g! Don't you hear them?
Quick! We must try to hide."

At last he seemed to awaken from a trance; he started and began hurrying
with her, crowding by her, stumbling on ahead in the darkness, seeking
the cave's unfathomed depths of darkness. She heard him stumble and
fall; she ran blindly and caught him by the arm again, whispering
fiercely:

"You must be silent! If they once hear us we have no chance. If we are
still, maybe they won't find us."

After that he moved more guardedly. But still he crowded ahead; once in
his excitement, when she brushed against him and he thought that she was
going to get in his way, he shoved her violently aside. It was then
that Gloria, looking back, saw Brodie's great bulk outlined against the
snow outside. He came in; she saw his rifle; his figure was absorbed in
the shadows. She saw other men following him; how many she did not know.
One by one they bulked black against the daylight; one by one, as they
entered, they were lost among the shadows. She had bumped into a wall of
rock. Gratton was there, groping in all directions with his hands; she
could hear his quick, dry breathing.

They could go no further. This was the end. Brodie called out loudly,
his speech dripping with his habitual vileness; he shouted: "Gratton!
Better step out lively like a man now. We got you anyway." Then he began
to gather the scattered firewood; a match flared in his hand; his face
leaped out of the dark like a devil's. Or a madman's, a man's mad with a
rage which lusted for the killing of another man. Gloria's heart sank in
despair; she felt as though she were going to faint.

But all the time her hands, like Gratton's, had been groping. At the
moment when she felt that her knees were giving way under her, she found
where an arm of the cave continued, narrow, slanting upward steeply,
cluttered with blocks of stone. She tugged at Gratton's sleeve; she
crept into this place and felt him close behind her, crowding, trying to
press by her. She gave way briefly, felt him scrape past, and began
crawling, following. Again only a few feet further on she came up with
him again; once more he had come to the end of the tunnel. He was
crouching, flattened against the rock wall. They were in a pocket with
no outlet save the way they had come. She stood, turned toward the front
of the cave, and waited.

"Get a fire going, boys," Brodie's rumbling bass was calling. Assured
now of having run his quarry to earth, he t