Chapter 16. Through The Woods

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_ CHAPTER XVI. THROUGH THE WOODS

The autumn quiet at Roya-Neh was intensely agreeable to Scott Seagrave. No social demands interfered with a calm and dignified contemplation of the Rose-beetle, _Melolontha subspinosa_, and his scandalous "Life History"; there was no chatter of girls from hall and stairway to distract the loftier inspirations that possessed him, no intermittent soprano noises emitted by fluttering feminine fashion, no calflike barytones from masculine adolescence to drive him to the woods, where it was always rather difficult for him to focus his attention on printed pages. The balm of heavenly silence pervaded the house, and in its beneficent atmosphere he worked in his undershirt, inhaling inspiration and the aroma of whale-oil, soap, and carbolic solutions.

Neither Kathleen nor his sister being present to limit his operations, the entire house was becoming a vast mess. Living-rooms, library, halls, billiard-room, were obstructed with "scientific" paraphernalia; hundreds of glass fruit jars, filled with earth containing the whitish, globular eggs of the Rose-beetle, encumbered mantel and furniture; glass aquariums half full of earth, sod, and youthful larvae of the same sinful beetle lent pleasing variety to the monotony of Scott's interior decorative effects. Microscopes, phials, shallow trays bristling with sprouting seeds, watering-cans, note-books, buckets of tepid water, jars brimming with chemical solutions, blockaded the legitimate and natural runways of chamber-maid, parlour-maid, and housekeeper; a loud scream now and then punctured the scientific silence, recording the Hibernian discovery of some large, green caterpillar travelling casually somewhere in the house.

"Mr. Seagrave, sir," stammered Lang, the second man, perspiring horror, "your bedroom is full of humming birds and bats, sir, and I can't stand it no more!"

But it was only a wholesale hatching of huge hawk-moths that came whizzing around Lang when he turned on the electric lights; and which, escaping, swarmed throughout the house, filling it with their loud, feathery humming, and the shrieks of Milesian domestics.

And it was into these lively household conditions that Kathleen and Geraldine unexpectedly arrived from the Berkshires, worn out with their round of fashionable visits, anxious for the quiet and comfort that is supposed to be found only under one's own roof-tree. This is what they found:

In Geraldine's bath-tub a colony of water-lilies were attempting to take root for the benefit of several species of water-beetles. The formidable larvae of dragon-flies occupied Kathleen's bath; turtles peered at them from vantage points under the modern plumbing; an enormous frog regarded Kathleen solemnly from the wet, tiled floor. "Oh, dear," she said as Scott greeted her rapturously, "have I got to move all these horrid creatures?"

"For Heaven's sake don't touch a thing," protested Scott, welcoming his sister with a perfunctory kiss; "I'll find places for them in a minute."

"How _could_ you, Scott!" exclaimed Geraldine, backing hastily away from a branch of green leaves on which several gigantic horned caterpillars were feeding. "I don't feel like ever sleeping in this room again," she added, exasperated.

"Why, Sis," he explained mildly, "those are the caterpillars of the magnificent Regal moth! They're perfectly harmless, and it's jolly to watch them tuck away walnut leaves. You'll like to have them here in your room when you understand how to weigh them on these bully little scales I've just had sent up from Tiffany's."

But his sister was too annoyed and too tired to speak. She stood limply leaning against Kathleen while her brother disposed of his uncanny menagerie, talking away very cheerfully all the while absorbed in his grewsome pets.

But it was not to his sister, it was to Kathleen that his pride in his achievements was naively displayed; his running accompaniment of chatter was for Kathleen's benefit, his appeals were to her sympathy and understanding, not to his sister's.

Geraldine watched him in silence. Tired, not physically very well, this home-coming meant something to her. She had looked forward to it, and to her brother, unconsciously wistful for the protection of home and kin. For the day had been a hard one; she was able to affix the red-cross mark to her letter to Duane that morning, but it had been a bad day for her, very bad.

And now as she stood there, white, nerveless, fatigued, an ache grew in her breast, a dull desire for somebody of her own kin to lean on; and, following it, a slow realisation of how far apart from her brother she had drifted since the old days of cordial understanding in the schoolroom--the days of loyal sympathy through calm and stress, in predatory alliance or in the frank conflicts of the squared circle.

Suddenly her whole heart filled with a blind need of her brother's sympathy--a desire to return to the old intimacy as though in it there lay comfort, protection, sanctuary for herself from all that threatened her--herself!

Kathleen was assisting Scott to envelop the frog in a bath towel for the benevolent purpose of transplanting him presently to some other bath-tub; and Kathleen's golden head and Scott's brown one were very close together, and they were laughing in that intimate undertone characteristic of thorough understanding. Her brother's expression as he looked up at Kathleen Severn, was a revelation to his sister, and it pierced her with a pang of loneliness so keen that she started forward in sheer desperation, as though to force a path through something that was pushing her away from him.

"Let me take his frogship," she said with a nervous laugh. "I'll put him into a jolly big tub where you can grow all the water-weeds you like, Scott."

Her brother, surprised and gratified, handed her the bath-towel in the depths of which reposed the batrachian.

"He's really an interesting fellow, Sis," explained Scott; "he exudes a sticky, viscous fluid from his pores which is slightly toxic. I'm going to try it on a Rose-beetle."

Geraldine shuddered, but forced a smile, and, holding the imprisoned one with dainty caution, bore him to a palatial and porcelain-lined bath-tub, into which she shook him with determination and a suppressed shriek.

That night at dinner Scott looked up at his sister with something of the old-time interest and confidence.

"I was pretty sure you'd take an interest in all these things, sooner or later. I tell you, Geraldine, it will be half the fun if you'll go into it with us."

"I want to," said his sister, smiling, "but don't hurry my progress or you'll scare me half to death."

The tragic necessity for occupation, for interesting herself in something sufficient to take her out of herself, she now understood, and the deep longing for the love of all she had of kith and kin was steadily tightening its grip on her, increasing day by day. Nothing else could take its place; she began to understand that; not her intimacy with Kathleen, not even her love for Duane. Outside of these there existed a zone of loneliness in which she was doomed to wander, a zone peopled only by the phantoms of the parents she had never known long enough to remember--a dreaded zone of solitude and desolation and peril for her. The danger line marked its boundary; beyond lay folly and destruction.

Little by little Scott began to notice that his sister evidently found his company desirable, that she followed him about, watching his so-called scientific pursuits with a curiosity too constant to be assumed. And it pleased him immensely; and at times he held forth to her and instructed her with brotherly condescension.

He noticed, too, that her spirits did not appear to be particularly lively; there were often long intervals of silence when, together by the window in the library where he was fussing over his "Life History," she never spoke, never even moved from her characteristic attitude--seated deep in a leather chair, arms resting on the padded chair-arms, ankles crossed, and her head a trifle lowered, as though absorbed in studying the Herati design on a Persian rug.

Once, looking up suddenly, he surprised her brown eyes full of tears.

"Hello!" he said, amazed; "what's the row, Sis?"

But she only laughed and dried her eyes, denying that there was any explanation except that girls were sometimes that way for no reason at all.

One day he asked Kathleen privately about this, but she merely confirmed Geraldine's diagnosis of the phenomenon:

"Tears come into girls' eyes," she said, "and there isn't anybody on earth who can tell a man why, and he wouldn't comprehend it if anybody did tell him."

"I'll tell you one thing," he said sceptically; "if Rose-beetles shed tears, I'd never rest until I found out why. You bet there's always a reason that starts anything and always somebody to find it out and tell another fellow who can understand it!"

With which brilliant burst of higher philosophy they went out into the October woods together to hunt for cocoons.

Geraldine, rather flushed and nervous, met them at Hurryon Gate, carrying a rifle and wearing the shortest skirts her brother had ever beheld. The symmetry of her legs moved him to reproof:

"I thought people looked that way only in tailor's fashion plates," he said. "What are you after--chipmunks?"

"Not at all," said his sister. "Do you know what happened to me an hour ago? I was paddling your canoe into the Hurryon Inlet, and I suppose I made no noise in disembarking, and I came right on a baby wild boar in the junipers. It was a tiny thing, not eighteen inches long, Kathleen, and so cunning and furry and yellowish, with brown stripes on its back, that I tried to catch it--just to hug it."

"That was silly," said her brother.

"I know it was, now. Because I ran after it, and it ran; and, one by one, a whole herd of the cunning little things sprang out of the hemlock scrub and went off bucking and bucketing in all directions, and I, like a simpleton, hard after one of them----"

"Little idiot," said her brother solicitously. "Are you stark mad?"

"No, I'm just plain mad. Because, before I knew it, there came a crash in the underbrush and the biggest, furriest, and wickedest wild boar I ever saw halted in front of me, ears forward, every hair on end----"

"Lord save us, you jumped the sow!" groaned her brother. "She might have torn you to pieces, you ninny!"

"She meant to, I think. The next thing I knew she came headlong, mouth open, fairly screaming at me; and I turned and jumped clean into the Gray Water. Oh, Scott, it was humiliating to have to swim to the point with all my clothes on, scramble into the canoe, and shove off because a very angry wild creature drove me out of my own woods!"

"Well, dear, you won't ever interfere with a sow and pigs again, will you?" said Kathleen so earnestly that everybody laughed.

"What's the rifle for?" inquired Scott. "You don't intend to hunt for her, do you?"

"Of course not. I'm not vindictive or cruel. But old Miller said, when I came past the lodge, dripping wet, that the boar are increasing too fast and that you ought to keep them down either by shooting or by trapping them, and sending them to other people for stocking purposes. The Pink 'uns want some; why don't you?"

"I don't want to shoot or trap them," said Scott obstinately.

"Miller says they pulled down deer last winter and tore them to shreds. Everything in the forest is afraid of them; they drive the deer from the feeding-grounds, and I don't believe a lynx or even any of the bear that climb over the fence would dare attack them."

Kathleen said: "You really ought to ask some men up here to shoot, Scott. I don't wish to be chased about by a boar."

"They never bother people," he protested. "What are you going to do with that rifle, Geraldine?"

"My nerve has gone," she confessed, laughing; "I prefer to have it with me when I take walks. It's really safer," she added seriously to Kathleen. "Miller says that a buck deer can be ugly, too."

"Oh, Lord!" said her brother, laughing; "it's only because you're the prettiest thing ever, in that hunting dress! Don't tell me; and kindly be careful where you point that rifle."

"As if I needed instructions!" retorted his sister. "I wish I could see a boar--a big one with a particularly frightful temper and tusks to match."

"I'll bet you that you can't kill a boar," he said in good-humoured disdain.

"I don't see any to kill."

"Well, I bet you can't find one. And if you do, I bet you don't kill him."

"How long," asked Geraldine dangerously, "does that bet hold good?"

"All winter, if you like. It's the prettiest single jewel you can pick out against a new saddle-horse. I need a gay one; I'm getting out of condition. And all our horses are as interesting as chevaux de bois when the mechanism is freshly oiled and the organ plays the 'Ride of the Valkyries.'"

"I've half a mind to take that wager," said Geraldine, very pink and bright-eyed. "I think I will take it if----"

"Please don't, dear," said Kathleen anxiously. "The keepers say that a wounded boar is perfectly horrid sometimes."

"Dangerous?" Her eyes glimmered brighter still.

"Certainly, a wounded boar is dangerous. I heard Miller say----"

"Bosh!" said Scott. "They run away from you every time. Besides, Geraldine isn't going to have enough sporting blood in her to take that bet and make good."

Something in the quick flush and tilt of her head reminded Scott of the old days when their differences were settled with eight-ounce gloves. The same feeling possessed his sister, thrilled her like a sudden, unexpected glimpse of a happiness which apparently had long been ended for ever.

"Oh, Scott," she exclaimed, still thrilling, "it _is_ like old times to hear you try to bully me. It's so long since I've had enough spirit to defy you. But I do now!--oh, yes, I do! Why, I believe that if we had the gloves here, I'd make you fight me or take back what you said about my not having any sporting spirit!"

He laughed: "I was thinking of that, too. You're a good sport, Sis. Don't bother to take that wager----"

"I _do_ take it!" she cried; "it's like old times and I love it. Now, Scott, I'll show you a boar before we go to town or I'll buy you a horse. No backing out; what's said can't be unsaid, remember:

"King, king, double king,
Can't take back a given thing!
Queen, queen, queen of queens,
What she promises she means!"

That was a very solemn incantation in nursery days; she laughed a little in tender tribute to the past.

Scott was a trifle perturbed. He glanced uneasily at Kathleen, who told him very plainly that he had contrived to make her anxious and unhappy. Then she fell back into step with Geraldine, letting Scott wander disconsolately forward:

"Dear," she said, passing one arm around the younger girl, "I didn't quite dare to object too strongly. You looked so--so interested, so deliciously defiant--so like your real self----"

"I feel like it to-day, Kathleen; let me turn back in my own footsteps--if I can. I've been trying so very hard to--to get back to where there was no--no terror in the world."

"I know. But, darling, you won't run into any danger, will you?"

"Do you call a hard-hit beast a danger? I've wounded a more terrible one than any boar that ever bristled. I'm trying to kill something more terrifying. And I shall if I live."

"You poor, brave little martyr!" whispered Kathleen, her violet eyes filled with sudden tears; "don't you suppose I know what you are doing? Don't you suppose I watch and pray----"

"Did _you_ know I was really trying?" asked the girl, astonished--"I mean before I told you?"

"Know it! Angels above! Of course I know it. Don't you suppose I've been watching you slowly winning back to your old dear self--tired, weary-footed, desolate, almost hopeless, yet always surely finding your way back through the dreadful twilight to the dear, sweet, generous self that I know so well--the straightforward, innocent, brave little self that grew at my knee!--Geraldine--Geraldine, my own dear child!"

"Hush--I did not know you knew. I am trying. Once I failed. That was not very long ago, either. Oh, Kathleen, I am trying so hard, so hard! And to-day has been a dreadful day for me. That is why I went off by myself; I paddled until I was ready to drop into the lake; and the fright that the boar gave me almost ended me; but it could not end desire!... So I took a rifle--anything to interest me--keep me on my feet and moving somewhere--doing something--anything--anything, Kathleen--until I can crush it out of me--until there's a chance that I can sleep----"

"I know--I know! That is why I dared not remonstrate when I saw you drifting again toward your old affectionate relations with Scott. I'm afraid of animals--except what few Scott has persuaded me to tolerate--butterflies and frogs and things. But if anything on earth is going to interest you--take your mind off yourself--and bring you and Scott any nearer together, I shall not utter one word against it--even when it puts you in physical danger and frightens me. Do you understand?"

The girl nodded, turned and kissed her. They were following a path made by game; Scott was out of sight ahead somewhere; they could hear his boots crashing through the underbrush. After a while the sound died away in the forest.

"The main thing," said Geraldine, "is to keep up my interest in the world. I want to do things. To sit idle is pure destruction to me. I write to Duane every morning, I read, I do a dozen things that require my attention--little duties that everybody has. But I can't continue to write to Duane all day. I can't read all day; duties are soon ended. And, Kathleen, it's the idle intervals I dread so--the brooding, the memories, the waiting for events scheduled in domestic routine--like dinner--the--the terrible waiting for sleep! That is the worst. I tell you, physical fatigue must help to save me--must help my love for Duane, my love for you and Scott, my self-respect--what is left of it. This rifle"--she held it out--"would turn into a nuisance if I let it. But I won't; I can't; I've got to use everything to help me."

"You ride every day, don't you?" ventured the other woman timidly.

"Before breakfast. That helps. I wish I had a vicious horse to break. I wish there was rough water where canoes ought not to go!" she exclaimed fiercely. "I need something of that sort."

"You drove Scott's Blue Racer yesterday so fast that Felix came to me about it," said Kathleen gently.

Geraldine laughed. "It couldn't go fast enough, dear; that was the only trouble." Then, serious and wistful: "If I could only have Duane.... Don't be alarmed; I can't--yet. But if I only could have him now! You see, his life is already very full; his work is absorbing him. It would absorb me. I don't know anything about it technically, but it interests me. If I could only have him now; think about him every second of the day--to keep me from myself----"

She checked herself; suddenly her eyes filled, her lip quivered:

"I want him now!" she said desperately. "He could save me; I know it! I want him now--his love, his arms to keep me safe at night! I want him to love me--_love_ me! Oh, Kathleen! if I could only have him!"

A delicate colour tinted Kathleen's face; her ears shrank from the girl's low-voiced cry, with its glimmer of a passion scarcely understood.

Long, long, the memory of his embrace had tormented her--the feeling of happy safety she had in his arms--the contact that thrilled almost past endurance, yet filled her with a glorious and splendid strength--that set wild pulses beating, wild blood leaping in her veins--that aroused her very soul to meet his lips and heed his words and be what his behest would have her.

And the memory of it now possessed her so that she stood straight and slim and tall, trembling in the forest path, and her dark eyes looked into Kathleen's with a strange, fiery glimmer of pride:

"I need him, but I love him too well to take him. Can I do more for him than that?"

"Oh, my darling, my darling," said Kathleen brokenly, "if you believe that he can save you--if you really feel that he can----"

"I am trying to save myself--I am trying." She turned and looked off through the forest, a straight, slender shape in the moving shadows of the leaves.

"But if he could really help you--if you truly believe it, dear, I--I don't know whether you might not venture--now----"

"No, dear." She slowly closed her eyes, remained motionless for a moment, drew a deep, long breath, and looked up through the sunlit branches overhead.

"I've got to be fair to him," she said aloud to herself; "I must give myself to him as I ought to be, or not at all.... That is settled."

She turned to Kathleen and took her hand:

"Come on, fellow-pilgrim," she said with an effort to smile. "My cowardice is over for the present."

A few steps forward they sighted Scott coming back. He was unusually red in the face and rather excited, and he flourished a stick.

"Of all the infernal impudence!" he said. "What do you think has happened to me? I saw a wild boar back there--not a very big one--and he came out into the trail ahead, and I kept straight on, thinking he'd hear me and run. And I'm blessed if the brute didn't whirl around and roughen up, and clatter his tusks until I actually had to come to a halt!"

"I don't want to walk in these woods any more," said Kathleen with sudden conviction. "Please come home, all of us."

"Nonsense," he said. "I won't stand for being hustled out of my own woods. Give me that rifle, Geraldine."

"I certainly will not," she said, smiling.

"What! Why not?"

"Because it rather looks as though I'm about to win my bet with you," observed Geraldine. "Please show me your boar, Scott." And she threw a cartridge into the magazine and started forward.

"Don't let her!" pleaded Kathleen. "Scott, it's ridiculous to let that child do such silly things----"

"Then stop her if you can," said Scott gloomily, following his sister. "I don't know anything about wild boar, but I suppose straight shooting will take care of them, and Sis can do that if she keeps her nerve."

Geraldine, hastening ahead, rifle poised, scanned the woods with the palpitating curiosity of an amateur. Eyes and ears alert, she kept mechanically reassuring herself that the thing to do was to shoot straight and keep cool, and to keep on shooting whichever way the boar might take it into his porcine head to run.

Scott hastened forward to her side:

"Here's the place," he said, looking about him. "He's concluded to make off, you see. They usually go off; they only stand when wounded or when they think they can't get away. He's harmless, I suppose--only it made me very tired to have him act that way. I hate to be backed out of my own property."

Geraldine, rather relieved, yet ashamed not to do all she could, began to walk toward a clump of low hemlocks. She had heard that wild boar take that sort of cover. She did not really expect to find anything there, so when a big black streak crashed out ahead of her she stood stock still in frozen astonishment, rifle clutched to her breast.

"Shoot!" shouted her brother.

"Oh, dear, oh, dear," she said helplessly, "he's gone out of sight! And I had such a splendid shot!" She stamped with vexation. "What a goose!" she repeated. "I had a perfectly splendid shot. And all I did was to jump like a scared cat and stare!"

"Anyway, you didn't run, and that's a point gained," observed her brother. "I had to. And that's one on me."

A moment later he said: "I believe those impudent boar do need a little thinning out. When is Duane coming?"

"In November," said Geraldine, still looking vaguely about for the departed pig.

"Early?"

"I think so, if his father is all right again. I've asked Naida, too. Rosalie wants to come----"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't," he protested. "All I wanted was a shooting party to do a little scientific thinning out of these boar. I'll do some myself, too."

Geraldine laughed. "Rosalie is a dead shot at a target, dear. She wrote asking us to invite her to shoot. I don't see how I can very well refuse her. Do you?"

"That means her husband, too," grumbled Scott, "and that entire bunch."

"No; if it's a shooting party, I don't have to ask him."

Her brother said ungraciously: "Well, I don't care who you ask if they'll thin out these cheeky brutes. Fancy that two-year-old pig clattering his tusks at me, planted there in the path with his mane on end!--You know it mortifies me, Kathleen--it certainly does. One of these fine days some facetious pig will send me shinning up a tree!" He grew madder at the speculative indignity. "By ginger! I'm going to have a shooting party before the snow flies," he muttered, walking forward between Kathleen and his sister. "Keep your eyes out ahead; we may jump another at any time, as the wind is all right. And if we do, let him have it, Geraldine!"

It was a beautiful woodland through which they moved.

The late autumn foliage was unusually magnificent, lacking, this year, those garish and discordant hues which Americans think it necessary to admire. Oak brown and elm yellow, deep chrome bronze and sombre crimson the hard woods glowed against backgrounds of pine and hemlock. Larches were mossy cones of feathery gold; birches slim shafts of snowy gray, ochre-crowned; silver and green the balsams' spires pierced the canopy of splendid tapestry upborne by ash and oak and towering pine under a sky of blue so deep and intense that the lakes reflecting it seemed no less vivid.

Already in the brooks they passed painted trout hung low over every bed of gravel and white sand; the male trout wore his best scarlet fins, and his sides glowed in alternate patterns, jewelled with ruby and sapphire spots. Already the ruffed grouse thundered up by coveys, though they had not yet packed, for the broods still retained their autonomy.

But somewhere beyond the royal azure of the northern sky, very, very far away, there was cold in the world, for even last week, through the violet and primrose dusk, out of the north, shadowy winged things came speeding, batlike phantoms against the dying light--flight-woodcock coming through hill-cleft and valley to the land where summer lingered still.

And there in mid-forest, right in the tall timber, Scott, advancing, flushed a woodcock, which darted up, filling the forest with twittering music--the truest music of our eastern autumn, clear, bewildering, charming in its evanescent sweetness which leaves in its wake a startling silence.

Ahead, lining both sides of a gully deep with last year's leaves, was an oak grove in mid-forest. Here the brown earth was usually furrowed by the black snouts of wild boar, for mast lay thick here in autumn and tender roots invited investigation.

"Get down flat and crawl," whispered Scott; "there may be a boar or two on the grounds."

Kathleen, in her pretty white gown of lace and some sheer stuff, looked at him piteously; but when he and Geraldine dropped flat and wriggled forward into the wind, misgiving of what might prowl behind seized her, and she tucked up her skirts and gave herself to the brown earth with a tremor of indignation and despair.

Nearer and nearer they crept, making very little sound; but they made enough to rouse a young boar, who jerked his head into the air, where he stood among the acorns, big, furry ears high and wide, nose working nervously.

"He's only a yearling," breathed Scott in his sister's ear. "There are traces of stripes, if you look hard. Wait for a better one."

They lay silent, all three peering down at the yearling, who stood motionless, nosing for tainted air, listening, peering about with dull, near-sighted eyes.

And, after a long time, as they made no sound, the brute wheeled suddenly, made a complete circle at a nervous trout, uttered a series of short, staccato sounds that, when he became older, would become deeper, more of an ominous roar than a hoarse and irritated grunt.

Two deer, a doe and a fawn, came picking their way cautiously along the edge of the gully, sometimes flattening their ears, sometimes necks outstretched, ears forward, peering ahead at the young and bad-tempered pig.

The latter saw them, turned in fury and charged with swiftness incredible, and the deer stampeded headlong through the forest.

"What a fierce, little brute!" whispered Kathleen, appalled. "Scott, if he comes any nearer, I'm going to get into a tree."

"If he sees us or winds us he'll run. Don't move; there may be a good boar in presently. I've thought two or three times that I heard something on that hemlock ridge."

They listened, holding their breath. Crack! went a distant stick. Silence; nothing stirred except the yearling who had returned to the mast and was eagerly nosing among the acorns. They could hear him crunching the husks, see the gleam of long white teeth which one day would grow outside that furry muzzle and curve up and backward like ivory sabres.

Geraldine whispered: "There's a huge black thing moving in the hemlock scrub. I can see its feet against the sky-line, and sometimes part of its bulk----"

"Oh, heavens," breathed Kathleen, "what is that?"

Out of the scrub trotted a huge, shaggy, black thing, all head and shoulders, with body slanting back abruptly to a pair of weak hindquarters. Down the slope it ran in quick, noiseless, jerky steps; the yearling turned his head, still munching, ears cocked forward. And suddenly the monster rushed at him with a squeal, and the yearling shrieked and fled, chased clear up the slope.

"It's a sow; don't shoot," whispered Scott. "Look, Sis, you can't see a sign of tusks. Good heavens, what a huge creature she is!"

Fierce, formidable, the great beast halted; three striped, partly grown pigs came rushing and frisking down the gully to join her, filling the forest with their clumsy clatter and baby squealing. From the ridge the two deer, who had sneaked back, regarded the scene with terrified fascination.

Presently the yearling rushed them out again, then sidled down, venturing to the edge of the feeding-ground, where he began to crunch acorns again with a cautious eye on the sow and her noisy brood.

Here and there a brilliant blue-jay floated down, seized an acorn, and winged hastily to some near tree where presently he filled the woods with the noise he made in hammering the acorn into some cleft in the bark.

Gradually the sunlight on the leaves reddened; long, luminous shadows lengthened eastward. Kathleen, lying at full length, her pretty face between her hands, suddenly sneezed.

The next moment the feeding-ground was deserted; only a distant crashing betrayed the line of flight where the great fierce sow and her young were rushing upward toward the rocks of the Gilded Dome.

"I'm so sorry," faltered Kathleen, very pink and embarrassed.

Geraldine sat up and laughed, laying the uncocked rifle across her knees.

"Some of these days I'm going to win my wager," she said to her brother. "And it won't be with a striped yearling, either; it will be with the biggest, shaggiest, fiercest, tuskiest boar that ranges the Gilded Dome. And that," she added, looking at Kathleen, "will give me something to think of and keep me rather busy, I believe."

"Rather," observed her brother, getting up and helping Kathleen to her feet. He added, to torment her: "Probably you'll get Duane to win your bet for you, Sis."

"No," said the girl gravely; "whatever is to die I must slay all by myself, Scott--all alone, with no man's help."

He nodded: "Sure thing; it's the only sporting way. There's no stunt to it; only keep cool and keep shooting, and drop him before he comes to close quarters."

"Yes," she said, looking up at Kathleen.

Her brother drew her to her feet. She gave him a little hug.

"Believe in me, dear," she said. "I'll do it easier if you do."

"Of course I do. You're a better sport than I. You always were. And that's no idle jest; witness my nose and Duane's in days gone by."

The girl smiled. As they turned homeward she slung her rifle, passed her right arm through Kathleen's, and dropped her left on her brother's shoulder. She was very tired, and hopeful that she might sleep.

And tired, hopeful, thinking of her lover, she passed through the woods, leaning on those who were nearest and most dear.

Somehow--and just why was not clear to her--it seemed at that moment as though she had passed the danger mark--as though the very worst lay behind her--close, scarcely clear of her skirts yet, but all the same it lay behind her, not ahead.

She knew, and dreaded, and shrank from what still lay before her; she understood into what ruin treachery to self might precipitate her still at any moment. And yet, somehow, she felt vaguely that something had been gained that day which never before had been gained. And she thought of her lover as she passed through the forest, leaning on Scott and Kathleen, her little feet keeping step with theirs, her eyes steady in the red western glare that flooded the forest to an infernal beauty.

Behind her streamed her gigantic shadow; behind her lay another shadow, cast by her soul and floating wide of it now. And it must never touch her soul again, God helping.

Suddenly her heart almost ceased its beating. Far away within, stirring in unsuspected depths, something moved furtively.

Her face whitened a little; her eyes closed, the lids fluttered, opened; she gazed straight in front of her, walked on, small head erect, lips firm, facing the hell that lay before her--lay surely, surely before her. For the breath of it glowed already in her veins and the voices of it were already busy in her ears, and the unseen stirring of it had begun once more within her body--that tired white, slender body of hers which had endured so bravely and so long.

If sleep would only aid her, come to her in her need, be her ally in the peril of her solitude--if it would only come, and help her to endure!

And wondering if it would, not knowing, hoping, she walked onward through the falling night. _

Read next: Chapter 17. The Danger Mark

Read previous: Chapter 15. Dysart

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