.”

“Or what you’re doing to her,” cried Bronson with his first showing of anger.

“I’m trying to protect her,” proclaimed Loren. “And that seems to be more than you’ve done. I’m not thinking about myself. I’m thinking about her. Usually, after this sort of thing, a man in your shoes stands face to face with a shotgun wedding,—or a shotgun without the wedding.”

Bronson laughed. He laughed in spite of the paraded rifle and the voice so husky with indignation.

“You mean that since you can not cure the dishonor you would at least stop the scandal?” suggested the abductor of innocence.

“I mean,” cried Loren, blinking four-square and menacing at his enemy, “that you’re responsible for this mess, and you’re going to be held responsible.”

Bronson was no longer smiling.

“I just quoted a sentence,” he explained, “from The Sire de Maletroit’s Door. And I’m wondering if you happen to know your Stevenson.”

“Stevenson,” barked the other. “What’s Stevenson got to do with this?”

It was Lynn who answered that question. Her eyes shone luminous from a face pale with indignation as she rose to her feet before the two contentious figures.

“I’m not sure what this means,” she said with a listless sort of intentness. “But if you’re bargaining about me I decline to be cheapened by more of this talk.”

“But this thing has to be settled,” contended Loren. “And——”

“Not in this way,” cried the indignant-eyed woman. “And I refuse to be haggled over. It’s time, I think, for me to make my own decisions. And I know what I intend to do.”

Bronson, as he turned and studied her, failed to find something for which he had faintly hoped in her face.

“You’re right, of course,” he said with unexpected humility. He drew a deeper breath as he fell back a step or two. “What do you want me to do?”

Her level and lucid gaze, as she spoke, was on Loren.

“I want you to let me talk to this man alone,” was her quiet-toned reply. That seemed to surprise the owner of the cabin, for he stood an irresolute moment or two looking at the slightly triumphant Loren. Then he turned back, almost pleadingly, to the pale-faced woman. He waited, apparently, for her to say something. But she stood, silent and remote, waiting for him to go.

Bronson, without speaking, turned and walked out of the cabin. He slowly crossed the clearing and followed the narrow trail that wound through the grove of white birches where a few yellow leaves were sifting down on the windless air.

Loren, having watched him go, turned back to the taut-lipped Lynn.

“You’re coming with me, of course?” he suggested.

Her laugh was brief and bitter.

“That would be equally scandalous,” she reminded him.

“What are you going to do?” asked Loren, disturbed by a new air of fortitude about her.

“I’m going back without your help,” she answered. “And without further imperiling your good name.”

He looked stolidly at her, untouched by the intended barb.

“How can you do that?” he questioned.

“There happens to be a guide waiting to take me out.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s a provincial officer, and he’s just over the hills there, within rifle-shot of this cabin.”

Loren noticed for the first time the tightly rolled double blanket and the well corded shoulder-pack.

“But you haven’t yet told me,” he contended, “how you’re going to face your own people.”

“Having faced you,” she answered with a mingling of pity and asperity, “I think I can face the rest of the world.”

“That’s not fair,” he cried, watching her as she thrust her short-handled belt-ax into its holster and shouldered the blanket-roll. “You’re not yourself, Lynn. And I refuse to accept any decisions you try to make at a time like this. I know how twisted things can get in this God-forsaken forest. You’re not even being fair with yourself. You’re not being fair to your family. And you’ll look at things in a different light, once you’re back in New York.”

She stood strangely Artemis-like and efficient and self-reliant, with her blanket-roll over her shoulder and her trail-equipment swinging from her leather-belted waist.

“I’m already looking at things in a different light,” she said with a fortitude that both shocked and perplexed him. “And I can’t even talk to you, I find, as I intended.”

He remained stubbornly immobile.

“I want to ask you one question.”

“What question?”

“Did that man——”

He saw the quickly uplifted glance and the dangerous light in her eye, as he spoke, and his courage deserted him.

“No,” she agreed, with the disheartening look of pity once more on her face. “It’s better not even said.”

He was cloudily conscious of the gulfs between them. But he moved determinedly to the doorway, blocking it with his thick-shouldered figure.

“Do you suppose I’m going to let you wander around this wilderness alone?” he challenged.

“You have no choice in the matter,” was her quiet retort. “And I’ve just told you I’ll not be alone.”

But that answer did not seem to satisfy him.

“Where will this man Bronson be?”

“I neither know nor care,” she said with unexpected spirit. “And I’ll trouble you to let me pass.”

He made no move, however, to do so.

“I’m not going to agree to this sort of idiocy,” he contended, “and I’m not going to——”

“Will you let me pass,” she commanded. Her eyes, as she spoke, were on his. And the steel-like hardness of her glance pushed slowly through his trivial showing of resolution. He stood silent a moment, and then stepped slowly aside.

“There’s one thing I want to say,” he began as she passed out into the revealing white sunlight that gave her belted and burdened figure a new firmness of line, making him think of a slender-bodied infantryman equipped for a battle-front.

“You’ve said all you need to,” she announced, without looking back at him.

He turned and watched her as she crossed the clearing. He called out to her, as she passed from the clearing into the narrow trail that wound through the close-clustering spruce-boles. But she disregarded that call. And when he looked again she was no longer in sight.

He stood irresolute for a moment or two. Then he stared frowningly about the cabin, studying it with an eye of disapproving bewilderment. His face lost its abstraction as his slowly wheeling glance fell on the ring that sparkled from the table-end. That, he remembered, was an issue about which there could be no argument.

He swallowed hard, in an effort to regain control of his feelings. Then, with a none too steady hand, he reached in his side-pocket for his pipe, which he slowly and thoughtfully filled. Having lighted it, he sank heavily into the creaking chair of cedar-boughs, staring morosely at the wall-bunk as he smoked.

He was still sitting there, in a mist of drifting blue, when Bronson strode into the cabin.

“Where’s Lynn?” was his quick demand.

“Do you call her that?” Loren challenged.

“Where’s Lynn?” repeated the newcomer, his narrowing eye on Loren as the latter lifted the repudiated ring from the table and stored it away in his pocket.

“She’s going back where she belongs,” announced the heavier bodied man, not without a note of triumph.

“What do you mean by that?”

Loren reached for a match and relighted his pipe.

“I mean that she’s gone to meet the provincial officer who’s taking her back to the world of white men. And she expressed a desire to go alone.”

Bronson stood, for a full moment, without moving. Then his face abruptly darkened.

“You thick-headed fool,” he cried in anger plainly beyond his control. “There’s a killer loose in these woods. And you’ve sat here and let her get lost in them.”

Loren looked at him through a slowly coiling cloud of smoke.

“You weren’t so thin-skinned about things,” he reminded his enemy, “the first time she got lost in them.”

But Bronson, instead of essaying an answer to that taunt, sprang across the cabin and threw open his storage chest, flinging what he needed from it out on the floor. Then he caught up a blanket from the wall-bunk and his rifle from the cabin corner.

“What are you going to do?” asked Loren, watching the other as he crammed food into a grub-bag and buckled on an abraded and all but empty cartridge-belt.

Bronson, in his haste, left that question unanswered. He rounded the table-end, gave one quick and comprehensive look about the cabin, and hurried out through the door.

“Where are you going?” the somewhat bewildered Loren called after him.

“I’m going to find Lynn,” answered Bronson, “if it’s not too late!”

Lynn’s resolution wavered a little as she worked her way determinedly up the long slope that ended in a mounded rock, like the hump on a dromedary’s back, and from that promontory studied the lonely dark ridges about her. She was glad to ease herself of pack and rifle and blanket-roll and rest, for a few minutes, on the gray rock bearded with juniper. She liked the fragrance of that aromatic shrub. She remembered, as she lay there, how Bennie had once said that the best thing about the North was the smell of its juniper-berries, because it made him think of a speak-easy.

But she remembered, too, that she had covered a good many miles of open trail and had failed, as yet, to establish contact with her provincial officer. And the afternoon, she could see, was slowly but surely wearing away. The sun was still high above the blue-misted fringe of the pinelands but the midday warmth had gone out of the air. Above her still arched a dome of deep sapphire that merged into a liquid cyan blue, and from a cyan blue melted into a dreamy turquoise. The small wind that came out of the North, crisp and cool, brought with it the commingling odors of sun-steeped moss and leaves and pine-cones. It was aromatic and invigorating. It brought with it a delusive sense of quietness and security.

It prompted Lynn to forget her earlier feeling of resentment at a double betrayal. She remembered only the sense of escape that had lightened each lengthening mile since she had left Loren Stratton staring after her from the doorway of Bronson’s cabin. She was alone, but she was no longer afraid of the wilderness. She had decided on the trail to take and had quietly followed it. But she would feel better, she knew, when she saw the blue-gray smoke of a camp-fire going up between the scattered treetops. She was not afraid of solitude. But the thought of night coming on, in those valleys of silence, did not add to her happiness.

She went on again, however, with a studied casualness. She was no longer, she remembered, an untried newcomer in those hills of desolation. The forest had done both its best and its worst to her. She was no longer afraid of it. It had hardened her, she told herself, hardened her in both body and spirit. She had, in a way, mastered the small devices by which a unit of life as small as herself could defy its immensity. It had humbled her, but at the same time it had made her more self-reliant. And the thought of solitude no longer terrified her. For in another day or two, she remembered, she would be heading back to a friendlier and more garrulous world.

She decided on a camp-site, when weariness overtook her, at the edge of a little emerald and amethyst lake where the fish were leaping in the evening light. There she built a wind-break, as she had seen Bronson do, and gathered wood and made a consolingly prodigal fire. She sat beside it, in the paling light, quietly eating her solitary meal. Then, having replenished her fire, she rolled up in her blanket, with her short-barreled rifle reassuringly close to her tired body, and lay watching the dwindling flames and the mounting colors of the Northern Lights that began to show along the sky-line. She saw how they spread and wavered, like two rainbows blown apart by the wind, into widening bands of violets and greens and reds. She saw them merge and turn to orange and gold and then back to green and crimson again, softly waving curtains of color that sharpened into striated lines of iridescence and dulled again into sweeping veils of violet. She fell asleep, thinly exalted. She was awakened, in the night, by the repeated scream of a lynx, not far from her dwindling camp-fire. She sat up, with a curdling of the blood, and reached for her rifle. But the night became still again. When she awakened, for the second time, she found the comfortable light of day all about her.

An hour later she was on her way again. She pushed on quietly and stoically, studiously picking her trail and avoiding the lower terrain where unfriendly muskegs might bar her path. She stopped, at every hilltop, and stared frowningly about for some relieving sign of life. When no sign of smoke rewarded her search, and no sound of life came to her straining ears, she tightened her belt and once more took up rifle and pack and forged on through poplar and jack-pine, through birch and spruce, along the lonely ridges that seemed to melt interminably into the pallid apple-green of the sky-line.

The monotony of that thinly wooded wilderness began to depress her. As she went on, mile by mile, she had to fight against a feeling of defeat. She refused to meditate on her remoteness from all companioning life. And when her spirits were lowest, she was startled by a faint drone of sound, a faint drone that rose and fell on the air and died away and returned a little stronger than before. It was too full-noted for the hum of an insect. And it grew louder, even as she listened.

“It’s an airplane,” she said aloud.

She ran, with a foolish quickening of the heart, to an open space between the scattered poplar-groves. Her knees were trembling as she stood on a little height-of-land, with one hand hooding her eyes while she searched the skies, point by point, until she discerned the floating black speck above the distant spruce-ridges. It grew bigger, even as she watched. It was heading toward her, the drone of sound increasing to a pulsing roar as it came.

She ran about in small circles, shouting and waving her arms as it swept overhead. It was a seaplane, flying reassuringly low over the pinelands. She could see the gondola, shaped like a fore-shortened canoe. She could see the wings, black against the quivering light, pale again as it banked and turned a little. She thought, as she continued to wave and shout, that she had been seen, that the helmeted figure in the cock-pit was about to swing back and soar over the little hilltop with its absurdly gesticulating figure.

But he merely changed his course a few points and flew on, furrowing the wooded silences with the diminished drumming of his propeller. And the drumming faded away to a drone, and the drone died down, and a floating black speck vanished over the saw-toothed fringe of the northern wilderness.

Lynn stood looking after it, with her hands clenched close to her side and hope burning slowly out of her body. They had ignored her. They had passed her by. They had come, with their promise of delivery, and had gone on again, leaving a new sense of desolation in their wake. Yet in a few hours, she remembered, they might have carried her back to her lost world, to a land of crowded and laughing towns threaded together by lines of steel.

Her lips quivered as she took up her short-barreled rifle and started down the long slope into a more heavily wooded valley. But she squared her shoulders, determinedly, and held her head high as she passed on through the mottled sunlight and shadow. She went on, studious-eyed, until she emerged from the clean-floored woodland and faced a tangle of bramble and underbrush. There, after lining up her landmarks, she stumbled across a winding game-trail which she followed across the valley and up into a broken plateau with a showing of poplar and birch. She hesitated, when she came to a fork in the narrow trail, wondering, as she glanced at the sun, whether to turn to the right or to the left. But she did neither. For she remembered, as she stood there, that she was both hungry and tired.

So with the utmost deliberation she selected a resting-place on a lichen-freckled bald-head at the edge of a birch-grove where the shed foliage made a carpet of pale gold at her feet. She opened her grub-bag and ate slowly and methodically. She was staring thoughtfully down at a fragment of bannock, slightly scorched and as dry and hard as saddle-leather, wondering why it was that toil and open air could make so crude a combination of flour and bacon fat sweet to the taste, when a shadow fell across the pale gold carpet of birch-leaves all about her.

Her first impulse was to reach for her rifle. But before she could do so, a long and ragged arm, quick as a snake in its movements, caught up the firearm that leaned against the rock beside her.

She looked up, at that, and studied the ragged figure confronting her. And her heart sank, for the second time that day.

She saw a lean and swarthy face, bearded almost up to the high cheek-bones, a scowling face with a sullen and sidelong glance.

“What’re you doin’ with this gun?” demanded the stranger. His head-movement, as he turned and looked down each branch of the forked trail, impressed her as oddly animal-like.

“Are you a game warden?” asked Lynn, doing her best to keep her voice under control. Appearances, she knew, were against him. Yet she wanted him to be a game warden, to be anything, in fact, but the thing that her quick-beating heart kept warning her he was.

His laugh, short and husky, held a note of careless contempt.

“Sure I’m a game warden,” he proclaimed. He stood assessing her equipment, his eyes hardening as they rested on the half-opened grub-bag. “How’d you get here?”

She rose to her feet, slowly, as the long arm reached out and took possession of her food supply.

“I came from a camp not far from Lake Ambigo,” she said as she stood studying the man in the ragged and sweat-stained clothing. His shoes, she noticed, were all but falling apart. And in those ever watchful eyes of his, she also noticed, dwelt a haggard look of desperation.

“What else’ve you got?” he was asking.

“Nothing that’s worth much,” she contended, shrinking back a little before his coldly roving eye.

But he reached out and took possession of her sheath-knife, testing its edge on the curve of his thumb. He smiled with a grim sort of satisfaction at the keenness of the blade, promptly pocketing it.

“You’re pretty well heeled, for a pickerel-fisher,” he observed as he appropriated her belt-ax and balanced it in his talon-like hand. “I’d call that a right hefty little tomahawk,” he added, before pushing it, handle down, inside the plaited rawhide about his waist.

Then he turned back to the grub-bag.

“Where’s your matches?” he demanded.

“I have none,” protested his captive.

“You should’ve known enough to carry matches,” he complained. And he consoled himself by taking a handful of dried beef from the grub-bag and munching it between his uneven teeth. “And now,” he proceeded, “we’ll figger out just where you were goin’.”

She hesitated, wondering how much she should tell him.

“Where you goin’?” he barked.

For the time being, she realized, she was helpless before his insolence.

“Down to Laird’s Post,” she acknowledged, “and then on to the nearest railway station.”

His laugh was as offensively curt as before.

“You’d never make it,” he affirmed.

“But I have friends in this territory,” she protested, fighting against a growing feeling of defenselessness.

“Then we’d better be movin’ on,” he said with a quick and scowling glance about the wooded hills.

“What does that mean?” she demanded, without stirring.

“It means you’re comin’ with me,” he said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She was speculating, as she studied him, on the possibilities of sudden and determined flight. But any effort to escape, she saw, would be useless.

“Coming where?” she countered.

“Wherever I say,” he retorted. He was busy examining the rifle magazine, grunting with satisfaction when he found it full.

She turned on him, at that, with a quick wave of resentment.

“I know exactly what you are,” she recklessly proclaimed.

He looked at her, for a moment, with a quiet and brooding eye. But behind its quietness was a threat of fire.

“If you want to keep on livin’,” he announced, “you’ll do what I say.”

“And if I don’t?” she challenged, trying to ignore the vague feeling of nausea in the pit of her stomach.

He looked her over, for a second time, with an estimative and possessive eye.

“When you know me better,” he proclaimed, “you’ll not waste time tryin’ to argue. Take that trail to the left. And keep goin’ until I tell you to stop.”

She stood motionless, her eyes on the bearded and bony face. She stood, without moving, until she saw the telltale wave of recklessness surge slowly up into the haggard and desperate eyes under the shaggy brows. Then she surrendered to the inevitable. She turned, without speaking, and slowly followed the narrow trail that wound through the tangle of brush.

“Move quicker,” he commanded, close behind her. She knew, from the thickness of his voice, that he was eating from her grub-bag as he followed her.

She went on, in silence, until they emerged on a wooded slope, up which she was ordered to make her way. She was fortifying herself with the thought, as she went, that time would yet bring its chance for escape. This lean-faced fugitive, she remembered, was a tired and hungry man. He might, at every moment, be on his guard. But eventually he would have to sleep. Or his vigilance might relax, for the essential moment or two, somewhere along the open trail. Eventually, she reassured herself, her chance would come. The one thing for her to do, in the meanwhile, was to remain wary and watchful. Somewhere, in those valleys of silence, an officer of the law was on the lookout for this unkempt figure so close behind her. Or the seaplane that had soared over her head that morning might return and spot them on some sparsely wooded hillside. Or Adam Bronson himself, once he had learned the truth from Loren, might start out in pursuit of her.

She went on, thoughtful-eyed, until the sight of a brawling little brook reminded her that she was thirsty.

“Could I stop,” she asked, “and have a drink?”

“We’ll both have one,” he bruskly announced.

He sank down on his haunches, and squatted there with the rifle in his hands, watching her as she advanced to the pebbly stream-side. Her first intention had been to drink from her cupped hands. But on second thought she lay full length along a graveled bar and drank directly from one of the narrow pools between the rocks. She did her best to be casual about it all. But her heart was beating a little faster as she moved back from the pool-edge. For she was hoping that her captor would do as she had done. And any such movement meant that for a moment, at least, he would have to relinquish possession of the rifle. She would, for a brief space of time, be out of his line of vision. And that might give her the chance she was waiting for.

“Now it’s my turn,” he carelessly announced. But, instead of advancing toward the pool-edge, he remained where he was. He merely pulled his faded felt hat from a tangled mat of hair and flung it toward her. “Fill that with water,” he told her, “and bring it here.”

She did as he commanded, trying to hide her disappointment, which sharpened perceptibly as he motioned her to seat herself on a near-by rock. He drank leisurely but guardedly, always with one eye on his captive. Then he slapped the wet hat against his ragged trousers leg and restored it to his head. Then, as once before, he wiped his wide mouth with the back of his hand.

Lynn sat, listless-eyed, waiting for him to speak.

“You got any more shells?” he finally asked.

She failed to understand that question.

“Got any more ammunition?” he repeated. She assumed, from the caressing glance with which he studied the firearm, that he had hidden away there without a weapon.

“Only what’s in the rifle magazine,” she told him. And a frown of annoyance crossed the swarthy face.

“Is there a canoe back at that camp o’ yours?” was his next interrogation.

And she weighed that question, turning it hurriedly over in her mind as a squirrel might turn over a hickory-nut, before answering it.

“Yes, there’s a canoe there,” she told him. “And plenty of provisions.”

“That’s worth knowin’,” he said with a grunt of satisfaction.

“Why?” asked his captive.

The smile on the bearded face was one of careless fortitude. “Because I’m sick o’ boiled rice and fish. And we may be needin’ to push north, before long, and winterin’ somewhere along the Waziska.”

It was said casually enough, but its significance did not escape her. She stood up and faced him, trying to keep the tremor from her knees.

“You can’t do a thing like that,” she said with a quiet intensity that brought the smile back to his bearded face.

“But I’m goin’ to,” he averred. He said it indolently, with the casualness of assured power. “I want a woman. And you’re comin’ along.”

It seemed, to the listening Lynn, an odd example of history repeating itself. It struck her as a strange duplication of a situation already experienced. But she realized, as she looked at the unclean and indolently crouched figure confronting her, that it was a duplication with a difference. And her blood chilled again at the hopelessness of a situation that took on, the more she comprehended it, the aspects of the incredible. It seemed fantastic beyond belief that she, Lynn Everett, should be the helpless captive of a half-starved refugee who could casually claim her as his property, who could no more be reasoned with than one could reason with a timber wolf It seemed like a reversion to the Stone Age, to the time when a shaggy-browed he-thing, in search of a mate, stunned her with a war-club and dragged her off to his cave.

“How will you make me go along with you?” she demanded as her enemy rose slowly to his feet.

“Oh, you’ll come, all right,” was his nonchalant retort.

“But what good will it do you?”

His brow darkened as he looked back and forth along the broken valley-slopes. “What good’s this talkin’ doin’?” he countered. “Let’s get goin’.”

“Where?” she asked, without moving.

“Where we can lay up for the night,” he said as he shouldered the rifle.

She studied the short-barreled firearm as it glinted in the afternoon sunlight. It was a trivial thing of wood and metal, something that could be carried in the hand or tossed over a jack-pine. But its word, when it spoke, was final. And on its possession vast issues depended.

“The time would come when I could kill you,” she said with a quavering intensity that brought his half-mocking eyes back to her face. His bearded mouth widened in a one-sided smile.

“You’re quite a bob-cat, aren’t you?” he observed in his indolent drawl. “Quite a bob-cat!”

“You’ll never be safe,” she told him, “when I’m near you.”

His laugh was both insolent and indifferent.

“Well, I’m used to trouble,” he proclaimed. “And I’ll take a chance on you. I like ’em, in fact, with a little fightin’ blood in their make-up.”

She refused to surrender to panic.

“Would money be of any use to you?” she asked, compelling herself to calmness.

“What good’s money in a country like this?”

“You may not be here,” she reminded him, “as long as you expect.”

She could see his face harden. But the slow smile of assurance returned to the broad and bearded mouth.

“What makes you think that?” he challenged.

“Because there are two men in this territory,” she told him, “who are trying to find you. They’re in these woods, at this very moment, searching for you. And I don’t think they’ll give up until they have found you.”

She regretted that proclamation, however, the moment she had made it.

“Then the sooner we get back to that camp o’ mine, the better.”

He motioned her bruskly to her feet. The mockery, she could see, had gone out of his face. Then he pointed significantly up the valley-slope where the shadows were lengthening and deepening in the cooling air.

“Get goin’,” he commanded. His tone, she realized, was disquietingly like that of an illiterate mule-driver to a beast of burden. Yet she stood rigid, fighting against a recurring wave of helplessness.

“I prefer staying here,” she said with paraded valor.

He crossed, in two quick strides, to where she stood confronting him with her foolish show of opposition.

“Don’t monkey with me,” he said with venomous quietness. “Don’t fool with me, or I’ll knock your face in. Go as I say, and where I say, or I’ll drag you there. I’ll haul you there by the hair o’ the head!”

His claw-like fingers closed on the tawny and tangled tresses and jerked her head back. The look of hate, touched with revolt, that came into her face did not escape him. But his smile remained a sardonic one.

“You’re not used to rough handlin’, eh? Well, try buckin’ me and you’ll get your bellyful.”

He was as unclean in spirit, she realized, as he was unclean in body. He was like something scaled and spotted and coiled, climbing in casual hunger out of swamp-ooze, fortified with the knowledge of his own venom. She tried not to shudder. But she was powerless, she knew, before his strength.

“I’ll go,” she said in a final and throaty gasp of surrender. But it was not complete surrender. Her captor could see the sharpened look of hate on her face as he swung her about. And because of that look he prodded her with the end of the rifle-barrel, prodded her sharply between the shoulder-blades.

“Get movin’,” he commanded.

They climbed in silence, until their path grew rough with broken rock between which a few wind-twisted pines fought for a meager footing. They went on, mounting higher and higher, until they came to a crater-like hilltop studded with glacial hardheads, many of them shoulder high. It impressed Lynn, weaving her perplexed way through the boulders at her captor’s curt directing, as a bleak and lonely spot. Nor did her spirits revive when they skirted a pool of stagnant rain-water and came to a shallow recess in the rock-wall confronting them. She saw where that inadequate shelter had been amplified by a tier of spruce-boles thatched with tree-branches, with a clutter of broken stone at their base to keep the wind from tearing them apart. She saw a litter of fish-bones and the ashes of a camp-fire close against the overhanging rock-wall, a scattering of fire-wood, and the malodorous skeleton of an antlered buck that had long-since been stripped of its meat. She saw a canoe paddle and a small bag of rice, a battered copper tea-pail, and a worn and ragged blanket on a dried layer of spruce-twigs. She saw other things, equally incongruous, in that cave of disorder, an ax-head into which a rough birch-wood handle had been fitted, a galvanized iron chain linked on a padlock and staple that might have been torn from a canoe-bow, an abraded Klondike-bag corded with a leather tump-line, a frayed and spotted oblong of hemp that had obviously been used as a towel, a little pile of punkwood and a bit of flint beside a broken file, which, it was equally apparent, had been used for starting a fire.

Lynn watched her enemy as he folded his ragged blanket and flung it down at the base of a stunted hemlock that grew out of a rock-cleft.

“Sit there,” he commanded.

She did as he ordered, watching him as he took possession of her grub-bag and shoulder-pack and proceeded to make a camp-fire. He had trouble, she could see, in getting an adequate spark to fall on the stubborn tinder. It seemed a long time before he was able to blow his smoldering punkwood into a flame.

He was nursing that flame, feeding it with bark and twigs, when he suddenly looked up. His attitude, as he crouched arrested, was one of listening. He gave no further thought to the fire, but crossed to the rough lean-to, where he took up the galvanized iron chain. He stood listening again, and then stepped to the waiting woman.

Before she quite realized what his intentions were, he swung the linked metal about her waist, doubled it, drew it taut, and snapped the padlock into place. It held her there a prisoner, chained to the hemlock against which her back rested. She could feel, as she breathed deeper, the constricting links against her ribs.

No word passed between them. But she knew she was even more helpless than before. Her captor, however, was giving scant thought to her predicament. He was staring, intent and motionless, into the prolonging twilight. Something, apparently, was disturbing him, some distant small sound or sign of life that had escaped her. It made her less afraid, to see that shadow of fear on her enemy’s face. He seemed, of a sudden, less sure of himself.

He crossed, still without speaking, to where the short-barreled rifle lay. He took it up, thoughtfully, with his dusky hands fondling the magazine-metal as he stood staring out through the uncertain light. Then, still without speaking, he crouched low and crept guardedly out through the clustered hardheads, pausing from time to time as he went. He reminded the watching woman, as he went, of a clumsy but stealthy animal stalking its prey.

She sat motionless for several minutes after he had disappeared from sight. Then she tested the chain that held her a prisoner. It was impossible, she found, to free herself. Tug and writhe as she might, she remained a prisoner. And she wondered, as she sat passive again, what her fate would be if she were left there, if anything happened to that captor of hers, skulking about in the gathering dusk.

She sat, beaten on by recurring small waves of helplessness, numbed by the lethargy of weariness. But her mind remained singularly alert. Her position, she knew, was a perilous one. Yet she was perplexed by the discovery that she could, in some way, feel most acutely alive when life was most in danger. It was the unlooked-for reward of hazard. It was the breast of things stripped bare, so that one could hear the very heart-beats of Fate.

But what she heard, as she sat there, was a solitary rifle-shot, a report that tore the evening silence and echoed abysmally across the valley below her. It sounded, through the quietness, indescribably malignant and mysterious. It chilled her blood and quickened her pulse. But she had no way of determining its source or its significance. All she could do was to wait there, in the half light of the cooling hilltop dusk, for some final meaning to disclose itself.

The increasing chilliness of the air caused her to glance toward the fire, which had climbed from its small mattress of twigs up to the larger pile of crossed sticks against the smoke-blackened rock. Her glance, as she studied the sullen flames, fell on the broken file which lay where her captor had dropped it, half-way between her and the fuel-pile.

She made an effort to reach it, with her outstretched shoe-heel. But she failed, by more than a yard. Then she made an effort to work her body lower in the encircling chain-strands. Even then she found her reach increased by little more than a foot. And more than anything she wanted that file.

She sat, thoughtful-eyed, for a moment of silence. Then she worked the folded blanket from under her body, shaking it out so that it lay full length in front of her. Then she cast for the file, as one might cast for a sulky fish. She flung the blanket-end over the oblong flake of steel, completely covering it. She drew the blanket slowly toward her.

Sometimes her casts were ineffectual; sometimes she succeeded in dragging the precious strip of metal an inch or two closer to her feet. Eventually she was able to reach it with her shoe-heel. And in the end she held it in her none too steady hands.

She saw, as she examined it in the failing light, that it was rusted and old. And she found, when she tested it on a link of the galvanized chain, that its cutting edge had long since been battered and eaten away. Instead of biting into the chain-metal, it merely abraded it. But with time enough, she saw, it might be possible to sever one of the links. And with that discovery a new lease of life came to her.

She sat waiting, for a moment or two, making sure that she was still alone there. Then, quietly and stubbornly, she began to saw back and forth on one of the chain-links. She kept at it until her fingers ached. Then she rested and listened and once more went back to her filing. She remembered the blanket, as she worked, and stopped long enough to restore it to its place under her body. Her exploring finger-tips told her, after another period of frantic sawing back and forth, that the link-metal was abraded more than half-way through. Then she stopped short, a moment later, when the sound of footsteps, followed by an animal-like grunt, fell on her ears. She promptly pushed the file in under her belt. Then she closed her eyes and let her body relax against the supporting hemlock-bole.

When an unkempt and ragged figure stooped over her, the next minute, she seemed deep in a sleep of exhaustion. Her captor stood above her, listening to her breathing. She could hear his small grunt of satisfaction as he reached down and tested the chain with his long and bony fingers. She could hear him as he went to the pool for water, with which, strangely enough, he promptly quenched the camp-fire. And she could see him as he stood for a ponderable length of time, the rifle in his hands, peering guardedly about in the uncertain light. And a meager sense of delivery came to her as she heard him crawl in to the litter of dried pine-twigs under the lean-to. She sensed, as she lay there, the aboriginal woman’s dread of darkness, the fear of the dark, dormant in those who walked with peril.

She shuddered with a sense of the unfairness of it all. Life, she felt, was confronting her with conditions for which she had never been tempered and hardened. She had been behind glass for too many years. And those sheltered years had instilled in her a horror for the horrible.

She had, too, always been singularly free. And the one thing she wanted now was freedom. Yet freedom, she warned herself, could come only through her own clearness and quickness of thinking. Her one chance seemed to lie in her wariness.

So she waited, in the darkness, until no sound came from the cliffside cave. She waited still longer. Then she cautiously reached for the hidden file.

But her captor, she soon realized, had not fallen asleep. At the first faint rasp of metal against metal he emerged from the shadowy lair confronting her. He loomed before her, ursine and ungainly, as he came crawling on all fours to where she lay so abruptly passive again. She could feel his fetid breath on her face as he bent over her. But she breathed on, like a woman lost in sleep. She could feel his hand once more test the chain-strands about her body. She could hear his quiet and pectoral grunt as, seemingly satisfied, he rose to his feet.

But restlessness remained with him. He stood listening a moment, and then crossed to one of the vaguely outlined hardheads, against which he leaned, once more in an attitude of listening.

He was, she remembered, very much awake. But something at the core of her own tired body was also very much awake. And when her time came, she told herself, she must be ready for it.

Bronson, as he rounded the head of Lake Ambigo, was at first afraid that Stratton might attempt to follow him. But he knew, by the time Twisted Rock had been left well behind, that he was to be unmolested on what he had come to accept as a pilgrimage of expiation.

He was glad to be alone, for his mood was far from a companionable one. He was glad to go on, lashed forward by a diminishing fury of self-hate. He realized, as he went, that he stood the actual cause of Lynn’s flight. And it was his duty to find her.

Yet finding her, he also realized, was not to prove as easy as he had first hoped. Time, he knew, was a factor in the situation. But a precious two hours slipped away before he even caught up with a trace of her, convinced as he was of the general direction in which she would travel. His spirits lightened, however, when he stumbled on the unmistakable marks of her hurrying feet. The discovery of those prints seemed to bring her closer to him. He was tempted, at first, to disregard the meagerness of his ammunition and fire a series of signal-shots. But any such signal-shots, he remembered, would have no influence on her.

So he patiently followed the footprints up the long valley-slope, and lost them again on the rocky ledge, and once more found them as they led down a second slope. But the trail was not a continuous one. And the afternoon, he could see, was wearing away. So he decided, after quartering back and forth in search of the essential footprints, to advance along the line of least resistance, to follow the course which would present itself as most acceptable to a traveler none too certain of her destination.

His guess proved right when, at the edge of a small lake, he found a freshly made wind-break and the ashes of a camp-fire. And the footprints about the lake-front were unmistakably Lynn’s. He followed them, with reviving hope, through spruce and poplar, past groves of paper-birch and jack-pine, until they mounted a hill, where he stood frowning over a series of irregular half-circles. For those broken arcs implied that she had been running about under some sudden stress of excitement. Yet he could decipher no reason for that excitement. He even searched carefully for bloodstains, suspecting that she might have shot down some dubious-spirited woodland animal. But he could see no signs of a killing. And he was glad when he caught up with her footsteps again, leading more soberly down to a wooded valley. But he lost all trace of her, in the brambled valley-bottom. The failing light told him it would be useless to go farther that night.

He ate perfunctorily and slept for a few hours, conscious, for the first time, of the leaden ache of weariness in his legs. He was astir again, when the first faint glimmer of dawn showed over the eastern pine-ridges. And in half an hour’s time he was once more resolutely pressing forward.

But, search as he might, he could find no reassuring footprints in the tangle of brush and marshland that surrounded him. There were game-trails in plenty, weaving in and out in a bewildering maze, but none that bore the telltale print of a human foot. He caught sight of a rabbit, as he came to rising ground and a fir-grove. He stood watching it as it bounded off among the shadowy trunks and came to a pause, a shadow amid shadows. Then, even as he looked, he saw a small and snakelike form rise up out of the shadows. It was slender and brown and sleek. But its movement, as it darted at the waiting rabbit, was arrow-like in its quickness. There was a screech, small and sharp, as its fangs fastened on the furred throat, and a quick movement or two of the lithe brown body as it clung to the heavier body in its last thrashing of life.

Bronson knew, as he saw the cruelly pointed muzzle stained with blood, that it was merely a hungry weasel in search of his morning’s breakfast. But it brought home to him the fact that the forest was inherently cruel. And it brought a new resoluteness to his movements as he mounted the lightly wooded slope and forged on to its rounded summit, where he stood staring anxiously about for some reassuring sign of life.

But out of that surrounding solitude no echo of life came back to him. He realized, as he stood there, the immensity of the country which he was trying to comb, the endlessness of the unmapped forest through which he was so blindly advancing. Yet he refused to give up. He went on again, still swayed by his smoldering determination for redemption. He went on, mile by toiling mile, with a quick scrutiny, from every height of land, of every quarter of the compass. Far to his left, early in the afternoon, he thought he saw smoke. He promptly changed his course, only to find, an hour later, that his drift of smoke was merely a cloud of mist above a trumbling small waterfall.

It dawned on him, at last, that it would be foolish to go farther. He had passed, he felt, beyond the border of reasonable promise. So he quartered back in a widening arc, always on the lookout as he went. But his search remained a fruitless one. The long afternoon deepened into evening, with a sharpening chill in the air. And his spirits sank with the sun. He was conscious of a great want, of a fixed craving to see a slender gray figure moving across a shadowy valley-bottom or standing silhouetted against the hilltop sky-line. He even stopped, from time to time, to picture that lost companion of his, nestling in a sheltering birch-grove or awaiting him in a little clearing where she had built her valorous wind-break.

He peopled the silent forest with his memories of her. And those memories, as night came on, grew more and more vivid. He could recall how the sun glinted on her bright and boyishly unkempt hair; how her rounded brown throat melted and merged into the widening plane of the brown shoulder; how the shoulders themselves, back-thrust a little, like the shoulders of a Flying Victory, always carried a vague touch of the imperial. He remembered her face, as he had first seen it, as she lay asleep on his wall-bunk. It was a face he would never forget, that would hold always the world’s desire in the shadow of its amber-flecked eyes. Yet it was lost to him. And somewhere in the solitude that surrounded him those amber-flecked eyes were probably looking into the face of peril.

Bronson stumbled on through the failing light, depressed by an abysmal sense of failure. He fought his way through blueberry scrub and bramble until he came to rising ground again, a long and gloomy slope studded with broken rock and wind-twisted pines. It looked forbiddingly desolate in the twilight. Even its crater-like crest, mottled with great boulders suggestive of an earlier age of fury, stood sullen and malignant against the last rind of light. And Bronson, when he came to a shelf of rock down which a meager stream trickled, decided that he had done enough for that day.

He was too tired to make a fire. He merely put down rifle and pack and sank beside them. Then he ate frugally and listlessly, watching the stars as they came out in a darkening vault of violet. The northern woodland air, he noticed, was exceptionally clear, clear and yet shot through with the faint balsam-smell that hangs over any extensive area of pineland. It was a smell, he remembered, that one encountered only in the North. He lounged back, sniffing indolently, relaxing a little before the balm that the small night breeze brought to his nostrils.

Then he sat up, of a sudden, with his head lifted and a frown of perplexity on his face. For on that cool and clean breath of air drifting past him he detected, or thought he detected, something more than the thin fragrance of balsam. It impressed him as the faint and ghostly smell of wood-smoke.

He stood up, still frowning, staring along the broken slope above him. There was no pearl-mist, no slightest trace of haze, between him and the stars, as would be the case if that teasing fragrance came from some far-off forest-fire. It was the season of fires, but during the day, he knew, there had been no evidence of any such calamity. It came, he finally concluded, from the crater-like hilltop above him. And it came, he told himself, with a small tingle of nerves, from a camp-fire within ponderable distance of where he stood. The world, after all, was not so empty as it had seemed.

Yet he felt a need for caution. That rocky and wind-swept height, he knew, was no natural place for camping. It might, on the other hand, prove a good lurking-spot for a long-harried fugitive.

So Bronson, as he circled slowly up the broken slope, advanced with a new alertness, studying every shadow as he went. He stopped to listen, from time to time, but no sound came to his straining ears. Finally he mounted a hardhead, the better to study the shadowy upper slope along which the greenish-white northern stars glinted and winked. A sudden bark of sound beat on his ears and a bullet whistled past his ear.

He dropped behind the boulder and lay still. He lay there, waiting, with his rifle ready. But no sound or stir of movement came to him. He watched and waited for a long half-hour. Then he resumed his slow and studied advance up the slope. He moved silently, from rock-shadow to rock-shadow, changing his course when the need for cover called for it, but always advancing toward the uncertain summit above him. He went with a certain tingling deliberateness, remembering as he did that a second bullet might at any moment spit down at him out of the star-strewn silence. He was not actively conscious of fear. He nursed, in fact, a vague sense of satisfaction at the thought of something active and actual after his second day of ineffectual wandering. And he had no intention of turning back.

He groped his way slowly on through the darkness, hoping, as he circled higher, to catch sight of a camp-fire in some upland arena between the clustering rocks. But he saw none. And the smell of smoke was no longer discernible on the air. When he came to a rock-ledge, as high as his head, he worked his way cautiously along its face, stopping short when a branch of dead wood crackled under his foot, and listening intently before going on again. He crouched low, when he came to a break in the ledge, through which a stronger breath of wind blew on his face. He bent low, studying the uncertain shadows, knowing that the summit was not far above him.

And as he crouched there, he was stunned by a sudden sense of shock. For a shaggy and long-armed figure, leaping catamount-like from the ledge above him, struck him down in his tracks. His struggle to free himself, once his brain had cleared, was prompt and instinctive. He writhed and twisted, striking blindly at the grunting and hairy face so close to his own. He even escaped the clinging long arms, for a moment, and fought his way to his knees. Then his world went out, in a puff. A rifle-barrel, brought briskly down on his half-turned head, left him limp and indifferent to his surroundings.

He found himself, when his brain cleared again, lying on his side, perplexingly hampered and helpless. This was due, he discovered, to the fact that his hands were closely pinioned and tied together at his back. He fought to free them. But nothing came of his efforts. And as he rose none too steadily to his feet he became conscious, for the first time, of the shaggy figure standing close beside him in the uncertain light.

Memory came back to him slowly, as he studied the silent and bearded stranger, the malignant-eyed stranger, with a rifle in either hand. He noticed, also, that the first gray light of morning was beginning to show along the receding tiers of the spruce-lands. But his head swam and the rock on which he stood seemed to move back and forth in a slow and steady ground-swell. He was glad enough to let his knees relax and sink to the earth again. There were a number of things, he told himself, that he must get straight in his mind. And that inner light, he found, was coming back very slowly.

It was the stranger who spoke first.

“Get up,” he commanded.

Bronson remained where he was. He was slowly emerging, he found, into a world of reason.

“D’you want a bullet through your head?” inquired his captor. He spoke quietly, but with an ominous note of impatience. He even shifted his grip on the rifle, which had been resting, stock down, on the ground.

“Haven’t you done about enough?” countered the man with the hopelessly pinioned arms.

His captor disregarded that question.

“Why’re you prowlin’ around here?” he curtly demanded.

It was the other man’s turn to disregard a question. For his eye rested studiously on the short-barreled magazine rifle. He recognized it as his own. And the conclusion that he arrived at was not a quieting one.

“I was on my way out,” he replied, realizing the need for caution, “by way of Laird’s Post.”

“Then why’re you houndin’ me all night?” questioned the furtive-eyed refugee. And Bronson, as he studied the sunken and harried face, remembered that he was dealing with a man trembling on the brink of madness.

“I was lost,” asserted the captive, casually reseating himself on a fallen tree-trunk, “and when I smelled smoke I thought there might be a friendly camp up here.”

The bearded man’s laugh was raucous.

“Friendly ain’t the word for it,” he proclaimed. “And when you go out you’re not goin’ out by way of Laird’s Post.” The lean face abruptly hardened again. “Get movin’, or you’ll go out where you’re squattin’.”

Bronson rose to his feet. It was useless, he realized, to marshal the forces of reason against the unreasoning. The best he could do, under the circumstances, was to remain guarded and watchful and await his chance.

He wondered, as he moved slowly along the path designated by his enemy, what similar phases of brutality Lynn Everett had been compelled to face. For it was only too evident that she too had come in contact with this unclean animal of the wilds. And he had been responsible for it. He had, in his blindness, been as unfair to her at the end as at the beginning. He had forgotten her defenselessness. He had forgotten everything, except his own blind and self-defeating hunger for her. Yet even in that he had been vacillating and afraid of himself. He had lost on every count. And his thoughts were none too happy as he stepped into the malodorous hollow where the ashes of a camp-fire stood beside a barbarically rough lean-to.

As he stood there, wondering if he was about to stumble on her trail, he was startled by a sudden animal-like cry of anger from his captor. For the bearded stranger, after staring frowningly about, ran forward and peered in under the lean-to. Then he dodged questioningly about, from boulder to boulder, emitting little grunts of disappointment as he went.

Bronson could decipher no reasons for those guttural sounds of frustration. Nor could he altogether understand the final burst of rage with which his enemy confronted him.

“You’re the cause o’ this,” he cried with an oath of indignation. “And it’s not goin’ to happen twice in this camp o’ mine.”

Bronson stood with his back against the rock-wall, facing the lean and twitching figure with the rifle.

“What’s happened?” asked the man with the pinioned arms, speaking as steadily as he was able. For a faint flower of hope was blossoming in the dark soil of his uncertainties.

The bearded stranger, with his rifle at half-arm, was still again peering questioningly about. Then he turned to kick a ragged blanket aside.

“She’s got away,” he muttered with a second small and blasphemous cry.

A little flame of happiness ran through Bronson’s bruised and aching body. The entire sordid adventure, after all, hadn’t proved as inconsequential as it promised. Lynn too had been a captive there; but she had succeeded in escaping. And he, in his blindness, had been a factor in that escape.

“But I’ll see that you don’t,” said his enemy, stepping slowly back. He stopped, with his feet well apart, on the bald rock-floor clear of all camp rubble. The morning light, by this time, was no longer uncertain. The pale rose and pearl in the east were turning to gold. And somewhere, just over the crest of the brightening hill, a belated bird was singing, singing thinly and sweetly.

Bronson wondered, as he saw the rifle-barrel lift and come to a rest, if there was anything to say. He decided, as he saw the malignant face behind the sights, that all argument would be wasted, that even to plead for a little time would be a foolish and empty sacrifice. Yet it seemed strange, that life should go out like that, at a stroke. It was unjust and absurd. But it had to be faced. And his one remaining hope was that it would be over quickly.

Yet life was sweet. It was good to breathe clean air, and walk under the blue arch of the sky, and hear the wind in the treetops as he went. He had, he remembered, many things still to do in this world. And he wondered, for one brief second, if he should step thus passively into eternal darkness. He was tempted to turn and run, run blindly through the silvering morning light, in the hope that he might miss the whistling death that would spatter about him.

But he dismissed the thought. It would only make the thing ignominious. And the end would be the same. There was no escaping that venomous “O” of metal that was to spit death at him and the even more venomous face of the killer behind it. One couldn’t reason with a rattlesnake. One could merely stand firm, and draw a deeper breath, and nurse a faint but frantic hope that the unsavory business would soon be over with. He braced himself to sustain the impending shock, wondering if the report of the rifle would reach his ears.

Instead of a rifle-shot, he heard a cry, clear and a little shrill, across the morning air. “Wait!” was the frantic call that came out of the silence.

Bronson turned and saw Lynn, between two rock-shoulders, with the sunrise light behind her. It gave her the appearance of standing in a gateway. He could see desperation on her face.

“Wait,” she repeated as she faced the man with the rifle. “I’ll go with you.”

Bronson could not entirely comprehend that message. But it implied surrender and sacrifice. And he knew it was wrong.

“Go back,” he shouted, breathing deeper as he saw the rifle-barrel waver and fall away. For the gaunt figure that held it was no longer facing him. The startled eyes, so deep-set in the hairy face, were turned toward the woman not twenty paces away from him. And the bearded stranger seemed to regard her presence there as a ruse.

His reaction to her call was both abrupt and unexpected. Instead of turning the rifle on her, as the watching Bronson half feared, he raised it club-like above his head and charged toward her, emitting a bellow of rage as he went. It was his intention, apparently, not to put a bullet through her body. She was still a woman, his woman; and as such it was better to take her alive.

Some inkling of that intention must have communicated itself to Lynn, for all her earlier fortitude seemed of a sudden to forsake her. She turned, with a small and instinctive cry of fear, and ran rabbit-like between the clustered boulders. She ran abandonedly and desperately, only too conscious of the fact that the shaggy creature pursuing her was no longer a reasoning and reasonable human being. She fled as a cave-woman would flee before a Neolithic monster.

Bronson’s first impulse was to join in that chase, helpless as he was with his pinioned arms. But he stopped short, when he came to where his fallen rifle lay, staring down at it hungrily. He struggled to free his hands, which seemed to be bound with a stout leather thong, such as might be used for a tump-line. He fought against the tightly knotted cords, twisting and writhing and calling out in his desperation. Then he leaned, exhausted, against a granite boulder, split and forced apart by the action of the frost. His eye, as he did so, fell on the serrated sharp edge of the cleft, close beside him. He promptly backed against it, leaning there until the uneven edge of the granite was pressed close to the narrow bands of leather binding his forearms. Then he moved his body up and down, sawing desperately on the leather as he moved.

He severed a thong, in that way, and then another, disregarding, in his impatience, the abrasions to his own sunburned skin. A moment later he felt the constricting coils relax and the blood flow more freely through his numbed fingers. And in another moment his hands were free.

Yet he was compelled to wait there, for a time, before he could make his cramped muscles respond to the telegraphed intention of the brain. But, once he was free, he thrilled with a new hope and a new sense of deliverance. He was no longer an impassive factor in that absurd tableau of violence. His lost manhood returned to him. And he gasped with satisfaction as he reached for the rifle that lay at his feet. His lips even framed a cry as he caught up that compact and glittering instrument of death and ran forward through the scattering of hilltop boulders in search of his enemy.

He realized, as he ran, that much precious time had been wasted. He feared, in fact, that he might already be too late. But as he reached the edge of the crater-like bowl and glanced down the lightly wooded valley-slope he caught sight of a shaggy figure disappearing into a birch-grove. Emerging from that grove, on the farther side, he saw a smaller gray-clad figure. And he knew it was Lynn. He knew, also, that only a few yards separated her from her pursuer.

Bronson’s first impulse, as he beheld that flight and pursuit so far below him, was to drop on one knee and send a bullet after the heavier and shaggier figure. But his still tremulous hands left him no faith in his marksmanship. He merely shouted aloud, defiantly yet foolishly, and, doubling low, raced down the broken hillside, balancing his rifle in his unsteady right hand as he ran.

Lynn’s only impulse was one of flight. It was fear, primal and indisputable fear, that sped her on her uncertain way past ridge and pine-grove and alder-thicket. She headed downhill, primarily because descent was easier than ascent. Yet she knew, vaguely, that cover was better in the lowlands. And in that cover, eventually, lay a tenuous chance of eluding the madman at her heels.

She also knew, as she ran, the modified satisfaction of the ruffled ground-thrush that lures peril from the neighborhood of its nest. She was saving Bronson. She was, whatever might happen, meagerly atoning for all she had done to him. Yet she gave scant thought to her destination. Flight, with her, remained an instinctive and automatic reaction to terror. It was, she remembered as she panted on, like trying to escape from an infuriated animal. Her overtaxed body cried out for rest, but one glimpse of that odious pursuer, wheezing and thrashing after her, was enough to send her on her way again. Twice, where the underbrush grew thicker, she quartered abruptly off and momentarily bewildered her bearded enemy. But she could hear him crashing through brush and scrub, once more back on her trail. And it seemed to her, as she ran, like a nightmare, as though the clock of the world had been turned back for thirty long centuries and she was merely a woman of the Bronze Age being pursued by some maddened and hairy monster from a transpontine camp.

She noticed, as she raced on, that she was on softer ground. The scrub had given way to sedge and rushes, and her path was no longer a downward one. She found herself in the midst of marsh-grass studded with an occasional shrub-willow. The earth under her flying feet became spongier, with here and there a showing of water. But she raced on, picking a trail where reeds and swamp-grass grew thickest. And she could hear her pursuer splashing on behind her.

She knew, when she came to a series of water-pools interspersed with streaks of soggy tundra, that she was on the verge of a muskeg. But there could be no thought of turning back. She plunged on, leaping from yielding hummock to hummock, veering about black-bottomed pools of ooze. She knew the nature of that bubbling quagmire. It was the cupped accumulation of long centuries of decay, deep enough to embed a mastodon. Countless years of rotting plant-growth, of freezing and thawing, of disintegrating and dissolving, had made it more perilous than a quicksand. She realized, as she leaped from one spongy island of turf to another, that a misstep would send her floundering into a muddy emulsion more treacherous than any honest and open waterway, an emulsion that slowly but surely sucked everything under its surface.

She wondered, as she fought her way on, if death like that would be easy. Then she wondered if people went out like candles, if they merely went out and that was the end, the final and voiceless and everlasting end.

Then she wondered no more, for close behind her sounded a dry-throated and animal-like shout, a shout that reminded her of the moose-call she had heard by moonlight beyond Lake Ambigo. It was her enemy, closing in on her, and shouting again as he came.

But she refused to stop. She had no wish to go out like a candle. She found it harder, however, to pick a path through the sparsely islanded ooze-bed where ever larger bodies of marsh-water confronted her. She could even feel the turf-clump on which she stood begin to sink slowly under her feet. She leaped for another, only to find it equally unstable. It wavered and dipped like a raft, with the black water bubbling up about its edges as she jumped for a larger hummock. That larger hummock subsided and went to pieces under her feet, flinging her waist-deep in a black batter where she could find no footing. She floundered through it, with small and audible gasps of exhaustion, neither wading nor swimming, thrashing about for something stable to cling to. The last of her strength was gone by the time her outstretched fingers clutched at the tangled roots of a shrub-willow. It was a small willow, growing precariously on an islet of oozy soil surrounded by open water. But its roots clung stubbornly to their anchorage. And she was able to draw her heaving body slowly up out of the blackening marsh-liquid that seemed so ready to suck her down.

She lay there, half in and half out of the water, fighting for air. As she lay there, panting, she heard the repeated hoarse shout that rang out still closer behind her. And that brought back to her the thought of her peril. She clambered farther up on the tangled shrub-willow, forgetful of the chill of the marsh-water as she looked back over her shoulder.

She saw her enemy, waist-deep in the ooze, fighting his way toward her. She saw him flounder and go down, in the more open water between two broken hummocks, and struggle to his feet again. But he was more than waist-deep, by this time, and the power to advance seemed suddenly taken away from him. He bellowed aloud as he thrashed and churned the liquid muck engulfing him. But slowly, inevitably, he sank, inch by inch, as the ooze closed over his shoulders.

She could see the final look of terror, touched with pleading, that came into his bearded face as the velvety dark water reached his neck. She herself cried out in protest, without knowing she was doing so, as the slowly receding head turned and twisted in its fight for air. But she was without the power to avert the inevitable. She turned away, sickened by those grotesque last struggles. When she looked back she could see only an oily batter, troubled here and there with a bubble of marsh-gas.

She lay there, inert and exhausted, with little shudders of horror spending themselves along her chilled and aching body and a mist of unreality gathering about her numbed senses. Her dulled thoughts, as she rested there, went back to her city home and to her Louis Philippe bed, the lit à couronne with its crown-shaped tester where she had once slept so lightly and so luxuriously, under damask and silk, until a quietly moving maid drew back the curtains and let the late morning sunlight fall across the canopied shadows where the china and silver glistened on the waiting breakfast-tray.

It seemed dreamlike and far away, that old and care-free life of sheltered ease. It belonged to another world, through which one could wander imperiously, with a free mind and a light heart, with artfully woven fabrics about one’s body and elaborately organized protection about one’s steps.

But here, she remembered, she was unprotected and shelterless. She felt battered and unclean. She was something without meaning or dignity, harried about a world of dark and tangled hungers, lost in a wilderness where life was cheap and death was always near. She had had too much of it. She was not fashioned for a setting so pagan. And she lay there, too listless to remember the dangers that still surrounded her.

It was a shout from across the swamp-sedge that brought her back to the present. She could see Bronson, when she looked up. She heard his repeated shout of relief. She realized, as she turned toward him for the second time, that he was trying to fight his way out to her. But he seemed to be having trouble in finding tundra-clumps that would support his weight.

Lynn knew a thin sense of disappointment when he stopped and worked his way back toward firmer ground. He was, apparently, giving up the struggle. But she saw him, a few minutes later, busily dragging brush to the swamp-edge. He brought tree-branches and boughs and saplings, even a blow-down or two. With these he built a rough causeway, from tussock to tussock, testing it with his weight, from time to time, but advancing slowly toward the solitary shrub-willow to which she clung. He stopped, once, at the end of his undulating branch-mat, and called encouragingly out to her.

Then he went back, for heavier timber, since the last stretch of open water was obviously not easy to bridge. His movements seemed slow and lethargic. But he worked with a sort of sullen steadiness. She could see where his stubbled face was darkened by a dried trickle of blood. She also noticed, as he came closer, the shadowed hollow in his cheeks and the sunken look of his eyes. And he seemed to have trouble in carrying out a heavier tree-trunk, for twice, she noticed, he had to stop and wait until a palsy of weakness passed away from his mudsplattered body.

But he reached her, at last, and was able to help her to her feet. Then, with an arm about her, he guided her along the rocking causeway. He seemed very tired. He remained silent, in fact, until they slushed over their last branch-mattress and stood once more on solid ground. Then Bronson looked frowningly about.

“Where is he?” he finally asked.

Lynn pointed, in silence, to the slow-bubbling marsh-water. Her companion, equally silent, studied the muskeg’s slimy surface. Then he shrugged and turned wearily away. It was not until his companion, with an answering weariness, sank down on the sun-warmed rock that he looked at her.

“Let’s get away from this unclean hole,” he listlessly suggested.

“Where can we go?” she asked, grateful for the sun that poured a little heat into her long-chilled body.

There was a small lake, he told her, around the second hill-shoulder, a clean-lipped lake with plenty of timber behind it. He could make a fire there. And while he went back to the dead man’s hideout, to gather up what food might be there, she could bathe and dry her clothes.

“I’d rather sleep,” she said with the indifference of exhaustion.

“You can sleep afterward,” he proclaimed almost angrily. “And you’d better wash out everything you’re wearing.”

“If they’ll hang together,” she said with a glance down at her tattered raiment.

“We’ll see that they hang together,” he retorted as he took up his rifle and waited for her to struggle to her feet.

She followed him, leaden-footed, until the amber-green of the lake showed through the blue-green of the spruce. She wondered, as they rounded a diminishing ridge of rock, why he should so abruptly stop and motion her back. She saw him sink to one knee, behind a gneiss-boulder, and let his rifle-barrel rest along the weathered stone-face. She waited, wondering what it meant. She failed to understand, even after she heard the report of the rifle and his small gasp of satisfaction.

“What is it?” she asked, listless-voiced.

“It’s a bull-moose,” he said, entirely without elation. “And fresh meat for us.”

She saw the carcass lying in the cove-shallows as they emerged on the water-front. She wondered why he left it lying there while he gathered wood and built a fire. It seemed an unnecessarily big fire. But she was phantasmally glad to see the flames licking up through the bleached timbers. It would feel good, after her cold plunge in the lake. She would need it to dry out her clothing, the pathetically worn things of tatters that would have to be washed in lake-water and draped about the roaring flames and restored again to her fatigue-poisoned body. And that restoration, she mistily imagined, might bring back a little of her self-respect.

Bronson was away much longer than she expected. And he brought with him, when he returned, much more than she had looked for. Thrown together in a ragged camp-blanket he brought her belt-ax and half emptied grub-bag, a coil of line with two fish-hooks on its end, a handful of tea-leaves, some scraps of bacon, a battered copper pail, a small sack half-full of rice. He dropped them beside the fire, studying them with a jaded eye. Then he sat, slumped forward against his knees, breathing so quietly that his companion thought, for a moment, that he had surrendered to the sleep of utter exhaustion. But he roused himself, with an effort, and set about preparing a much-needed meal.

In the copper pail he boiled rice and the bacon-ends, which he divided impartially on two roughly made rogans of birchbark. Then he brewed tea, and produced two portions of hardtack from the grub-bag, and beside them placed six tablets of sweetened chocolate. And then he indifferently announced that they had better eat.

They sat side by side on the ground, eating in morose silence. They ate moodily but steadily, like tired animals. They ate until the pangs of hunger were appeased and a second and less febrile tide of weariness overtook them. Then they sat in a coma of indifference, blinking at the dwindling fire, experiencing neither joy nor exaltation at the thought of their delivery, their abused and aching bodies too crowded with the toxins of exhaustion to exult in the knowledge of half-remembered escapes. They had no wish to think or remember, no will to move. They merely sat there, staring at the coals, while the warmth soaked into their bodies and their eyes grew heavy.

But Bronson roused himself, for the second time, and threw fresh wood on the fire. Then he took up Lynn’s camp-blanket, maculated with dried muskeg-ooze, and spread it out on the open ground. At one end of it he placed the rice-sack, as a pillow. Next to it, with slow and wavering movements, he disposed the ragged blanket from the hilltop hideout. Then he motioned listlessly to the drowsy woman.

“Better sleep,” he muttered as he placed his rifle on the ground between the two blankets.

She had no memory of answering him. She merely knew that it would be easier, instead of rising, to crawl over to her waiting blanket. She knew, too, a misty sense of relief in being able to lie full length in the narcotizing warmth from the fire. She wrung no sense of companionship from the fact that she was not alone there. The ragged figure on the ragged blanket, almost within hand-reach of her, seemed a matter of small moment. All she wanted was sleep.

It was Bronson’s voice, drowsily indifferent, that roused her for a moment as she was lapsing off into unconsciousness.

“You know what it’s like now,” he said, without raising his head. His voice, heavy with drowsiness, sounded thick and far-away.

“What?” she sleepily inquired.

“To be captured by a real killer,” he said with an ironic low mumble of a laugh.

She failed to see much point to that observation. Yet she felt that it meant something. But it didn’t much matter. What she wanted, before all things, was rest, rest and sleep. And she sighed, with estranging remoteness, as she felt the soft gray down of slumber once more enclosing her.

A red fox crept out of the blueberry scrub and stopped short on a bracken-ridge, wondering at the man-smell that should drift up from so silent a valley. He pushed guardedly through the bracken and emerged once more in the open, where he stood gazing down on the lake, and the thin column of smoke going up from its shore, and two strange figures stretched out on two rumpled blankets. Those figures, as motionless as the dead, perplexed the staring fox, who studied them for an intent minute or two and then turned and trotted off through the frost-bleached blueberry scrub.

A little later a lithe-bodied marten, working between the alder roots near the lake’s rim, ventured up to the sun-bathed plateau studded with stones, where he lifted his black nose-pad and looked meditatively at the two motionless sleepers. He considered them solemnly, teased by the meat-smell that came from the neighborhood of the dying camp-fire. But he decided, in the end, that it was best to avoid that meat-smell, for mingled with it was the warning aroma of an enemy for whom he had no liking. But never before, in the full light of day, had he seen that enemy so passive. It puzzled him as he turned away and disappeared like a brown shadow through the shadowy birch-grove.

Yet the sleepers slept on. A blue heron alighted at the lake-end, fed leisurely, and flew off again. Two teal circled over the amber-green water, came to rest in the rush-fringed cove and flirted noisily along the shore-line shallows. When the sound of their scrabbling was interrupted by the distant drone of a more mysterious flier, they rose into the wind and disappeared down the broad valley where the shadows were beginning to lengthen.

The drone grew into a throb, and the throb into a roar, as a gray-bodied seaplane drifted over the spruce crests and banked and wheeled over the amber-green lake. It dipped interrogatively lower, as it flew back, and banked again and circled into the wind and heeled down on the slate-green surface of a larger lake, a mile away from where the thin gray column of camp-smoke still drifted up into the afternoon air.

But the sleepers slept on. They lay, relaxed and ragged, on their outstretched blankets. They lay almost side by side, in a healing torpor of weariness, unconscious of the wheeling sun, of the wilderness noises about them, of the muskrat that swam across the cove, leaving two widening sabers of surface-motion as it went. They slept on, even when a stern-eyed youth, lining up his landmarks as he descended the broken valley-slope, made his way impatiently on to the dwindling camp-fire. His frown deepened as he emerged on the clearing and stood over the two unkempt sleepers. A gasp that was not entirely a gasp of relief broke from him as he bent over the smaller of the two figures. He stared, for an incredulous moment, into the sun-browned face where hardship had hollowed the once rounded cheek under its tangled mat of hair. Then he stared at the small hands, so reddened and roughened. Then he stared at the tattered clothing and the worn and broken shoes.

A flush of anger, and something more than anger, spread over his face. Yet that color vanished, leaving him quite pale again as he uttered the single cry of “Lynn!”

It was Bronson who wakened first, blinking up at him with uncomprehending eyes.

“Who are you?” questioned the still drowsy man on the ragged camp-blanket.

But the newcomer, who looked strangely urbanized and out of place in his fur-lined melton greatcoat, was once more stooping over the sleeping woman. A new grimness came into his face as he shook her roughly by the shoulder. And still again he called out a startled and incredulous “Lynn!”

The sleeping woman stirred, at that repeated cry. The tangled dark lashes lifted from the dusky cheek and the amber-flecked eyes, still opaque with drowsiness, looked up at the dark-coated stranger. Then the opaqueness went from the slowly focusing eyes. Lynn sat up with a start.

“Bennie!” she cried, the vibrata in her voice more a matter of astonishment than relief.

But Bennie, with a hardening face, backed slowly away from her.

“So this is how I find you,” he said, his austere young eyes ablaze.

Lynn looked at Bronson, who had risen impassively to his feet, as though she expected some elucidating word from him. But he remained determinedly silent. Then she looked back at her indignant brother.

“How do you expect to go back, after this?” he was somewhat foolishly demanding.

“After what?” questioned Lynn. She was on her feet by this time. And she too had paled a little under her tan.

“I wish to God I hadn’t found you,” cried the hard-eyed youth, ignoring the sharp-noted question. And Lynn wearily wondered if all the rest of her life was to echo with that absurd yet impassioned proclamation.

It was then that Bronson spoke up.

“What do you know about this?” he rather huskily demanded.

The younger man turned on him with a frank look of hate.

“I know more about it than you imagine, you——”

It was Lynn who broke in on him.

“Wait,” she cried. “You’ve been talking to Loren.”

“Yes, I’ve been talking to Loren,” retorted Bennie, his face twitching. “And what I see here backs up everything he’s said. And this human skunk is going to answer to me.”

Lynn’s color came back to her.

“Yet he saved my life,” she found the courage to protest, “more than once.”

“Why?” challenged the anger-shaken youth.

“Suppose you ask him,” she answered in a voice sharpened with indignation.

“I’ll tell you why,” proclaimed her quivering and unreasoning brother. “He wanted to save you for his own——”

“That’s enough,” interrupted Bronson. “This sort of thing isn’t doing any good. How did you get here?”

“I flew,” was the other’s curt retort. Then he snorted aloud. “And my pilot thought he saw a lone-fire Indian sleeping beside his squaw.” He turned on Lynn with the earlier look of abhorrence in his eyes. “And that squaw was you!” His glance went from her ragged clothing to the ragged blanket on the ground. “And I call it a filthy way of living.”

Lynn drew a deep breath, fighting against some final sense of injustice. But Bronson interposed before she could speak.

“What you think,” he proclaimed, “isn’t important. If you’ve got a plane anywhere around here, you’d better get your sister back to civilization. She’s faced enough without all this foolish talk.”

“Thanks to you,” cried the younger man, a new line of grimness about his mouth.

“There’ll be a time and place for settling all that,” retorted Bronson. “What’s needed now is food and clothing and shelter for a defenseless woman. You’d better get busy about it. And when you reach steel-end you’d better report the death of a murderer in a muskeg here.”

“I wish it was yours,” cried the youth known as Bennie.

“I’ll keep alive,” retorted the other. “And if you’re flying out before dark, you’d better get back to your plane.”

Lynn was no longer looking at Bennie. Her troubled gaze rested on Bronson’s gaunt and stubbled face.

“What will you do?” she questioned.

Bronson, staring out at the carcass of the slaughtered moose lying in the shore-shallows, remembered that he would soon be needing meat. Then he looked back at the waiting Lynn.

“What difference does it make?” he countered. A few hours’ flying, he remembered, would carry her out of that wilderness, would swing her back to the world of bathtubs and warmth and white linen and delicate food on delicate plates.

“But I can’t go without you,” asserted Lynn. She spoke quietly. Yet there was a reckless light in her eyes.

“Well, he won’t go with us,” Bennie was quick to proclaim.

She turned on the younger man, a quaver of indignation about her lip-corners.

“Do you mean you’d leave him here?” she demanded.

“Why not?” retorted Bennie. “It’s the kind of country that seems to suit him.”

“But he’s without proper supplies. If anything happened to him he’d be helpless. He’d probably die.”

“That,” proclaimed the irate Bennie, “is the best thing that could happen to him.”

“But that’s inhuman, Bennie. It doesn’t sound like you.”

“I don’t care how it sounds. We’ve got past that. It’s what you’ve done in the last month and a half we’ve got to think about.”

“Then I’ll put your mind at rest,” announced Lynn, regal in spite of her rags.

“How’ll you do it?” challenged the stern-lipped youth.

She drew a deep breath, adding a newer line of resolution to the indignantly back-thrust shoulders.

“By staying here with him,” she proclaimed.

Bronson’s quick glance swept her face.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said, the ring of iron no longer in his voice. “You’ve done enough.”

“I’ll say she has,” cried the unhappy Bennie.

But Bronson disregarded that cry. “You’ve got to go out,” he said, face to face with Lynn. “And you’ll be happier if you go alone.”

She looked at him, with all her defenses down.

“I’ll never be happy,” was her low-toned cry. And Bronson, watching her, controlled himself only with an effort.

“I mean it will be easier,” he quietly continued, “if you go without me. There’ll be questions asked, naturally, and you must be in a position to protect yourself.”

“Aren’t you a little late in thinking about all that?” challenged the tremulous-handed Bennie.

But Bronson remained impervious to that taunt. “A great deal depends,” he quietly resumed, “on the way you go back. You’ve seen, for the second time, what the smaller-minded rabble will think of it all. And those are the people you’ve got to remember, no matter how free you may feel in your own soul.”

“I’m not afraid,” proclaimed Lynn. But her clenched hands were pressed close to her sides.

Bronson regarded her for a silent moment.

“That’s the important thing,” he finally asserted.

“Isn’t there something equally important?” she asked, trying in vain to keep the quaver out of her voice.

“That,” he told her, “will have to wait.”

“Until when?”

“Until I come out and join you,” he said with the utmost deliberation.

It was Bennie who crowded in between them.

“If you do,” he cried, “I’ll put a bullet through you.”

Bronson’s laugh was curt and mirthless.

“I’ll take my chance on that,” he said as he turned to throw fresh wood on his dwindled camp-fire.

Lynn stepped to his side, her lips no longer quivering. “I’ll be waiting for you,” she said in little more than a whisper.

Bennie, who had shaken out her rumpled camp blanket, looked up at the lowering sun. A new coolness had come into the afternoon air.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” was his impatient proclamation. He kicked a battered tea-pail aside as he held the blanket out toward the ragged small figure that looked so Indian-like in the slanting autumn sunlight. “That plane of ours has got a lot of ground to cover between now and midnight.”

Slowly Lynn withdrew her gaze from Bronson’s intent face. She shivered, even after she had wrapped the blanket, squawlike, about her shoulders. But she seemed reluctant to start.

“Why couldn’t I send a plane in for you?” she asked, turning back to the man standing alone beside his camp-fire.

Bronson’s smile, as he shook his head, was a wintry one.

“You mustn’t even know me,” he reminded her. “I’ve got to come out in my own way, and in my own good time.”

Bennie’s gesture was one of impatience.

“That’s the trail,” he said as he pointed up the long valley-slope. He declined to look at Bronson as they got under way.

It was the woman in the blanket who stopped at the hilltop and stared back at the solitary figure beside the camp-fire. Bronson watched her as she passed over the crest. Then he took out his sheath-knife and whetted it on a bit of sandstone, trying its edge, thoughtfully, on the face of his thumb. Then he went down to the lake and waded out to the moose carcass that lay in the shallows. He would need meat, he remembered, during his next ten days of solitude.

Bennie, morosely silent, led the way. Lynn, equally silent, followed after him. She nursed the feeling, as she dipped into the second wooded valley, that she was passing from one world to another, that her pagan life would soon be a thing of the past. She was being taken back where she belonged, where she could move about in something more than a ragged camp-blanket. And Bennie, she remembered, was her link with that forgotten world.

But she noticed, at the end of their climb up the next ridge, that Bennie was breathing heavily. His face, above the dark cloth of his coat, looked disturbingly white. She noticed, too, the blue shadows under his eyes and the dewing of moisture on his sunken temples.

She felt suddenly sorry for him. She was no longer alone in a world of her own, answerable only to herself. She was once more one of a clan, with the code of the clan to remember. And as they moved on again she stepped more companionably up beside the stern-eyed youth who pretended to disregard her.

“Where’s father?” she finally asked. She spoke quietly, for all her accumulating hunger for news of her forgotten world.

Bennie, intent on lining up his landmarks, declined to look at her. “He’s been at Ottawa, this last week, conferring with the Forestry Patrol officials. And you can imagine, of course, what he’s been through this last six weeks.”

Some inkling of what he had gone through came slowly home to Lynn.

“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing the inadequacy of her own words as she uttered them.

“He thought, of course, that you were dead,” proclaimed Bennie as he waited for her to follow him over a blow-down. “But since he got that second wire from Stratton he’s had two planes combing this whole God-forsaken end of the province. And Stratton himself had another plane sent up from Haileybury. That’s the plane that brought us in.”

“Then where’s Loren?” asked Lynn.

“Over there with the pilot,” answered Bennie, “waiting for us. He refused to believe you were the woman on the blanket.”

They were drawing closer to the slate-green waters of the lake.

“There are other things he refuses to believe,” observed Lynn out of the silence.

But Bennie failed to hear her. His startled eyes were searching the coves between the spruce-points.

“The plane’s gone,” he cried with a frown of perplexity.

“Wouldn’t we have seen it?” questioned Lynn.

“Not from that valley-bottom,” answered Bennie. His face hardened. “Stratton, of course, insists on running his own show. But he was to wait here.”

Lynn, searching the shore-line, suddenly called out. “There’s a flag. There’s something white flying from that tamarack-spar at the point-end.”

She followed Bennie out along the dwindling rock-ridge. Tied to the tamarack-spar they found a strip of linen and a message written on a sheet of paper torn from a notebook.

“An Indian runner for a provincial officer named Cummings,” Bennie read aloud, “tells me a white woman was seen by Cummings northeast of this point. I’m flying on to the Bittiwabi in the hope it’s Lynn and she’s worked her way back to the old camp. Wait here for our return, before sundown.”

Bennie stared, with a deepening frown, about the lonely pine-ridges turning purple in the evening light.

“The officious fool,” he said as he paced to the water’s edge and then back to the lone-tree spar.

“How long would it take him?” asked Lynn, searching the sky-line above the saw-tooth hilltops.

“They can do sixty miles in half an hour. But it’s after sundown. And they can’t nose out a lake like this in the dark. And we’re here without food.”

Lynn, for some reason, failed to participate in his dismay. It was not the first time, during the last few weeks, that she had found herself without food and shelter. But Bennie, she remembered, knew little of such rigors.

“Perhaps we’d better go back,” she suggested.

“Back where?” asked the morose-eyed Bennie.

“To Adam Bronson,” answered Lynn. “He’ll know what to do. And he has food there.”

She could feel the scornful glance that swept her face.

“I’d rather starve,” proclaimed Bennie, “than eat his damned old bull-moose meat!”

Lynn stood silent, her eyes on her pallid-faced brother. He looked young and inadequate and oddly out-of-place. The wilderness, plainly enough, had never yet taught him to be patient.

“I hate this country,” cried Bennie out of the silence that had fallen over them.

“Why?” asked Lynn, watching a pair of wavies that drifted along the rush-lined shore. A wolf-howl echoed out of the far-off hills and died forlornly away again.

“Because it’s an insult to civilization,” protested the unhappy youth. “It takes everything away from you, everything we’ve built up after ten thousand years of work.” He turned on her with a cold and accusatory eye. “And look what it’s done to you.”

She smiled at that, with a fortitude all her own.

“Perhaps it’s brought me something,” she quietly suggested.

Bennie inspected her with an unrelenting eye.

“Nothing that I’d go crazy about,” he mordantly proclaimed.

She glanced down at her broken shoes, at her reddened hands, at the clothes that hung in rags about her sinewy young limbs. But she was no longer smiling. “Perhaps,” she ventured, conscious of his contemptuous survey of her person, “it doesn’t go as deep as you imagine. Perhaps it’s brought me something you don’t understand.”

“It certainly has,” he announced. “And it’s too putrid to talk about,” he added with his unhappy and brother-like brutality.

It struck her as odd that for the rest of her days she would have to clamor and campaign for her own good name. She had thought herself invulnerable. But those who stood closest to her seemed the readiest to condemn her. And she wasn’t used to arguing about the righteousness of her ways.

“Why can’t you believe in me?” she finally asked. “I remember a time or two when I gave you the benefit of the doubt.”

“But never in a mess like this,” proclaimed the grim-lipped Bennie. And her prompt gesture of protest did not escape him. “Oh, you’ll see it as I do, once you get out of this wolf-howling wilderness.”

“But we’re not out of it yet,” she reminded him.

Bennie, looking about the darkening sky, lost a little of his valor.

“What’ll we do?” he asked.

“We’ll make a fire,” asserted Lynn. “And if it’s big enough, it ought to be seen by Loren and his pilot. You’ll have to help me carry wood out to the point here.”

“Why here?” demanded the listless Bennie.

“Because the bush is dangerously dry, at this time of the year,” she explained. “And also because it will be more easily seen, out here in the open.”

The quiet celerity with which she gathered the scattered fire-wood proved a bit of a puzzle to her languid-moving brother.

“How’d you learn to do this sort of thing?” he demanded as he reached in his pocket for his gold-and-enamel lighter.

“I’ve learned quite a lot, in this last two months,” she retorted as she watched the flame catch and mount through the dried wood.

Bennie looked for an inviting spot between the uneven humps of the rock-slope.

“Well, I’ve never learned to rest decently on an indecently empty stomach,” he said as Lynn rolled herself in her blanket and writhed about the rock-face until its undulations suited the straightened curves of her body. “How long do you suppose we’ll have to wait here?”

“I don’t know,” answered Lynn. “But this isn’t exactly the country for night-flying.”

“Then I suppose we stay here until morning, just for that stuffed shirt.”

“I’m afraid so,” answered Lynn, grateful for the mounting warmth that played over her tired body. She looked up at the stars, puzzled by a faint pearl-mist that had taken away a little of their brilliance. But she was glad to rest and watch the play of the Northern Lights, muffled and remote above the sharp black line of the spruce-ridges.

“Stratton may be a stuffed shirt,” she heard the relenting Bennie’s voice say out of the silence, “but he certainly worked hard to find you.”

“Yet I’m afraid he never will,” was Lynn’s low-voiced reply.

It brought Bennie up on one elbow.

“You don’t think he’ll get back here?”

“Oh, yes, he’ll get back here all right,” she wearily acknowledged. “But he won’t find me, Bennie, any more than you find the tick in the watch when you take it to pieces.”

He would be back, she remembered, fencing her in with his tremendously unimportant details, fussing about her feet being dry, when he should have been thinking a little more about the dryness of her heart.

“Why are you going sour on Stratton?” asked the youth on the far side of the fire. “Dad seems to feel that he’s just the right sort of tail for your kite of craziness.”

She could afford to smile at that in the darkness. Loren, she knew, had long since lost the power of holding her down.

“Go to sleep,” she wearily commanded.

“I don’t think I can,” protested Bennie as he shifted his position between the rock-humps. “I’m so empty I’ve got a pain under my floating ribs.”

But quietness eventually fell over them. Lynn wakened, during the night, disturbed by an acrid sharpness in her throat. She thought, in her drowsiness, that the shifting wind had been blowing the smoke of the camp-fire in her face. So, after throwing more wood on the fire, she changed her position and fell asleep again.

She wakened, toward morning, oppressed by an undefined sense of discomfort. Bennie, she saw, was still asleep, and the fire was low. But the air, she observed, was misted with a vague grayness. She sniffed at it, drowsily, and wondered at the pungent smell of the freshening wind. Then she wondered at the flocks of wild birds winging their way through the gray light over her head.

They were flying northeast, in a steady stream, making little sound as they went. She saw a black fox, his head low, lope purposefully down the long hill-slope and cross the valley and ascend the next slope. He went without once stopping or varying his course. What shook the last of the drowsiness from her body was the discovery that close behind the self-immured black shadow of the fox drifted a scattered gray line of rabbits, traveling in the same direction.

Lynn, thoroughly aroused, stood up in the gray light, with her head thrown back, sniffing once more at the pungent-smelling wind that blew on her face. She stood uncertain, for a moment, frowning at the pearl-misted sky where no clearly defined light showed along the eastern horizon. Then she ran to the sleeping Bennie and awakened him.

“What is it?” he asked, blinking dazedly about.

“There’s a bush fire,” cried Lynn. “And we must do something.”

Bennie, swearing softly, rose stiffly to his feet. He wondered why Lynn’s hands were unsteady as she hurriedly rolled up her blanket and tied it in so soldierly a fashion about her ragged shoulders.

“What difference does it make?” he morosely demanded.

Her answer to that was not an immediate one. For a heavily antlered bull-moose, before she could speak, crashed through the underbrush, rounded the lake-end, and went bounding up the next valley-slope. It went self-absorbed and intent on its own ends. And, like all the other creatures of the wild that had swarmed past, it headed without doubt or deviation into the northeast.

“The forest’s on fire,” cried Lynn. “We can’t stay here.”

Bennie refused to share in her alarm.

“But we have water here,” he pointed out. “We’ve got a whole lake, right beside us.”

“It’s not big enough,” she told him. He was, after all, only a tenderfoot. “It couldn’t help us, where the timber is this heavy. Come on.”

She was already rounding the lake-end, searching for a trail up the long and broken slope.

“But how’ll Stratton find us,” cried the panting Bennie, “when he comes back with the plane?”

“He can’t come back. And he couldn’t find us if he came. We couldn’t even signal him.”

A white owl flopped heavily ahead of them, disappearing into the northeast. Within a stone’s throw of them, a porcupine hurried clumsily in the same direction.

“Where are we going?” panted Bennie. By this time they were in the cathedral-like aisles of a spruce-grove, mysteriously silent in the misted light.

“I don’t know,” answered Lynn. “But Lac Grenier is somewhere ahead of us. That, I think, is the biggest lake in this district. And these animals seem to know it.”

Bennie, who had somewhere heard of back-firing, questioned Lynn about starting a second fire, to split the wider conflagration behind them.

“Bush-land like this burns too long,” she explained when she could catch her breath. “We’d only die of suffocation.”

They were fighting their way up a rocky slope, where the trees thinned out and the soft-floored forest pathway was lost in bramble and underbrush.

It was on the granite ridge, at the crest of the slope, that Lynn abruptly stopped. For out of the misted distance on her right there came to her the report of a rifle. Then came another, and still another, deliberately timed. They seemed to be signal-shots.

“What does that mean?” demanded Bennie, dropping to the ground, with his hand pressed hard against his heart.

“It’s Bronson,” cried Lynn. “It must be Bronson.”

The sag went out of her shoulders as she stood on that hilltop pinnacle, staring through the darkening air. She cupped her hands to her lips, and filled her lungs, and sent a prolonged “Hallo-o-o” echoing across the vaguely defined valleys.

She waited for an answer, but none came. She waited while a brown bear shambled hurriedly past her and disappeared down the next valley, followed by a ghostlike flurry of snowshoe hares. Then she drew a deeper breath and repeated her call.

The rifle-shot was repeated, louder and nearer. The smoke was beginning to bother her, so that her voice lost a little of its carrying power when she called the third time. But she was rewarded, a minute later, by seeing an uncertain figure hurrying down the opposing hill-slope.

She knew, as she looked, that it was Bronson. He was running like an Indian, bent forward, in long loping strides. She saw, as he came closer, the blanket-roll on his shoulder and the rifle in his hand. She saw, also, that he was motioning her to go on.

But she waited for him, disregarding those signals.

“What shall we do?” she asked as he came panting up to them.

“Keep going,” he commanded, almost angrily. “Why didn’t that plane go out last night?”

He was already on his way down the next hillside, varying their earlier line of advance a little as he went. And Lynn, followed by Bennie, went panting after him.

“It didn’t come back,” she gasped, in belated answer to his question. “Can we make Lac Grenier?”

“Grenier’s too far,” he said with a glance back over his shoulder. “We’ll try for Half-Moon Lake. There’s an island there. That gives us a chance.”

She ran on, in silence, with Bennie wheezing behind her. There was a burning in her throat and a sword of pain in her overtaxed lungs. But she felt less helpless and alone in the world, with that loping and ragged figure just in front of her. She was glad that it was Bronson. She was glad to follow him and feel him her leader. She exulted, almost, in being able to keep up with him. It seemed symbolic of some wider and less tangible struggle.

But he grew misty, at times, before her vision. She felt light-headed, for all the leaden agony of weariness that had crept into her legs. She was conscious of sharpening pains in her feet, unprotected by their broken shoe-soles, abraded by thorn and bramble, bruised by rock and stone. These pains seemed to boil up to her legs, and from her legs extend to her torso, and from her torso to steal on to her very brain.

She staggered a little, then recovered herself.

“The smoke seems to be getting thicker,” she complained, wondering how long she could hold out.

“The whole forest’s afire,” gasped Bronson. “We’ve got to get to open water.”

It was Bennie’s voice that spoke next, thin with exhaustion.

“Could the plane pick us up?” he brokenly asked.

“How’d it land?” demanded Bronson as he lunged on, intent only on getting out of the heavier timber that surrounded them. The acrid tang of the air had increased. And there was an ominous breath of warmth in the wind that was sweeping after them. Yet he slackened his pace when he noticed that the others were falling behind.

“We’ve got to hurry,” he warned, for already, out of the clouded valleys behind them, he could hear a faint and far-off mutter. And he knew what it meant.

“I’m—I’m not—not good for much more,” cried Bennie in a voice thick with desperation. A cow-moose, followed by a shambling and long-legged calf, loomed past them in the murk.

“Come on,” urged Bronson. “We’ve still a chance.”

They went on, wavering a little as they ran. The sky above the spruce-ridge behind them was filled with a writhing and billowing curtain of smoke crowned with striated streamers of yellow driven on by the wind. Lynn, as they splashed through a shallow stream, felt a longing to drop and wallow in its cooling current. Her parched throat ached for a drink from the root-tinctured water. But there was no time for such luxuries. The pain in her side, she noticed, was less acute when she pressed her hand tightly against it. But her first duty in life, she remembered, was to keep up with the ragged and loping figure in front of her. She must keep up with him, even though the band of pain about her straining lungs tightened until her breathing had to stop.

She felt sorry for Bennie, who hadn’t been hardened to such things. She glanced back over her shoulder, to call out an encouraging word to him. And then she stopped short, with a cry of alarm. For Bennie was no longer there, was no longer in sight.

“It’s Bennie,” she gasped as Bronson turned back to her and supported her quivering body with an arm about her waist.

They found him, beside the trail, fifty yards back. He lay on the caribou-moss with his eyes glazed and his body twisted with pain. He saw them stooping over him. But he made no effort to rise.

“Go on,” he gasped. “I’m all in.”

Lynn, dropping to the ground, knelt panting beside him.

“You mustn’t give up, Bennie,” she said, with a hand already under his shoulder. But she was unable to lift him.

“It’s my ticker gone punk,” he said with a valorous effort at levity. “I—I can’t go on.”

“What’ll we do?” asked Lynn. Her eyes, as she glanced up at Bronson, were wet with tears. But the tears, he remembered, were caused by the smoke-clouds drifting past them. Those writhing and twisting curtains of gray, he noticed, were coming in heavier gusts. The earlier crackle of sound behind them had increased to a mounting roar. And already, through the dark lacework of the spruce-tops, he could see a hundred leaping red flames. And no time was to be lost.

“I’ll carry him,” said Bronson.

He gave Lynn the rifle to hold as he swung the still protesting youth up on his back, the ragged and sweat-stained back bent forward from the waist to sustain its weakly clinging weight.

“Quick,” he called as he caught the rifle from Lynn’s hesitating hand. He began to run, grotesquely stooped. He quickened his pace as a bright and wind-blown scrap of bark dropped in the dried bracken through which they were pushing. By the time they were out of the bracken again it was on fire. Behind them, as they went, they could hear the increasing roar and the occasional crash of a heavier branch as it fell. There was heat, actual heat, in the deepening blue haze that surrounded them. Bronson, with the salt sweat stinging his eyes, could not always be sure of his path.

“Is it far?” gasped Lynn, wondering when her heart would burst. But she stumbled forward, refusing to look up as a crimson brand flew crackling through the air and fell in a dead spruce that burst, a moment later, into a pyramid of writhing flame.

“No, not far,” answered Bronson.

If she doubted him, she gave no sign of it. But she knew, as that living wall of fire swept closer to them, it would have to be soon. Before long, she knew, she would have to give up. Yet she staggered on, her breast pumping with incredible quickness. It would not be pleasant, she mistily remembered, to lie there and let a living wave of fire sweep over one’s slowly scorching body. She must go on. She must.

But her legs were no longer under control. And her knees seemed without strength. She would fall, she knew, and not be able to get up. And that would be the end. She could fall and lie there, without crying out. And Bronson would never know.

She was arguing with herself, as she wavered on, that it would be good to rest, to rest at any cost, when she heard the cry of “Water!” break from Bronson’s parched throat. She thought, at first, that it was merely a cry of thirst from his overdriven body. But he croaked out again, triumphantly, as he staggered on: “The lake!”

She could see it before her, gray-green under the smoke-clouds that drifted above it. And her tired heart took courage. She wanted to feel water about her, to splash cooling showers of it over her hot skin, to float and wallow in it and let it soak into her thirsty bones. She wanted to feel the solace of it against her parched and burning throat. She wanted to see it between her and the roaring Hell so close behind her.

It was a little easier, she found, running down the rocky slope to the water’s edge. Her sense of contact with the earth seemed so remote that it was like falling. She stumbled and rolled on the graveled bank. Yet when a flaming and resinous brand fell on Bennie, where Bronson had dropped him, she knew enough to turn and beat the flames from the scorched coat-cloth. Then she crawled out to the lip of the lake, where she found Bronson knee-deep in the water, lashing two tamarack-boles together with his twisted-up blanket.

“There’s an island, half a mile out,” he huskily told her. “But this raft will only hold one.”

She had to moisten her throat with lake-water from her cupped hands before she could speak.

“Let Bennie have it,” she croaked. “I can swim.”

But he refused to let her swim. He ran back, to pick up his rifle and cache it in a rock-cleft. Then he showed her, as they pushed off, how she could rest one hand on the tamarack log and drift along with the raft. He swam at the end of it, paddling stubbornly into deeper water as the wind-blown brands of living fire fell hissing about them. A wolverine, swimming beside them, forged determinedly ahead and disappeared in the murk. Its course, however, was a few points to the north. Bronson, blinking after it, altered his own course a corresponding number of points. Man, he remembered, was without the forest-born instincts of that four-footed thing of fur. And to miss the island, he also remembered, might be fatal.

They went on for a long time. Then Bronson rested, and let the cool lake-water flow into his half-submerged throat, and paddled on again, disregarding the ache in his muscles. He called out once, to Bennie, warning him to lie still. Then he pushed on again, the water cold on his body but the blue-misted air warm on his face. He forged on, agonized stroke by stroke, until through the drifting smoke he caught sight of the low-lying island with its scattering of jack-pine. He called out to Lynn, at that, and rested again, and huskily told her that they were saved.

But she gave no sign that she had heard him. She remained equally silent as the raft grounded.

Bronson thought, for a moment, that she had lost consciousness. But when he bent over her, to carry her up to a slanting shore-rock mattressed with moss, she told him to take Bennie first. And before he could come back for her she had crawled up the bank, slowly and heavily, like a wounded amphibian.

The three of them lay there, silent as seals, grateful for the cleaner air that blew on their heat-scorched faces. They could see, under the drifting canopy of smoke, the raging wall of fire that crept down to the lake-front, snatching up treetops in its red vortexes of fury. They could see it hesitate and divide and roll along the shore-line, volleying glowing embers into the blue-gray heavens as it went. They could see it advance, more remotely, on either side of them, and circle the vaguely defined lake, and unite again in the heavier timber behind them.

Bronson was the first to stir. He rose heavily to his feet and looked down at Lynn, who looked up at him, without speaking. But he seemed to find something reassuring in her glance, for he set about slowly but determinedly gathering fuel from the driftwood along the shore-line. He carried it to the cliff-base behind the slanting rock, where he stolidly piled it together. Then he searched through Bennie’s pockets, until he found his lighter.

He gathered more wood, when his fire was started, and untied his wet blanket from the raft, dragging the raft itself farther up the pebbled shore. Then he went to Lynn, and still without speaking, untied the blanket-roll looped over her shoulder. He frowned heavily, for he found her shivering with a chill. And that brought a new vigor into his movements.

He gathered still more wood and draped the two blankets before the flames, where they steamed in the still smoky air. Then he went back to Lynn. He silently took her up in his arms and carried her to the upper side of the fire, where she could rest with her back against the warm cliffside.

It was his intention to do the same for Bennie. But Bennie, resenting any such solicitude, drew away and struggled to his feet.

“I’m all right,” he quaveringly protested. Yet he stopped short, after his first uncertain step or two, his hand pressed close against his side. He crumpled down, a moment later, with a little moan of pain and helplessness.

Lynn, rousing herself, crept over to him. She thought, at first, that he had fainted. But he smiled rather wintrily up at her.

“I think I’ve strained a heart-valve,” he told her. “It—it hurts like Sam Hill.”

“We’re all right now,” she assured him. “And the air’s getting clearer. You must lie still.”

“But will that plane ever come?” asked Bennie.

Lynn’s eyes, at that, questioned Bronson’s.

“Of course it’ll come,” stoutly maintained the latter. But his face was troubled as he stared across the lake-water at the tiers of smoking stumpage. It looked as empty and desolate as a battle-field swept bare by shell-fire.

He said nothing more as he helped Lynn move Bennie closer to the flames, where he wrapped the impassive youth in one of the dried blankets, with a hot stone at his feet. Bronson held the second blanket out for Lynn, but she refused it.

“I’m all right now,” she protested. “But Bennie ought to have food.”

“We’ll manage that,” quietly proclaimed her scorched and stubbled rescuer.

“How?” asked the desolate-eyed girl.

“I’ve got a few feet of line here,” he explained, “and a couple of fish-hooks. That ought to bring us something.”

She watched him with a brooding eye, as he mounted the shore-cliff and disappeared from sight. She wondered, when she could no longer see him, why continuing small waves of desolation should beat over her tired and aching body. She sat beside Bennie, close to the fire, drying out what remained of her wet shoes. Her clothes, she noticed, were no longer steaming. But her muscles were stiff and sore. Even to move, she found as she wandered down to the lake-lip to drink, brought a battalion of unexpected pains to her legs. And she was glad to return to the fire and sit there, as torpid as the drowsy-eyed Bennie, and wonder when Bronson would come back.

He was away longer than she expected. For he had first to find and cut a pole with his sheath-knife, and then search under rotting logs for bait-grubs, and then discover a shore-rock from which to fish. But he came back with four thick-bodied black bass, which he scaled and gutted with his knife, and washed in the lake-water and set to broil over his bed of coals. Then he grubbed in the lake-shallows and dug out a hatful of starchy bulrush-roots, which he trimmed and washed and roasted on a flat stone next to the browning fish.

They ate, side by side, quietly and ravenously, like a trio of half-starved Indians. But they felt better, with food in their bodies. They could face the paling evening light without flinching, with the camp-fire flames on their faces and Bennie once more wrapped in his blanket. The wind had gone down. And the smoke no longer bothered them.

Bennie even reached for Lynn’s hand and squeezed it between his limp fingers.

“This is what you get,” he protested, “for trying to take me out of cellophane.”

Lynn’s smile was a condoning one.

“I think you’ve been pretty brave,” she proclaimed. “And you’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.”

Bennie forced a laugh. “I’ll feel better,” he countered, “when I can sleep on something softer than limestone.”

“It won’t be long now,” she asserted. But the smile died on her fatigue-hollowed face as she studied the paling light above the blackened spruce-hills.

“You must use this,” she heard Bronson saying to her. He was stooping over her, with the second ragged camp-blanket in his hands.

But that, she remembered, would leave him without covering. And she stoutly refused to take it. He had done enough for her, and more than enough.

It was not until she had lapsed off into a sleep of utter weariness that he crossed to her side. Then, very quietly and tenderly, he wrapped her in the blanket, watching her face, as he did so, to make sure she was not wakening. He could see, in the firelight that bathed her, the violet shadows under her eyes. He could see, too, where the tangled dark lashes lay along the dusky cheek. And he listened, contentedly, to her breathing, where the strained and assaulted machinery of life was so mysteriously renewing itself.

Lynn, as she watched Bronson impassively fashioning a paddle out of a hemlock-spar, was conscious of an odd duality of feeling. She felt old and battered in body. Brief and abysmal waves of desolation swept through her as she glanced at the blackened world that surrounded Half-Moon Island. And a returning sense of disquiet took possession of her as she studied the gray-faced Bennie, who had valorously declared he felt better after his night’s sleep, and had even smoked his last cigarette with a paraded contentment that did not entirely delude her.

Yet at the core of her being, as her gaze went back to Bronson so quietly weaving cedar-roots together into a small rope, reposed a thin but persistent sense of escape. The future, she knew, was unpredictable. They were still three castaways, in the midst of an empty and burnt-out wilderness. But terror, she found, could no longer tug at her heart. The reservoirs of emotion, in that respect, seemed to have been drained dry. She was in a twilight of lassitude where hope and gratitude became equally indistinct. She felt removed from the world. Life itself seemed an illusion, a thing of shadows through which she herself moved, an uncertain shadow. Even her waking hours, of late, had taken on an air of unreality, as fantastic as her troubled dreams when she slept. She felt very tired. She was not only tired, but tired of being tired. She knew a need for rest and renewal, for quieter ways where the healing forces of Time could flow over her battered spirit.

That, she assumed, was why she was finding it so hard to appear grateful to Bronson. He had fought for her and helped her in her weakness. He had come back to her, in her hour of need. He had saved her.

But the softer moods of life, she vaguely discerned, did not flower on the fields of violence. Exaltation and exhaustion did not run together. Nor was there room for tenderness where the winds of danger blew strong. And Bronson himself impressed her as strangely self-immured and remote as he tied his two tamarack logs together with the rope of cedar-roots and took up his paddle. He was going back to the mainland, he had explained to her, to retrieve the much-needed rifle left there. He had sighted a cub-bear, on the far side of the island, and in that lay their one hope for fresh meat. His voice, as he pushed off on his precarious raft, sounded heavily listless when he called back to her to keep their camp-fire burning, in case a plane should pass overhead.

She was sorry, in a way, to see him go. There was something sustaining, she found, in the mere knowledge that he was near her. She needed him. She would always, she told herself, know that ghostly need for him. It would be a dull ache, like the ache of hunger, but more enduring and more difficult to combat. They had, she remembered as she watched him paddle slowly out into the open lake, been through a great deal together. Yet he looked anything but heroic, crouched on his half-submerged logs, crawling so ponderously out across the splashing lake-swells. He looked barbaric and Indian-like, a huddled thing of patches and rags, as he paddled stolidly away from her. An aura of pathos hung over his solitary figure as it diminished with distance and the twin timbers supporting him could no longer be seen.

Her gaze went on to the blackened pinelands, over which hung a floating dark mote which grew larger as she looked. Her ears caught a pulsing drone that puzzled her for a moment.

“It’s a plane,” she said aloud, wondering why no bigger surge of happiness should go through her as she watched it. But she sat impassive as its beat of power grew stronger. She watched it as it tilted and turned and bore down on Half-Moon Lake. She saw it bank and wheel, with a flash of sunlight on its fuselage, and fly back over the island from which the blue-gray column of smoke wavered up in the clear autumn air. She saw it turn still again, heading into the wind, and heel down on the lake-water, throwing up a twin line of spray as it lost momentum. It looked modern and majestic as the flashing propeller came to life again and the wide-spread wings taxied purposefully in toward the island, where it stopped again and a helmeted figure clambered down on a pontoon and poled slowly in to the shore-line.

Lynn could see the helmeted man leap into the shallows. She could see a second figure emerge from the cock-pit, a stalwart and thick-shouldered figure, as the pilot busied himself with the mooring lines.

It was Bennie who waved and called out to him. For the thick-shouldered man, Lynn saw, was Loren Stratton.

He was clambering across the shore-rocks, a little out of breath, his hands unsteady with excitement. And still again the listlessly watching Lynn nursed an impression of history oddly repeating itself.

“We’ve got you,” he cried in a hoarse shout of triumph. Then he stopped short, staring down at the two strangely quiescent figures.

“Are you all right?” he asked, with a frown of perplexity.

“Yes, we’re all right,” answered Lynn, wondering at the weakness that thinned her voice and the tremor in her body that kept her from rising.

The smile of triumph filtered out of Stratton’s broad face.

“You look bad, both of you,” he proclaimed. “What you need is food.”

He was bellowing to the helmeted figure beside the plane. Then his questioning eye swept the island and the curving lake-water and the blackened hinterland beyond it.

“It’s only by the grace of God you escaped that,” he announced. “And we had our own troubles getting out of it. But I said I’d find you. And I have.”

He looked at the camp-fire and the ragged blankets and the scattering of fish-bones at his feet. Then he turned to Bennie.

“Where’d you find her?”

Bennie declined to answer that question. He asked, instead, one of his own.

“How soon can we get out of here?”

“Right away,” proclaimed Stratton, “and then, thank God, your troubles will be over.”

Lynn was asking herself why Loren Stratton should look so adequate and full-blooded and well-fed. She wondered why she wrung so little joy out of seeing him there before her, ready to carry her back to the world where she belonged. She wondered, too, what Bronson’s thoughts could have been as he stood watching that ship of deliverance swing down into the lake.

Yet he was slow, she realized, in starting back to the island. And Loren Stratton, she suspected, would not be willing to wait long. He had a weakness for doing things in his own appointed time and in his own appointed way.

“You’ll feel better,” he was telling her, “after you have some hot coffee and sandwiches.”

“It’s Bennie needs help,” she explained. “He’s ill.”

But the wide-shouldered newcomer remained beside Lynn. He shook his head, solemnly, over her appearance.

“It’s a wonder you’re both not dead,” he proclaimed. “And you would have been, I imagine, in another day or two.” He glanced across the lake at the darkened tiers of spruce-hills. “But how’d you ever get here?”

It was Lynn who answered that question.

“Adam Bronson brought us,” she quietly asserted. And she had the expected satisfaction of seeing Stratton’s face abruptly harden.

“Where’s Bronson now?” he demanded. The helmeted pilot, who had come hurrying up with his food-hamper, poured coffee into a thermos-bottle top for her. But she insisted that it should be passed first to Bennie. And Stratton was compelled to repeat his question.

“He’s over on the mainland,” answered Lynn, “trying to find food for us.”

“And a fat lot he’ll find,” scoffed the well-fed man so well encased in leather and fur, “in a burnt-over country like that.”

“But he found it,” answered Lynn, “when we needed it most.”

She could see the steely look come into the ox-like brown eyes so narrowly regarding her.

“There’ll be no more of his bungling in this case.”

He turned abruptly to his pilot.

“The sooner we get back the better,” he curtly proclaimed. “You carry the boy over, Craig. And I’ll take care of Miss Everett.”

He noticed, as he stooped over the tight-lipped Lynn, that she shrank away from him.

“I’ll put you aboard,” he explained to her. She had gone through enough, he remembered, to overtax any woman’s nerves.

“But I’m not going aboard,” she told him. She was on her feet by this time, confronting him.

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“What are you going to do about Bronson?” was her counter-demand.

“Bronson,” he asserted, “no longer figures in this.”

Lynn’s shadowed eyes, touched with incredulity, were searching his face.

“You don’t mean that you’d leave him here?” she gasped.

Stratton’s movement was one of impatience.

“We’re overloaded, already. And if he’s the good woodsman he claims to be, he’ll come out about where and when he wants to.”

Lynn let her gaze lock with his.

“And you’re not going to take him out?” she questioned.

Stratton’s laugh was both harsh and brief.

“He wouldn’t come, if I wanted him.”

“But you propose to leave him here, without food or proper clothing? You’d leave him alone here, without help of any kind?”

Stratton, after considering that question, permitted his better nature to prevail.

“We can leave him some grub,” he conceded. He had come to know the look of steel that could show through the softness of the amber-flecked eyes. “Of course he’ll get food enough to see him through.”

“But there’s more than food,” Lynn reminded him, “to think of.”

Stratton’s movement, as he considered the two castaways, was one of impatience.

“The important thing, just now, is to get you and Bennie back to civilization. And your traveling, on this trip, is going to be altogether by plane, without people asking questions as we go.”

“I’m not afraid of their questions,” asserted Lynn.

“But the rest of us are,” proclaimed her rescuer. “And I’m going to side-step that rubbish. We’ll transfer at Managami to a Dominion Airways ship and then take an International from Montreal to the Newark Field. From there I’ll arrange to have you motored right through to your Mountain Lakes home. Or we may go by plane from Newark to the Rockaway Valley airport.”

“Thank God,” gasped Bennie.

But Stratton’s gaze remained on Lynn’s thin and half-averted face.

“Your father,” he continued, “went back to New York last night. I’ll wire him from Managami to have the Jersey house opened up and ready. We can keep you under cover there.”

“Under cover from what?”

“From the wagging tongues and the printer’s ink you seem to forget about.”

The gathering scorn on Lynn’s face puzzled him.

“You’ve got it pretty well worked out,” she contended. “But there’s one thing you’ve overlooked.”

“What?” he questioned.

“The fact that I’m not flying back with you,” was her quiet yet intent-noted reply.

Stratton’s eyes studied the ragged but valiant figure.

“You certainly can’t stay here,” he protested.

“But I’m going to,” she asserted.

“With whom?”

“With Bronson,” was the quietly decisive reply.

Stratton’s face clouded up. But he controlled himself with an effort. He stood silent, watching Craig as he carried the passive-bodied Bennie across the shore-rocks and lifted him into the waiting cock-pit. Then the wide-shouldered man once more confronted the mad woman.

“Lynn,” he said, “you’re not even thinking straight. You can’t, in the condition you’re in. And you’ll see things as I do, once you’re out of this wilderness.”

“But I’m going to stay.”

“That’s suicidal,” cried Stratton. “It’s not sane.”

“Yet I intend to stay.”

It was her quietness, more than anything else, that disturbed him. He harvested little encouragement from a second quick search of her face, the tanned and narrowed face with the obdurately curved lips and the quietly smoldering eyes.

“But how about Bennie?” he questioned. “Your own brother? Won’t he be needing you during the next few weeks?”

“There’ll be some one to take care of Bennie.”

Stratton’s gesture, at that proclamation, was one of patience perilously close to exhaustion.

“But no one,” he taunted, “to take care of your forest friend!”

That challenge left her quite unmoved.

“Take Bennie,” she announced. “But leave me.”

The broad and florid face above her lost a little of its color.

“I’m not going to leave you,” proclaimed Stratton. “You’re not being reasonable. And I’m not even going to listen to you.”

She saw the sudden determination in his face. And her own face darkened as she instinctively moved away from the cliff-shoulder behind her. His hand reached out, before she had taken her third step, and clutched at her ragged coat-collar, which parted under the strain, leaving her shoulder, where the brown merged into white, utterly bare. But he seized her in his arms, before she could break entirely away.

“This is cowardly,” she gasped as she fought ineffectually against his strength.

“It’s for your own good,” he panted, struggling to hold her foolishly striking hands down against her sides. “And you’ll agree with me when you get your reason back.”

But she gave no signs of agreeing with him. She writhed and twisted in his grasp, with small and childlike sounds of desperation, half moans and half gasps of hate, as she fought to free herself.

He was incomparably the stronger of the two. And he had no intention of releasing her. He held her close, in one long arm, until he could catch up a camp-blanket and wrap it about the impotently flailing small fists. But, even when thus imprisoned, she continued to resist him.

“Craig,” he called out over his shoulder, “give me a hand here. This girl’s lost her reason.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Craig as he came running up to them.

Lynn, by this time, was half-way out of the blanket again.

“She wants to stay here and starve,” panted her captor, once more imprisoning the flailing small fists. “She’s—she’s gone crazy.”

“I’m going to stay,” gasped Lynn.

“You can’t do that, ma’am,” said Craig. His glance at the unreasoning figure in its trailing rags was an understanding one.

“Help me aboard with her,” commanded Stratton. “And she’ll stay there, even though we have to tie her down.”

“It’s best to go quietly, ma’am,” argued the frowning Craig. “You’ll see, once we’re out, how it’s all for your own good.”

But she refused to go quietly. And they had their difficulties in getting her into the cock-pit and snapping the safety-belt about her still resisting body.

“I’ll manage, from now on,” proclaimed Stratton as he mopped a wet face with his free hand. “How are we for food supplies?”

“More than enough,” announced Craig.

The man of destiny, in his hour of triumph, could afford to be magnanimous. Drifting out from the mainland, on the far side of the lake, he could see an Indian-like figure squatted on a crazy raft made from two tree-trunks corded together. It moved slowly and awkwardly, like a plesiosaurus without a head, like something belonging to old and forgotten generations.

“Then take what we can spare back to that camp-fire,” was Stratton’s order to his pilot. “Leave it on an old blanket you’ll see lying on the rocks there.”

“But what’s it for?” asked the uncomprehending Craig.

“It’s for a bush-man,” answered the other, “who may be needing it.” And he noticed, not without satisfaction, that his captive’s struggles had practically ceased by the time the plane-engine roared into action.

She remained equally silent as they mounted and the receding black world seemed a dark-piled rug veined with threads of silver and spangled with splashes of blue, with here and there a film of lace where a lowland peat-bed still smoldered and smoked in the morning sunlight. They drummed on, heading southward, until the blackened forest-floor once more became a thing of green.

“We’re out of that hell hole,” exulted Stratton. “And out of it for good.”

But nobody heard him.

Bronson wakened early. His train, he saw, was coiling about the terra-cotta colored cliffs of the Hudson, dipping now and then into an echoing short tunnel and hurrying on through still sleeping towns. In the limpid-watered coves of the river, he could see anchored fishing smacks and motorboats and an occasional yacht. Familiar signboards accosted him, in their neatly lettered ugliness, from unfamiliar hillsides. He could see the Palisades, serried towers of purple rock and blue shadows, along the undulating Jersey shore. He could see factories and riverside wharves and a tug-boat hauling three lumber-laden barges. He could see chimney-stacks and gas-tanks and cliff-like apartment-houses on suburban hills. And he knew that he was getting home again.

A telegram was brought to him, at Harmon, by his car porter. It was from Lynn.

“Of course I’ll meet you,” was all it said.

It was enough, he told himself as he fought against a vague sense of disappointment. But his hands, he noticed as he shaved and dressed, were a trifle unsteady. And his excitement increased, for all the deliberateness of his movements, as his train rolled across the turbid and crowded waters of the Harlem.

He was in the City itself, he realized as he looked out and saw the shadowed canyons overhung by their thousand anonymous windows and roofs. It was his home. But it lay about him with a sense of unreality. It seemed a long time since he had beheld that million-footed hurry and heard that million-throated hum. The streets, as he passed them, became more crowded. But their tumult and fever tended to depress him. It seemed useless and self-frustrating. He had, in some way, lost step with it all. And as the onflowing train dipped into the final graveyard gloom of the tunnel beneath those hurrying feet, Bronson found himself fighting against a Laodicean feeling of rootlessness. Life had gone on and left him behind. He had been too long away. He felt oddly alone. And there would be sharp adjustments, he knew, before he was once more caught up by that frantic and hurrying machinery of living. He would have to learn how to run with the pack again.

Then he thought of Lynn. She too, he felt, must have faced the same disquieting ordeal. She too must have stood a little forlorn and lonely before that massed and massive urban army. It would be different, he knew, from the silences of the forest, from the straitened and simple ways of the northern wilderness. Yet peace, he contended, was not a matter of geography. One could encyst oneself with calm, even in the City. But he had a growing liking for quietness. He wondered if it wouldn’t be foolish, after all, to keep his rather ruinous old house in Waverley Place. And he was still wondering that when his train came to a stop and doors swung open and a line of red-caps formed beside a bank of hand-baggage.

He had expected, in his impatience, to step out of his sleeping-car and stand face to face with Lynn. But that, he remembered as he looked fruitlessly about the gloomy and vaulted train-tunnel for her, was asking a little too much. He knew a sense of strain, however, as he walked down the long aisle of concrete where pillars opened like mastodonic mouths and swallowed up hurrying truckloads of luggage. She would be there, he told himself, just on the other side of the iron-grilled gate, in the high and starry-roofed concourse with the beehive hum and the gallery that housed the little old Clinton engine beside the dwarfing big Mogul.

But he failed to find her there. He saw expectant faces ranged behind a barrier of rope. He saw a child shout and wave, a thin-armed woman reach out an arresting hand to a thick-shouldered giant. He saw greetings and happy smiles and bodies clasped briefly to bodies and arms linked possessively in arms, as the group shifted and turned and dispersed. But Lynn was not there.

His heart sank, in spite of the qualified expectations with which he had sought to armor hope. He looked anxiously about, with a more numbing sense of desolation taking possession of him as he stared into unresponding and unknown faces. A second incoming tide already flowed about him, impetuous and eddying as it went, the tide of early commuters pouring into the high-walled lock-pool that opened on the equally riotous flume-ways of the streets. They debouched through numeraled doorways and dispersed fanwise across the rotunda floor and boiled up stairways and ramps and lost themselves in their allotted byways. They impressed Bronson as extraordinarily determined and self-contained, intent on dim and undecipherable ways of their own. And he felt infinitely remote from them.

He was still standing there when his man Davis touched him on the arm. Davis, Bronson felt, seemed his one remaining link with that lost and ghostly world, Davis with his gentle old hound’s eyes and his sedentary pallor and his protuberant Adam’s apple that still nested uneasily between the indignant starched collar-points. But Davis, for once in his life, was a little flustered.

“You’re looking very fit, sir,” he ventured. He held in his hand a packet of telegrams and folded lettersheets, tied together with pink brief-tape.

“I’ve had three weeks of rather hard canoe travel,” explained the brown and lean-faced Bronson. But he was looking, with an abstracted eye, above the heads of the milling crowds about him. And Davis, when his master failed to betray the expected interest in his tape-tied sheaf of papers, held them more conspicuously before the abstaining eyes.

“These are the more important things, sir,” announced the opaque-eyed Davis.

“They’ll have to wait,” asserted the preoccupied Bronson.

Davis solemnly pocketed his papers.

“I’ve the car here, sir,” he said with equal solemnity.

“I’m not going home, Davis,” was the unexpected answer. “Not at once, at least.”

Davis hesitated as he gazed down at the baggage-checks thrust into his hand.

“There’s one thing, sir,” he finally ventured.

“What’s that?” asked Bronson, his mind on other matters. All his happiness in life, at the moment, seemed to hinge on the discovery of an oval and sun-tanned face with amber-flecked eyes.

“Lefty Phelan had me on the wire last week, sir,” Davis was explaining with purely delusive matter-of-factness. “He wanted you to know, if possible, about the Moretti Gang.”

The expected show of interest failed to manifest itself. So Davis’s manner, as he proceeded, became more honestly impressive.

“Moretti himself, sir, was murdered seven weeks ago. And two days later Wildcat Generoso was taken for a ride, as they express it. That was a bit too much for the authorities, and they got busy. The Faithful Four, you may be glad to know, are now all behind bars.”

Bronson’s glance remained a remote one.

“I found out about that in Montreal,” he casually explained. It was something already lost in the mists of the past. And what interested him, as present, was something far removed from the intrigues and enmities of underworld idlers. “I’ll call you up, later on, and let you know when to look for me.”

“Very good, sir,” answered Davis.

Bronson stood, desolately alone, in the high-vaulted and murmuring concourse. He stood there, still depressed by the flow of life about him. There seemed nothing companionable in the barricaded faces that so ceaselessly came and went before his unhappily restless eyes. He was merely a stranger in a city of strangers.

He wondered where Lynn was, why she was late. And he heard, as he wondered, a metallically stentorian voice announcing a train-departure. It was done, he remembered, by machinery, by tubes and electricity. But machinery, he felt, was converting city-life into something too complicated for comprehension. Even this gateway to a hive of sleepers and workers was too much of a maelstrom, with its train-level below train-level and its mole-run of bulb-lighted passageways and its tunnel bazaars and its pulsing elevators and its streets so cunningly turned up on end to make sky-scrapers. It became a hollow labyrinth where one was apt to miss happiness, just as he was missing Lynn.

Then he stopped short, with the frown gone from his face.

For Lynn was there, after all.

She was standing, perplexed and passive, at the fringe of a group of gesticulating foreigners whose voluble activities made her, by contrast, seem singularly immobile and statue-like. His first impression of her was a disturbing one of remoteness. She looked taller, too, than he expected. She was in a tailored suit of dark gray, with a silver-fox throw over the Flying-Victory shoulder where he had once seen a ragged blanket-roll. Her face was quite pale. He wondered as to what refining fires she had passed through, to lose so much of her tan in so brief a time. But the end, he decided, justified the means. She was so finished and lovely that it frightened him a little.

She saw him, the next moment, and her eyes became luminous.

He was a little awkward as he took her gloved hand in his. When she withdrew it, without speaking, he stared down at it, bewildered by its smallness. It had escaped him, until then, how slender her hand was. And how flower-like the face under the oblique dark line of the glistening green cocque-feathers that helmeted her head.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. They were both conscious of constraint. Her color even deepened a little as he studied her face. It made him think of magnolias.

“I wasn’t sure where to look,” he answered, disheartened at the inadequacy of his own words.

“I said I’d be waiting,” she reminded him. She spoke very quietly. But it was enough to start his pulses pounding again. They were moving, without quite knowing it, toward a broad stairway that divided and ascended again to the street level.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“I’ve a car here,” she told him. “And we’re going to motor up the Avenue to the Park.”

The Park, he remembered, was the fit and proper place for happy lovers to go. But he wasn’t as happy as he had counted on being. Life had done something to her, had lifted her up and carried her, in some way, calamitously out of his reach.

“And up in the Park,” she told him as he seated himself beside her in the pale azure sports-car with a distressingly complicated instrument-board and a great deal of nickel and upholstery about them, “we’re going to have breakfast at the Casino. All I gulped down, before I felt Mountain Lakes this morning, was a cup of coffee.”

“And after breakfast?” he asked.

“We have six hours all to ourselves,” was the quiet-toned but not unhappy reply.

That, to Bronson, sounded more promising.

“Then luncheon, at the Ritz,” he suggested, “just to get the moss off my table-manners.” And, as they turned into Fifth Avenue, she nodded her assent.

She drove, he observed, both easily and adroitly. But out of that discovery, oddly enough, he harvested a new and ghostly feeling of estrangement. She had seemed closer to him, in their other world, under the mottling sun and shadow of a northern birch-grove.

It was one of his recurring waves of desolation that gave him the courage to say what he did, when he spoke next.

“Are you going to marry me?” he asked.

She waited for the lights to turn from red to green. She even rounded a bus and cut in across a taxicab’s fenders before speaking, her eyes still straight ahead.

“Do you want me to?”

He laughed, for the first time.

“It’s more than that,” he proclaimed. “You’ve got to.”

She missed a limousine’s bumper by little more than an inch.

“That’s why you’ve got to come out and talk to father,” she said, still watching the road.

“Why your father?” he asked.

“It’s traffic rules, I suppose.” She came, unsmiling, to an abrupt stop. “One has to remember the red lights.”

“Is your father against me?” asked Bronson, conscious of the warmth of the body next to his. And it seemed a bewildering and beautiful and inexplicable thing, the softly radiating warmth of a woman’s body. It was something worth fighting for.

“He doesn’t understand,” was Lynn’s slightly retarded answer. “And Loren, of course, has given him only one side of the story.” She drove on in silence, for a moment or two. “I don’t know what to do about Loren,” she finally admitted. “He’s still hoping that time will bring reason back to me. He solemnly and firmly believes that what I went through up there rather affected my wits.”

“We’ll soon put him straight on that,” averred Bronson.

“But he insists that we’re still engaged,” said the girl at his side. “He’s still wondering why I haven’t the good sense to want him.”

“He would!”

“And father seems to be on his side.”

“But you’re going to marry me,” proclaimed the grim-jawed Bronson.

“I was waiting to hear you say that,” acknowledged Lynn. Her face remained grave as they swung into the constricted autumnal greenery of Central Park. She turned to him, for the first time. “Have you money enough to keep me?”

Bronson laughed again.

“We could worry along, I think.”

“But I’m extravagant,” she warned him.

“So am I,” he acknowledged.

“And I’ve turned into a terribly self-centered and frivolous female.”

“What have you been doing?” he asked, quite undismayed. He even laughed a small and comfortable laugh. It was unexpectedly pleasant, he found, to have somebody with whom he could be companionably commonplace. That, he told himself, was the true basis of friendship.

“I’ve been trying to get civilized again.”

His survey of her was an entirely approving one.

“You seem to have been eminently successful.”

“Only on the surface,” she said with the ghost of a sigh. “Something’s still wrong inside. Life, I find, is rather a lonely affair.”

“That,” he promptly proclaimed, “is something we’ll have to attend to.”

She smiled contentedly.

“Then you don’t hate me?”

“I love you,” was his low-voiced reply. “Only you frighten me a little, in all that flashing armor.”

Her hand went up to the cocque-feather hat, to make sure it was in place.

“That,” she explained, “was my antidote. I’ve been reverting to type, these last few weeks, and buying clothes enough to sink a ship.”

“You deserve them.” He remembered a sun-browned figure, in ragged and smoke-stained doeskin, sitting solitary and self-immured beside a pineland camp-fire.

“Loren suspects it’s another evidence of my lunacy.” And she laughed, for reasons entirely her own. But her face sobered when Bronson asked about Bennie.

“Bennie’s a little better,” she told him. “But there’s a heart condition that can’t be trifled with. We’ve just bundled him off to Aiken. And this winter we’re going to keep him in Florida, on Aunt Barbara’s house-boat. He said, before he went, that you perhaps weren’t as ocher-tinted as he’d thought you were.”

“Has Bennie talked with your father?”

“He said that was your job.”

She felt Bronson’s glance on her face. She gave him her eyes, for a brief moment, but her lips remained non-committal.

“And you,” he questioned, “were too proud to do it?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said as they swept about the curving wide driveway, and crossed a bridge that spanned a bridle-path. It was a mild and mellow October-end morning, with no wind and a cloudless sky. There was a sense of completion, touched with serenity, in the autumn air, with a faint mist softening the towers and roofs of the city sky-line above the treetops. But there was something missing in the day’s sense of completion.

“Would you mind stopping here a moment?”

“What for?”

“So I can kiss you,” Bronson proclaimed.

The head helmeted in the iridescent cocque-feathers moved from side to side in negation.

“Not until you’ve talked to father,” Lynn said.

“I prefer talking to you.”

She smiled, but her face remained judicial.

“It’s a case,” she explained, “of a borrowed umbrella that has got to be returned.”

And Bronson realized, as the blue-clad arm of a policeman halted them at a cross-road with its waiting line of cars, that they were once more back in that older and regimented world where traffic rules were needed and made and remembered.

Bronson’s spirits sagged a little as he followed the liveried butler to the library door. The whole proceeding, he felt as that door was so solemnly and ceremoniously opened, was lamentably medieval and heavy-handed. And he felt a trifle afraid of himself, even in the face of Lynn’s light-noted warnings and his own grimly marshaled resolutions.

He must be patient, he told himself as he stepped into the wide and shadowy room where the late afternoon sunlight streamed through the mulberry-colored curtains. A hickory log burned briskly in a Caen stone fireplace above which a Revolutionary officer glowered down on tapestried chairs and serried book-backs of which he manifestly disapproved.

Bronson waited for the man at the mahogany desk to look up. He resented the wait, watching the gold-banded pen as it inscribed a final word or two and was put to rest on the silver horns of a massive and glistening ink-well. Then the wielder of the pen rose slowly and deliberately to his feet.

The eyes of the two men met.

Lynn’s father, Bronson saw, was tall and soldierly-looking, with prematurely whitened hair and the contrasting ruddied skin of a golf-player. His tired eyes were shrewd and not unkindly, but his mouth was grim. His frame, neither stalwart nor spent, had the same arresting back-thrust of the shoulders as his daughter’s. It made him seem a little inquisitorial and assured. His manner, for all its quietness, carried a note of power touched with austerity.

“Adam Bronson, I believe,” he said with a cool and non-committal detachment that did not add to his visitor’s happiness. He neither smiled nor proffered his hand; he merely motioned the studious-eyed younger man into a chair.

“You wished to speak to me?” said Bronson as he seated himself.

“On the contrary,” retorted the master of the house, turning abruptly on his hearth-rug, “it was you, I understand, who was to speak to me.”

That, Bronson realized, was rather a bad beginning. But he managed a smile.

“The preliminaries, I imagine, are not so important,” he averred as his eye wandered discreetly away to the book-lined shelves.

“They have, however, been extensive,” was the somewhat asperous retort of the older man, who remained standing. “We’ve had a rather difficult month or two, in an effort to confine all such discussions to our own family circle.”

The quiet smile still hovered about Bronson’s lips, though his color deepened a little. Nothing was to be gained, he realized, by any further beating about the bush.

“Then what am I to explain?” he asked.

Anthony Everett remained silent a moment. And Bronson, waiting for him to speak, fought uselessly against an accruing sense of the epochal.

“You may think me a trifle old-fashioned,” Lynn’s father finally asserted, “but I still have a reasonable regard for the amenities. And my daughter’s happiness and good name is still a matter of considerable importance to me. Yet as I see it, you have imperiled both.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Bronson, “you are not seeing it as you should.”

“Then I’m willing to be corrected,” was the unrelentingly acid reply. “I don’t know you, of course. I don’t understand you. But I’ve talked with Loren Stratton. And I’ve talked to my son Benson. I have also——”

“Have you talked with Lynn?” interrupted the younger man.

It was the older man’s color which deepened perceptibly at that question.

“I have,” he acknowledged. “But she declines, for reasons of her own, to discuss it.”

Bronson felt himself on surer ground.

“Have you ever asked yourself why?” he inquired.

“I’d prefer asking you.” And the asperous note was stronger than ever. “I’ve no wish, naturally, to go into the whole unsavory mess. But last summer, much against my wishes, I permitted my son and my daughter to go on a camping trip in the Canadian woods. While in those woods my daughter wandered away from camp and became lost.”

“Hopelessly lost,” amended Bronson.

“She had the ill luck,” pursued the other with a rising note of passion, “to fall into your hands.”

“And if she hadn’t,” asserted Bronson, “she would have been dead in twenty-four hours.”

The men measured each other, for a silent moment.

“I have felt, at times, that that might have been preferable,” proclaimed the indignant-eyed father.

“Then you are welcome to your suspicions,” cried Bronson as he rose to his feet. And that answering note of passion held the older man arrested for a moment. His gesture, as he fell to pacing the rug again, was almost a self-deprecatory one.

“As I said before, Bronson, I know nothing about you,” he resumed with achieved deliberation.

“Then perhaps I’d better explain just who and what I am. That may help a little.”

Anthony Everett held up an arresting hand.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but I’ve taken the trouble to inquire into your background. I’m not questioning that. I’ve even taken the trouble to read a book or two of yours.”

“Which didn’t, of course, meet with your approval.”

The older man’s smile was a frosted one.

“On the contrary,” he acknowledged, “I found them much more acceptable than your conduct.” He was pacing his rug again, grimly meditative. “And since we are speaking of conduct, I’ve no intention of entering into a debate as to what is decorum and what is not. Times change, I know, and conduct with them. The once exacting ritual of being a lady has been considerably modified. And the equally onerous task of being a gentleman seems to be manifestly lessened. But honorable behavior still remains honorable behavior. And it all resolves itself, apparently, into one question: Did you, against a woman’s will, coerce her into remaining in your forest camp?”

Bronson considered the question, and finally answered it.

“I’m afraid I did.”

“When she was helpless and dependent on your chivalrous impulses, or, rather, on your absence of chivalrous impulses?”

“She was quite helpless,” acknowledged Bronson.

The austere old mouth hardened into a new line of grimness. But the owner of the mouth, obviously, was making an effort to remain judicial.

“My daughter, I must remind you, was and still is formally engaged to marry our friend and neighbor, Loren Stratton. And Stratton, I must also remind you, was willing to risk his life in rescuing her.”

“I have my doubts about that,” Bronson said.

“About what?”

“About Lynn marrying Loren Stratton,” was the reckless defiant reply.

“But I have not,” was the equally firm rejoinder. “And I still have something to say about such things, archaic as it may sound to you.” He crossed to the fireplace, and stood with his back to it. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “It’s my daughter’s happiness I’m thinking of, at the present. All this has done something to her. I’m not going to any extremes, like Loren Stratton. I’m accusing you of only one thing, a selfish and unchivalrous act where a woman’s good name is concerned.”

Bronson’s laugh was not a happy one.

“Then why not let Lynn answer that?” he asked. “She’s a better judge, after all, than you or Stratton.”

“I’m afraid not.” And Bronson detected, for the first time, a latent note of frustration in the other’s voice.

“But suppose she’s already done it?”

That held the older man for a moment or two.

“Lynn, since this forest experience of hers, seems foolishly set on making her own decisions. But I’m not going to permit a passing mood to make a mess of all the rest of her life.”

Bronson realized that it was all as futile as he had feared. But he refused to give up.

“Might I ask Lynn to come here?”

“Nothing, I think, can be gained by that.” And the note of obduracy in the speaker’s voice was not to be overlooked.

“Might I see Lynn?” asked Bronson.

“I’m afraid not,” was the equally obdurate reply.

Bronson noticed how the shaft of sunlight, through the mulberry drapes, had wheeled from the waxed parquetry to the soft-toned hearth-rug.

“Then nothing, after all, has been settled,” he said as he observed through the wide-silled window a terraced lawn where two peacocks strutted between the boxwood hedges. And beyond that he could see a long-vistaed avenue of grass cut through a woodland, a tame and ordered woodland in nowise resembling the forested hills he had so recently known.

“On the contrary,” asserted the master of the house, “a great deal has been settled.” He reached for the bell-cord beside the mantel. “My chauffeur, of course, will see that you are taken to the station.”

It was dismissal, Bronson knew, but he refused to accept it. He was no longer thinking of himself. He was remembering that passion solved few problems and that the Pyrrhic victories of pride were often costlier than defeat. The steel went out of his voice as he stepped closer to the man beside the mahogany desk.

“Aren’t we going at this in the wrong way?” he asked with new and unlooked for humility.

“The questionable approach,” was the unrelenting retort, “seems to go back a considerable length of time.”

“But perhaps I could make that clearer to you.”

“I regard the matter as closed,” said Anthony Everett as he seated himself at his desk.

Bronson looked at him, the old feral flash tingling through his body. He waited a moment, to regain control of himself.

“Then I may as well tell you,” he said with the utmost deliberation, “that I’m going to marry Lynn.”

The hand that reached out for the gold-banded pen was not so steady as it might have been.

“Never with my knowledge and consent,” was the equally deliberate reply. . . .

Instead of a chauffeur at the door, it was Lynn herself who awaited Bronson, Lynn in the azure-colored car, her eyes troubled and her face pale with some inner and unrevealed emotion.

Her glance, as she signaled for Bronson to get in with her, was a quick and searching one.

“What is it?” he asked.

She remained silent as they wound along the shrubbery-fringed driveway and swept out through the gray-pillared lodge gates. Then she glanced again at the morose-eyed Bronson.

“It wasn’t easy, was it?” she said with a small smile of understanding.

Bronson’s brief laugh was a defensive one.

“It didn’t get us anywhere,” he moodily acknowledged. And he wondered, in his bitterness, at the look of triumph that crept into Lynn’s face.

“But you’ve at least done your part,” she protested. “You’ve faced the music, no matter what the answer was. And it leaves you free now. Can’t you see that?”

Bronson studied the clear-cut profile above the cream-colored polo-coat. She looked younger, more released and liberated, in the cream-colored sports-hat with the tilted brim that gave her an unexpected air of youth and jauntiness.

“But it hasn’t left you free,” he reminded her.

She laughed at that, a little recklessly. Her eyes grew sober again as she turned from the highway into a narrower road that wound between crimson and russet woodlands.

“It’s you who haven’t left me free,” she said in a slightly lowered voice. He thought, as he heard her, that he detected a belated note of accusation in that protest. He had been ruthless with her. He had enslaved her, against her will, even against his own will. And she had failed to understand why.

They crossed a wooden bridge and passed a pond where ducks floated white on mottled green water. Bronson saw an orchard, gnarled and old, and a stone chimney standing solitary above the charred walls of a cellar.

“Where are we going?” he asked. For he realized, by this time, that they were not on their way to the station.

“I don’t know,” answered Lynn. But the insurrectionary squaring of the fighting Everett under lip did not altogether escape him.

“This won’t be approved of,” he reminded her. For his bruised spirit still retained a little of its bitterness.

“Does it matter?” she challenged.

“Do you want it to?” he took his turn at asking, perplexed by the luminous light in her eyes.

Her smile was a flickering and uncertain one.

“Isn’t it a little late,” she said as she drew up at the roadside where three crimson oaks towered above them, “for you and me to ask questions like this?”

That question, he realized, might mean much or little. But it brought the past surging back on him. He sat silent, smothered in a fabric of tangled and poignant memories that time had failed to fade. They were not altogether unhappy memories. But they had come at a cost.

“I can’t help remembering,” he finally said, “how unhappy it made you.”

“What made me unhappy?” she asked with her familiar heat-lightning smile.

“My hunger for you.”

Her eyes, more lucid than luminous now, studied his face. But she remained silent.

“It was my wanting you,” he went on, “made me do what I did. It gave you all that hardship and suffering, all those things that a woman should never have to face.”

She was looking at the light above the hilltop.

“Perhaps I wasn’t as unhappy as you imagined.”

That quickened his pulse a little, but her quietness sobered it again.

“The trouble is, you don’t know how beautiful you are.” He saw her indifferent smile, but he went determinedly on. “Your father’s right, in a way. It was all selfish and unchivalrous. It was all wrong. But it seemed the only way I could keep you. And I wanted you so much I couldn’t think straight. And all I want, now it’s too late, is to win back your faith in me.”

“Is it too late?” she said, turning a little away from him. Yet he wondered at the tremulousness of her voice. He even leaned closer, the better to see her slightly averted face, as though to read there the real significance of her words. He noticed, for the first time, how her breathing had quickened.

He even saw, as his eyes rested on the proud and clear-cut profile, that her lips were trembling a little. And restraint was suddenly tumbled from its throne. A propulsion, stronger than reason, prompted him to take her in his arms.

“Lynn,” he whispered, but she did not answer him.

“Lynn,” he cried out as he held her passive body close to his own, “I love you. I always have loved you. And I always shall.”

She turned to him, at that, with a small gasp of surrender.

“I can’t live without you,” he said, stooping lower, until his lips met her unprotesting and slightly parted lips. And a star came out, over the hilltop, before he lifted his head. She lay there, with her quieted face against his shoulder, the amber-flecked eyes studying the apricot-colored sky, above the autumnal tracery of the treetops, that was slowly deepening into gold. The fading light filled the wooded hill-slopes with violet-blue shadows.

“I was so lonely,” she murmured, “waiting for you to come back. I only went through the motions of living.”

She reached for his face and drew it down to her own. “Kiss me,” she whispered.

She lay, dusky-lidded and abandoned, in his clasp. She lay there, mysteriously exalted and mysteriously contented, as evening deepened about them.

“I’ll always need you, now,” she weakly admitted. And still again he kissed the tremulous and yielding lips that had lost so much of their imperiousness. They seemed alone in a world that had fallen asleep in its course.

She aroused herself with an effort. A tractor, crawling homeward after its field-plowing, clattered past them in the twilight. She was reminded by that solemn and purposeful shadow, apparently, that she was still a child of the machine age that surrounded them, for her gesture, as she glanced about the hills where a light or two began to show in the darkness, was almost a helpless one.

“What are we going to do?” she questioned.

Both the voice and the form beside her became suddenly resolute.

“Will you let me take that wheel?” he demanded.

But before she had a chance to answer him he was out of the car and waiting for her to relinquish the driver’s seat.

“What are you going to do?” she asked as she moved over to make room for him.

He did not speak until he had switched on the lights and started the engine.

“I’m going to run true to form,” he told her as he backed and turned and went droning down the undulating side-road.

“What does that mean?” she asked. She no longer resented his masterfulness. Men were made like that, and women were fashioned and foredoomed to bow before it.

“It means I’m going to take what I want,” he told her, “when I have the chance.”

The altogether unnecessary grimness of his face caused her to smile. But she looked at him questioningly, for his immediate intentions were still far from clear to her.

“Where are we going?” she asked, with one hand on his arm.

“To Maryland,” he answered.

“Why to Maryland?”

“Because in five hours’ time,” he answered as they swung into the state highway and raced determinedly on, “an Elkton justice of the peace can marry us there.”

She seemed to be thinking this over as the wind and the starlight flowed against her slightly frowning face.

“I haven’t any clothes,” she demurred.

“You’ve been that way before,” he reminded her. And the drone, as his foot pressed down on the accelerator, grew into a whining roar.

“But I’m not sure you love me.”

“It’s time you were.”

Head-lights blinded and passed them. They rocked up a hill, took the dip and flowed down into darkness again.

“But, darling, you don’t listen to me.”

“Not until we’re in Maryland,” answered the man at the wheel.

They slowed down a little, to pass through a village street spangled with lights, and then went on again at the earlier breakneck speed.

“I’m not going,” she protested. But her slightly swaying body, he noticed, was pressing perceptibly closer to his own determined body.

“Then I’m abducting you,” he proclaimed. And she laughed softly as they raced on through the night.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Marriage by Capture by Arthur Stringer]