en them had become a thing which he had no desire to
break. In that silence, excused and abetted by the tumult of the storm,
he felt that a wonderful something was drawing them closer and closer
together, and that words might spoil the indescribable magic of the
thing that was happening. When he set Marette on her feet again, her
hand accidentally fell upon his, and for a moment her fingers closed
upon it in a soft pressure that meant more to him than a thousand words
of gratitude.

A quarter of a mile beyond the poplar thicket they came to the edge of
the spruce and cedar timber, and Soon the thick walls of the forest
shut them in, sheltering them from the wind, but the blackness was even
more like that of a bottomless pit. Kent had noticed that the thunder
and lightning were drifting steadily eastward, and now the occasional
flashes of electrical fire scarcely illumined the trail ahead of them.
The rain was not beating so fiercely. They could hear the wail of the
spruce and cedar tops and the slush of their boots in mud and water. An
interval came, where the spruce-tops met overhead, when it was almost
calm. It was then that Kent threw out of him a great, deep breath and
laughed joyously and exultantly.

"Are you wet, little Gray Goose?"

"Only outside, Big Otter. My feathers have kept me dry."

Her voice had a trembling, half-sobbing, half-rejoicing note in it. It
was not the voice of one who had recently killed a man. In it was a
pathos which Kent knew she was trying to hide behind brave words. Her
hands clung to the arm of his rubber slicker even as they stood there,
close together, as if she was afraid something might drag them apart in
that treacherous gloom. Kent, fumbling for a moment, drew from an inner
pocket a dry handkerchief. Then he found her face, tilted it a bit
upward, and wiped it dry. He might have done the same thing to a child
who had been crying. After that he scrubbed his own, and they went on,
his arm about her again.

It was half a mile from the edge of the forest to the bayou, and half a
dozen times in that distance Kent took the girl in his arms and carried
her through water that almost reached his boot tops. The lightning no
longer served them. The rain still fell steadily, but the wind had gone
with the eastward sweep of the storm. Close-hung with the forest walls,
the bayou itself was indiscernible in the blackness. Marette guided him
now, though Kent walked ahead of her, holding firm