s arm.
Then the stranger left the stream, headed towards the woods.

Rynch jumped to his feet, a cry of warning shaping, but not to be
uttered. He padded after the other. There was plenty of time to stop
the man before he reached the danger which might lurk under the trees.

However the other was as wary of that dark as if he suspected what
might lie in wait there. He angled along northward, avoiding clumps of
scattered brush, keeping in the open where Rynch dared not tail him
too closely.

Their course, parallel to the woods, brought them at last to a second
stream, the size of a river, into which the first creek emptied. Here
the other settled down between two rocks with every indication of
remaining there for a period.

Thankfully Rynch found his own lurking place from which he could keep
the other in sight. The light points gathered, hung in a small
luminous cloud over the rocks. But Rynch had prudently withdrawn under
a bush, and the scent of its aromatic leaves must have discouraged the
sparks, for no such crown came to his sentry post.

Drugged with fatigue, the younger man slept, awaking to full day, a
fog of bewilderment and disorientation. To open his eyes to this
blue-green pocket instead of to four dirty walls, was wrong.

Remembering, he started up and slunk down the slope, angry at his
failure. He found the other's track, not turning back as he had half
feared, cleanly printed on level spots of wet earth--eastward now.
What was the purpose of the other's expedition? Was he going to use
the open cut through which the river ran as a way of penetrating the
wooded country?

Now Rynch considered the problem from his own angle. The man from the
spacer had made no effort to conceal his trail, in fact it would
almost seem that he had deliberately gone out of his way to leave boot
prints on favorable stretches of ground. Did he guess that Rynch
lurked behind, was now leading him on for some purpose of his own? Or
were those traces left to guide another party from the camp?

To advance openly up the stream bed was to invite discovery. Rynch
surveyed the nearer bank. Clumps of small trees and high growing
bushes dotted that expanse, an ideal cover.

He was hardly out of sight of the bush which had sheltered him when he
heard the coughing roar of a water-cat. And the feline was attacking
an enemy, enraged to the pitch of vocal frenzy. Rynch ran a zigzag
course from one clump of bush to the next. That sound