looked eagerly for the place.

To their great disappointment Mary had gone. However, Stonor pointed out
that it was a good sign she had been able to travel so soon.

They camped for the night at a spot where Mary had spelled the day
before. Stonor observed from the tracks that it was the breed woman who
had moved around the fire cooking. Mary apparently had been unable to
leave the canoe. It made him anxious. He did not speak of it to Clare.
He saw Imbrie examining the tracks also.

This camping-place was a bed of clean, dry sand deposited on the inside
of one of the river-bends, and exposed by the falling water. Stonor
chose it because it promised a soft bed, and his bones were weary. The
bank above was about ten feet high and covered with a dense undergrowth
of bushes, which they did not try to penetrate, since a dead tree
stranded on the beach provided an ample store of fuel. Clare's tent was
pitched at one end of the little beach, while Imbrie, securely bound,
and Stonor slept one on each side of the fire a few paces distant.

In the morning Stonor was the first astir. A delicate grey haze hung
over the river, out of which the tops of the willow-bushes rose like
islands. He chopped and split a length of the stranded trunk, and made
up the fire. Imbrie awoke, and lay watching him with a lazy sneer.
Stonor had no warning of the catastrophe. He was stooping over sorting
out the contents of Imbrie's grub-bag, his back to the bushes, when
there came a crashing sound that seemed within him--yet outside. That
was all he knew.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LAST STAGE ON SWAN RIVER.

When Stonor's sense returned the first thing of which he was conscious
was Clare's soft hand on his head. He opened his eyes and saw her face
bending over him, the nurse's face, serious, compassionate and
self-forgetful. No one knows what reserves may be contained in a woman
until another's wound draws on them. He found himself lying where he had
fallen; but there was a bag under his neck to hold his head up. Putting
up his hand he found that his head was tightly bandaged. There seemed to
be a mechanical hammer inside his skull.

"What happened?" he whispered.

She scarcely breathed her reply. "The woman shot you. She was hidden in
the bush."

Looking beyond her, Stonor saw Imbrie and the breed woman eating by the
fire in high good humour. He observed that the woman was wearing the
revolver he had given Clare.

"She disarmed me before