Corn cakes, maybe. It ought to feel quite stuffed after the seven you
had for dinner."

"Six," I corrected.

"Seven," she insisted.

"But I know!"

"So do I," she laughed, "that you stole one from my plate when you
thought I wasn't looking."

"I needed that one."

"I never doubted it," she agreed.

Wild words again sprang to my lips, but this time I ruthlessly strangled
them. Yet I wanted to say: "I took from you because you stole from me!"
And I wanted to ask--O, shades of suffering Dante, how I longed to
ask!--if her dear heart were hungering, too, that she should have needed
my own to feed it!--if that were her excuse for thievery!

But already I had overstepped my resolution, although not feeling
desperately contrite about it after the sleight-of-hand way that a
declaration of love had been changed into the accusation of filching a
corn cake. Yet it had been a narrow escape and I thanked my gods for the
chance of pulling up, of again getting the right perspective.

To tell her anything at all before Echochee came would be the act of an
utterly selfish cad, for if she did not want my love--and there was
little enough reason to suppose that she did--her position would be
intolerable. In such an eventuality never again could we sit beside the
fort on nights like this, no longer would she want a cleared path
leading to her bailiwick. We would be as two estranged creatures doomed
to live near yet apart; each a daily witness of the other's unhappiness;
neither able by word or deed to give relief. Ah, I was glad she did not
even suspect that I cared a whit for her! I lit my pipe and in moody
silence smoked.

A pipe stem is a safe thing for man to grip his teeth upon when silence
is a virtue. Here in our forest I was master, the undisputed superior
force; and I wondered with a fascinating wonder how that ancestor, who
climbed down from his tree at nightfall, would have been greeting her! I
visualized his cunning face, now peering at me through the ages, leering
at me with bared tusks, bidding me take what was my own by right of
might! I felt the savage splendor of it. The wildness of this place, its
solitude, its distance from mankind, supported me. The cry of a night
bird out on the prairie told that it, too, was preying, or being preyed
upon; and, as if being stirred by this, a panther sent his wail across
the night. I listened for a mate to answer, but she did not. A large,
whitish moth flying out of the sha