He hesitated, flushed, pointed down at the wet sphagnum. Smith's
foot-prints were there in damning 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 passive, 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. Nobody'll interfere with you then."
Stormont smiled: "Eve," he said, "do you really think me as yellow as
that?"
Her blue eyes flashed a terrible warning, but, in the same instant, he
had caught her rifle, twisting it out of her grasp as it exploded.
The detonation dazed her; then, as he flung the rifle into the water,
she caught him by neck and belt and flung him bodily into the spruces.
But she fell with him; he held her twisting and struggling with all her
superb and supple strength; staggered to his feet, still mastering her;
and, as she struggled, sobbing, locked hot and panting in his arms, he
snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists and flung her aside.
She fell on both knees, got up, shoulder deep in spruce, blood running
from her lip over her chin.
The trooper took her by the arm. She was trembling all over. He took a
thin steel chain and padlock from his pocket, passed the links around
her steel-bound wrists, and fastened her to a young birch tree.
Then, drawing his pistol from its holster, he went swiftly forward
through the spruces.
When he saw the cleft in the rocky flank of Star Peak, he walked
straight to the black hole which confronted him.
"Come out of there," he said distinctly.
After a few seconds Smith came out.
"Good God!" said Stormont in a low voice. "What are you doing here,
Darragh?"
Darragh came close and rested one hand on Stormont's shoulder:
"Don't crab my game, Stormont. I never dreamed you were in the
Constabulary or I'd have let you know."
"Are _you_ Hal Smith?"
"I sure am. Where's that girl?"
"Handcuffed out yonder."
"Then for God's sake go back and act as if you hadn't found me. Tell
Mayor Chandler that I'm after bigger game than he is."
"Clinch?"
"Stormont, I'm here to _protect_ Mike Clinch. Tell the Mayor not to
touch him. The men I'm after are going to try to rob him. I don't want
them to because--well, I'm going to rob him myself."
Stormont stared.
"You must stand by me," said Darragh. "So must the Mayor. He knows me
through and through. Tell him to forget that hold-up. I stopped that man
Sard. I frisked him. Tell the Mayor. I'll keep in touch with him."
"Of course," said Stormont, "that settles it."
"Thanks, old chap. Now go back to that girl and let her believe that you
never found me."
A slight smile touched their eyes. Both instinctively saluted. Then they
shook hands; Darragh, alias Hal Smith, went back into the hemlock-shaded
hole in the rocks; Trooper Stormont walked slowly down through the
spruces.
When Eve saw him returning empty handed, something flashed in her pallid
face like sunlight across snow.
Stormont passed her, went to the water's edge, soaked a spicy handful of
sphagnum moss in the icy water, came back and wiped the blood from her
face.
The girl seemed astounded; her face surged in vivid colour as he
unlocked the handcuffs and pocketed them and the little steel chain.
Her lip was bleeding again. He washed it with wet moss, took a clean
handkerchief from the breast of his tunic and laid it against her mouth.
"Hold it there," he said.
Mechanically she raised her hand to support the compress. Stormont went
back to the shore, recovered her rifle from the shallow water, and
returned with it.
As she made no motion to take it, he stood it against the tree to which
he had tied her.
Then he came close to her where she stood holding his handkerchief
against her mouth and looking at him out of steady eyes as deeply blue
as gentian blossoms.
"Eve," he said, "you win. But you won't forgive me.... I wish we could
be friends, some day.... We never can, now.... Good-bye."
Neither spoke again. Then, of a sudden, the girl's eyes filled; and
Trooper Stormont caught her free hand and kissed it;--kissed it again
and again,--dropped it and went striding away through the underbrush
which was now all rosy with the rays of sunset.
* * * * *
After he had disappeared, the girl, Eve, went to the cleft in the rocks
above.
"Come out," she said contemptuously. "It's a good thing you hid, because
there was a real man after you; and God help you if he ever finds you!"
Hal Smith came out.
"Pack in your meat," said the girl curtly, and flung his rifle across
her shoulder.
Through the ruddy afterglow she led the way homeward, a man's
handkerchief pressed to her wounded mouth, her eyes preoccupied with
the strangest thoughts that ever had stirred her virgin mind.
Behind her walked Darragh with his load of venison and his alias,--and
his tongue in his cheek.
Thus began the preliminaries toward the ultimate undoing of Mike Clinch.
Fate, Chance, and Destiny had undertaken the job in earnest.