"Rest a little," he said. "I'm going into the woods a piece to listen.
Gone only a minute or so."

Madeline had to feel round in the dark to locate the saddle and blanket.
When she lay down it was with a grateful sense of ease and relief. As
her body rested, however, her mind became the old thronging maze for
sensation and thought. All day she had attended to the alert business
of helping her horse. Now, what had already happened, the night, the
silence, the proximity of Stewart and his strange, stern caution, the
possible happenings to her friends--all claimed their due share of her
feeling. She went over them all with lightning swiftness of thought. She
believed, and she was sure Stewart believed, that her friends, owing to
their quicker start down the mountain, had not been headed off in their
travel by any of the things which had delayed Stewart. This conviction
lifted the suddenly returning dread from her breast; and as for herself,
somehow she had no fear. But she could not sleep; she did not try to.

Stewart's soft steps sounded outside. His dark form loomed in the door.
As he sat down Madeline heard the thump of a gun that he laid beside
him on the sill; then the thump of another as he put that down, too.
The sounds thrilled her. Stewart's wide shoulders filled the door; his
finely shaped head and strong, stern profile showed clearly in outline
against the sky; the wind waved his hair. He turned his ear to that wind
and listened. Motionless he sat for what to her seemed hours.

Then the stirring memory of the day's adventure, the feeling of
the beauty of the night, and a strange, deep-seated, sweetly vague
consciousness of happiness portending, were all burned out in hot,
pressing pain at the remembrance of Stewart's disgrace in her eyes.
Something had changed within her so that what had been anger at herself
was sorrow for him. He was such a splendid man. She could not feel the
same; she knew her debt to him, yet she could not thank him, could not
speak to him. She fought an unintelligible bitterness.

Then she rested with closed eyes, and time seemed neither short nor
long. When Stewart called her she opened her eyes to see the gray of
dawn. She rose and stepped outside. The horses whinnied. In a moment she
was in the saddle, aware of cramped muscles and a weariness of limbs.
Stewart led off at a sharp trot into the fir forest. They came to a
trail into which he turned. The horses traveled steadily; the