"You seem to be very secretive."
"Is a girl more so than a man?" she asked smilingly.
Stormont smiled too, then became grave.
"Who else was here with you?" he asked quietly.
She seemed surprised. "Did you see anybody else?"
He hesitated, flushed, pointed down at the wet sphagnum. Smith"s foot-prints were there in d.a.m.ning 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 pa.s.sive, 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. n.o.body"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, pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d!" 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 G.o.d"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 pa.s.sed 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.