n agile, tireless young thing, part of the swiftness
and silence of the woods -- part of the darkness, the sinuous celerity,
the ominous hush of wide, still places -- part of its very blood and
pulse and hot, sweet breath.

Even when she came out among the birches by Clinch's Dump she was
breathing evenly and without distress. She ran to the kitchen door but
did not enter. On pegs under the porch a score or more of rusty traps
hung. She unhooked the largest, would the chain around it, tucked it
under her left arm and started back.

* * * * *

When at last she arrived at the place of pines again, and saw the far,
spectral glimmer of Quintana's fire, the girl was almost breathless.
But dawn was not very far away and there remained little time for the
taking alive of a dangerous man.

Where two enormous pines grew close together near a sapling, she knelt
down, and, with both hands, scooped out a big hollow in the immemorial
layers of pine needles. Here she placed her trap. It took all her
strength and skill to set it; to fasten the chain around the base of the
sapling pine.

And now, working with only the faintest glimmer of her torch, she
covered everything with pine needles.

It was not possible to restore the forest floor; the place remained
visible -- a darker, rougher patch on the bronzed carpet of needles
beaten smooth by decades of rain and snow. No animal would have trodden
that suspicious space. But it was with man she had to deal -- a
dangerous but reasoning man with few and atrophied instincts -- and with
no experience in traps; and, therefore, in no dread of them.

* * * * *

Before she started she had thrown a cartridge into the breech of her
rifle.

Now she pocketed her torch and seated herself between the two big pines
and about three feet behind the hidden trap.

Dawn was not far away. She looked upward through high pine-tops where
stars shone; and saw no sign of dawn. But the watcher by the fire
beyond was astir, now, in the imminence of dawn, and evidently meant to
warm himself before leaving.

Eve could hear him piling dry wood on the fire; the light on the tree
trunks grew redder; a pungent reek of smoke was drawn through the forest
aisles. She sniffed it, listened, and watched, her rifle across her
knees.

Eve never had been afraid of anything. She was not afraid of this man.
If it came to combat she would have to kill. It never entered her mind
to fear Quintana's rifle. E