Then a stick cracked below in the darkness, and her signal, the shrill whistle of the marmot, rang out. His heart leaped, he gripped his axe and a stone for a down-throw; she would be hard-pressed to a surety, but why did the fool-creature make such a noise?--'Twas madness!
He hirpled to the lip of the rock-platform and craned over, peering down into the impenetrable dusk below, ready for action, listening, eye, ear and nostril at stretch for news of the whereabouts of his foes. But the only sounds were the scrape of his squaw's moccasins and her hardly-taken breaths. How heavily she climbed!--Was she wounded? She did not reply to his low-spoken questions. She was coming nearer, nearer; his eyes, accustomed to seeing in the worst of lights, could make out her bare unbandaged head and shoulders, her arms too, there seemed little the matter with what of her he could see. Her kaross was gone, he had seen it go, she was still encumbered with that silly bag of arrows, and the big bow-drill hampered her climbing. Drawing her breath in gasps, she reached the sill of the cave, crawled in and sate mutely panting, her eyes shining glassily in her head. She seemed unharmed; she was unharmed; it was wonderful--amazing! Now, what had happened? Why could not the creature speak? "What of the chase, Dêh-Yān?"
Still mute and with an open mouth drawn up from the teeth with the muscular contraction of extreme toil, she unrolled and laid out before him in the dusk--_One_--Two--THREE bloody scalps each with the top-knot of a brave,--raw, fresh-stripped.
Pŭl-Yūn caught his breath in with a harsh cry: "_Wah!--What?--How?--Where?_" but the woman squatting over her spoils did not answer. She had reached her farthest. She swayed, she leaned, she collapsed, she tumbled forward almost into his arms.
The man drew the bear-skin over her as she lay shuddering, whimpering. He marvelled to hear her long-drawn sobbing in the darkness. This was new indeed; never had he known her to weep. Presently she relaxed and slept. He watched her slumber, gnawing a tortured lip, incredulous and convinced, exulting and humiliated, adoring and furiously jealous by fits. What would come out of this? 'Twas glorious! But 'twas absurdly disconcerting! Wonderful, no doubt, past whooping, but not to be put up with!