"And though they raise a hue and cry, dead tongues can not wag and I save myse'f much annoyance in the end."
He leaned his back against the trunk of a massive pine.
Presently Quintana slept after his own fashion--that is to say, looking closely at him one could discover a glimmer under his lowered eyelids. And he listened always in that kind of sleep. As though a shadowy part of him were detached from his body, and mounted guard over it.
The inaudible movement of a wood-mouse venturing into the firelit circle awoke Quintana. Again a dropping leaf amid distant birches awoke him. Such things. And so he slept with wet feet to the fire and his rifle across his knees; and dreamed of Eve and of murder, and that the Flaming Jewel was but a mass of glass.
At that moment the girl of whose white throat Quintana was dreaming, and whining faintly in his dreams, stood alone outside Clinch's Dump, rifle in hand, listening, fighting the creeping dread that touched her slender body at times--seemed to touch her very heart with frost.
Clinch's men had gone on to Ghost Lake with their wounded and dead, where there was fitter shelter for both. All had gone on; nobody remained to await Clinch's home-coming except Eve Strayer.
Black Care, that tireless squire of dames, had followed her from the time she had left Clinch, facing the spectral forests of Drowned Valley.
An odd, unusual dread weighted her heart--something in emotions that she never before had experienced in time of danger. In it there was the deathly unease of premonition. But of what it was born she did not understand,--perhaps of the strain of dangers passed--of the shock of discovery concerning Smith's identity with Darragh--Darragh!--the hated kinsman of Harrod the abhorred.
Fiercely she wondered how much her lover knew about this miserable masquerade. Was Stormont involved in this deception--Stormont, the object of her first girl's passion--Stormont, for whom she would have died?
Wretched, perplexed, fiercely enraged at Darragh, deadly anxious concerning Clinch, she had gone about cooking supper.
The supper, kept warm on the range, still awaited the man who had no more need of meat and drink.
Of the tragedy of Sard Eve knew nothing. There were no traces save in the disorder in the pantry and the bottles and chair on the veranda.