-- faintly smiling. At _what?_

In a very low, passionless voice, Quintana cursed monotonously as he
gazed into the fire. In Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, he cursed
Clinch. After a little while he remembered Clinch's daughter, and he
cursed her, elaborately, thoroughly, wishing her black mischance awake
and asleep, living or dead.

Darragh, too, he remembered in his curses, and did not slight him. And
the trooper, Stormont -- ah, he should have killed all of them when he
had the chance. ... And those two Baltic Russians, also the girl duchess
and her friend. Why on earth hadn't he made a clean job of it?
Overcaution. A wary disinclination to stir up civilization by needless
murder. But after all, old maxims, old beliefs, old truths are the
best, God knows. The dead don't talk! And that's the wisest wisdom of
all.

"If," murmured Quintana fervently, "God gives me further opportunity to
acquire a little property to comfort me in my old age, I shall leave no
gossiping fool to do me harm with his tongue. No! I kill.

"And though they raise a hue and cry, dead tongues can not wag and I
save myse'f much annoyance in the end."

He leaned his back against the trunk of a massive pine.

Presently Quintana slept after his own fashion -- that is to say,
looking closely at him one could discover a glimmer under his lowered
eyelids. And he listened always in that kind of sleep. As though a
shadowy part of him were detached from his body, and mounted to guard
over it.

The inaudible movement of a wood-mouse venturing into the firelit circle
awoke Quintana. Again a dropping leaf amid distant birches awoke him.
Such things. And so he slept with wet feet to the fire and his rifle
across his knees; and dreamed of Eve and of murder, and that the Flaming
Jewel was but a mass of glass.

* * * * *

At that moment the girl whose white throat Quintana was dreaming, and
whining faintly in his dreams, stood alone outside Clinch's Dump, rifle
in hand, listening, fighting the creeping dread that touched her slender
body at times -- seemed to touch her very heart with frost.

Clinch's men had gone on to Ghost Lake with their wounded and dead,
where there was fitter shelter for both. All had gone on; nobody
remained to await Clinch's homecoming except Eve Strayer.

Black Care, that tireless squire of dames, had followed her from the
time she had left Clinch, facing the spectral forests of Drowned Valley.

An od