"Was it Jim Taggart who shot you in the back last night?" she demanded suddenly.
Now his eyes were keen and hard upon hers.
"I begin to think that he is, girl," he said shortly. "Why?"
He lumbered to his feet. Thor, knowing where he was going, barked and leaped ahead.
"Come, I'll show you where we pitch camp."
She looked about her. Mere madness to attempt flight now; he would bear down upon her before she had run twenty steps. And did she want to run just now? She had her own measure of curiosity.... Was it only that?... and she had, locked away securely in her breast, her absolute positive knowledge that she had nothing to fear at his hands. She rose and followed him.
Suddenly he swerved about, confronting her, his eyes stern, his voice hard with the emotion riding him.
"Madman I may be," he said. "Fool, I am not, praise God! Last night I heard; you could have chucked that rifle into Taggart's hands and could have gone free yourself ... and by now I'd be a dead man! But, glory be, there isn't a streak of yellow in your whole glorious being!"
The blood ran up into her face; it made her hot throughout her whole body. Praise, from him, to stir her like that! Her eyes flashed back angrily, for she was angry with herself.
"Come," he muttered. "Talk's cheap at any time. And I'm to show you where we make our first home."
With her teeth sharply catching up her underlip, she held her silence. He went on some two-score paces and stopped; with a sudden gesture he said:
"Here I've spent, God knows how many nights, when I had to be off by myself! No roof for us, girl, but who wants a roof with that sky above us?"
Here was a natural grotto which at another time would have made her exclaim in delight: a nook, set apart, thresholded in tender grass shot through with those tiny delicate blooms of mountain flowers. On one side a cliff, outjutting, thrusting forward a great overhanging shelf of rock which looked as though it must fall and yet which, obviously, had held securely through the centuries. Three big pine-trees, two of them leaning strangely toward the cliff, as though yearning to lean against the sturdy rock and rest there upon its iron breast. The whole ringed about by a dense copse of brush, thick as a wall and rearing high above her head. Almost a cave made of cliff and growing things, cosy and warm, with its opening fronting the stream which was never silent. Thor ran ahead into the dusky seclusion and barked his invitation to them to follow. A thick, dry mat, under Thor's feet, of fallen pine-needles.