Part 5 (1/2)

”You seem to be very secretive.”

”Is a girl more so than a man?” she asked smilingly.

Stormont smiled too, then became grave.

”Who else was here with you?” he asked quietly.

She seemed surprised. ”Did you see anybody else?”

He hesitated, flushed, pointed down at the wet sphagnum. Smith's foot-prints were there in d.a.m.ning contrast to her own. Worse than that, Smith's pipe lay on an embedded log, and a rubber tobacco pouch beside it.

She said with a slight catch in her breath: ”It seems that somebody has been here.... Some hunter, perhaps,--or a game warden....”

”Or Hal Smith,” said Stormont.

A painful colour swept the girl's face and throat. The man, sorry for her, looked away.

After a silence: ”I know something about you,” he said gently. ”And now that I've seen you--heard you speak--met your eyes--I know enough about you to form an opinion.... So I don't ask you to turn informer. But the law won't stand for what Clinch is doing--whatever provocation he has had. And he must not aid or abet any criminal, or harbour any malefactor.”

The girl's features were expressionless. The pa.s.sive, sullen beauty of her troubled the trooper.

”Trouble for Clinch means sorrow for you,” he said. ”I don't want you to be unhappy. I bear Clinch no ill will. For this reason I ask him, and I ask you too, to stand clear of this affair.

”Hal Smith is wanted. I'm here to take him.”

As she said nothing, he looked down at the foot-print in the sphagnum.

Then his eyes moved to the next imprint; to the next. Then he moved slowly along the water's edge, tracking the course of the man he was following.

The girl watched him in silence until the plain trail led him to the spruce thicket.

”Don't go in there!” she said sharply, with an odd tremor in her voice.

He turned and looked at her, then stepped calmly into the thicket. And the next instant she was among the spruces, too, confronting him with her rifle.

”Get out of these woods!” she said.

He looked into the girl's deathly white face.

”Eve,” he said, ”it will go hard with you if you kill me. I don't want you to live out your life in prison.”

”I can't help it. If you send my father to prison he'll die. I'd rather die myself. Let us alone, I tell you! The man you're after is nothing to us. We didn't know he had stuck up anybody!”

”If he's nothing to you, why do you point that rifle at me?”

”I tell you he is nothing to us. But my father wouldn't betray a dog.

And I won't. That's all. Now get out of these woods and come back to-morrow. n.o.body'll interfere with you then.”

Stormont smiled: ”Eve,” he said, ”do you really think me as yellow as that?”