The Flaming Forest | Page 9

moved himself cautiously and raised a hand to his head. His fingers
came in contact with a bandage.
For a minute or two after that he sat without moving while his amazed
senses seized upon the significance of it all. In the first place he was
alive. But even this fact of living was less remarkable than the other
things that had happened. He remembered the final moments of the
unequal duel. His enemy had got him. And that enemy was a woman!
Moreover, after she had blown away a part of his head and had him
helpless in the sand, she had--in place of finishing him there--dragged
him to this cool nook and tied up his wound. It was hard for him to
believe, but the pail of water, the moss behind his shoulders, the
bandage, and certain visions that were reforming themselves in his
brain convinced him. A woman had shot him. She had worked like the
very devil to kill him. And afterward she had saved him! He grinned. It
was final proof that his mind hadn't been playing tricks on him. No one
but a woman would have been quite so unreasonable. A man would
have completed the job.
He began to look for her up and down the white strip of sand. And in
looking he saw the gray and silver flash of the hard-working sandpiper.
He chuckled, for he was exceedingly comfortable, and also
exhilaratingly happy to know that the thing was over and he was not
dead. If the sandpiper had been a man, he would have called him up to
shake hands with him. For if it hadn't been for the bird getting squarely
in front of him and giving him away, there might have been a more
horrible end to it all. He shuddered as he thought of the mighty effort
he had made to fire a shot into the heart of the balsam ambush--and
perhaps into the heart of a woman!
He reached for the pail and drank deeply of the water in it. He felt no

pain. His dizziness was gone. His mind had grown suddenly clear and
alert. The warmth of the water told him almost instantly that it had been
taken from the river some time ago. He observed the change in sun and
shadows. With the instinct of a man trained to note details, he pulled
out his watch. It was almost six o'clock. More than three hours had
passed since the sandpiper had got in front of his gun. He did not
attempt to rise to his feet, but scanned with slower and more careful
scrutiny the edge of the forest and the river. He had been mystified
while cringing for his life behind the rock, but he was infinitely more
so now. Greater desire he had never had than this which thrilled him in
these present minutes of his readjustment--desire to look upon the
woman again. And then, all at once, there came back to him a mental
flash of the other. He remembered, as if something was coming back to
him out of a dream, how the whimsical twistings of his sick brain had
made him see two faces instead of one. Yet he knew that the first
picture of his mysterious assailant, the picture painted in his brain when
he had tried to raise his pistol, was the right one. He had seen her dark
eyes aglow; he had seen the sunlit sheen of her black hair rippling in
the wind; he had seen the white pallor in her face, the slimness of her as
she stood over him in horror--he remembered even the clutch of her
white hand at her throat. A moment before she had tried to kill him.
And then he had looked up and had seen her like that! It must have
been some unaccountable trick in his brain that had flooded her hair
with golden fire at times.
His eyes followed a furrow in the white sand which led from where he
sat bolstered against the tree down to his pack and the rock. It was the
trail made by his body when she had dragged him up to the shelter and
coolness of the timber. One of his laws of physical care was to keep
himself trained down to a hundred and sixty, but he wondered how she
had dragged up even so much as that of dead weight. It had taken a
great deal of effort. He could see distinctly three different places in the
sand where she had stopped to rest.
Carrigan had earned a reputation as the expert analyst of "N" Division.
In delicate matters it was seldom that McVane did not take him into
consultation. He possessed an almost uncanny grip on the