entire attention was divided between the last footprint
and the next; she had none over for any other consideration whatsoever.
It was an extreme instance of the forcing of one faculty at the expense
of all the rest. Moya thought no more even of what she should say when
she ran her man to earth. She had decided all that before she reached
the hut. No pang of hunger or of thirst assailed her; excitement and
concentration were her meat and drink.

Yet when the end came her very first feeling was that of physical
faintness and exhaustion. But then it was an exceedingly sudden and
really terrifying end. Moya was dodging boles and ducking under
branches, the dapple-grey behind her, her arm through the reins, when
all at once these tightened. Moya turned quickly, thinking the horse was
unable to follow.

It was.

A gnarled hand, all hair and sinew, held it by the bridle.

XIII

BLIND MAN'S BLOCK

It was some moments before Moya looked higher than that hand, and it
prepared her for a worse face than she found waiting for her own. The
face was fierce enough, and it poured a steady fire upon the girl from
black eyes blazing in the double shade of a felt wideawake and the
overhanging mallee. But it was also old, and lined, and hunted; the man
had grown grey in prison; whatever his offences, there was rare spirit
in a last dash for freedom at his age. Moya had not thought so before.
She was surprised that she should think it now. The last thing that she
had expected to feel was an atom of real sympathy with the destroyer of
her happiness. And yet it was the first thing she felt.

"Please don't look at me like that," she begged. "I wish you no harm,
believe me!"

There was a pause, and then a first stern question.

"Who sent you here?"

"Nobody."

"Rot!"

"It's the truth."

"How else did you find me?"

"I saw you yesterday in the hut; you know that; you saw me."

"This is not the hut."

"No, but as you weren't there I looked for your tracks. And I found
them. And here I am."

Shaggy brows rose above the piercing eyes.

"I thought you didn't come from the bush?"

"Nor do I; but I have heard a good deal about tracking, this last day or
two; and I had luck."

"You've come all this way alone?"

"Absolutely."

"Then nobody else knows anything about it. That's certain. But they will
know! You'll be followed, and I shall be found!"

"I don't think so; they'll think I've gone somewhere else."

The