Both recoiled; her face was bright with mounting colour and he seemed scared. Yet both knew it was not a caress; but she feared he thought she had invited one, and he feared she believed he had offered one.
He went about his affair with the theoretical roebuck in silence, picking up one of his pistols, loosening his knife in its sheath; then, without the usual smile or gesture for her, he started off noiselessly over the moss.
And the girl, supporting herself on one arm, her fingers buried in the moss, looked after him while her flushed face cooled.
McKay moved down stream with pistol lifted, scanning the hard-wood ridges on either hand. For even the reddest of roe deer, in the woods, seem to be amazingly invisible unless they move.
The stream dashed through shadow and sun-spot, splashing a sparkling way straight into the wilderness of Les Errues; and along its fern-fringed banks strode McKay with swift, light steps. His eyes, now sharpened by the fight for life--which life had begun to be revealed to him in all its protean aspects, searched the dappled, demi-light ahead, fiercely seeking to pierce any disguise that protective colouration might afford his quarry.
Silver, russet, green and gold, and with the myriad fulvous nuances that the, forest undertones lend to its ensembles, these were the patterned tints that met his eye on every side in the subdued gradations of woodland light.
But nothing out of key, nothing either in tone, colour, or shape, betrayed the discreet and searched for discord in the vague and lovely harmony;--no spiked head tossed in sudden fright; no chestnut flank turned too redly in the dim ensemble, no delicate feet in motion disturbed the solemn immobility of tree-trunk and rock. Only the fern fronds quivered where spray rained across them; and the only sounds that stirred were the crystalline clash of icy rapids and the high whisper of the leaves in Les Errues.
And, as he stood motionless, every sense and instinct on edge, his eyes encountered something out of key with this lovely, sombre masterpiece of God. Instantly a still shock responded to the mechanical signal sent to his eyes; the engine of the brain was racing; he stood as immobile as a tree.
Yes, there on the left something was amiss,--something indistinct in the dusk of heavy foliage--something, the shape of which was not in harmony with the suave design about him woven of its Creator. After a long while he walked slowly toward it.
There was much more of it than he had seen. Its consequences, too, were visible above him where broken branches hung still tufted with bronze leaves which no new buds would ever push from their dead clasp of the sapless stems. And all around him yearling seedlings had pushed up through the charred wreckage. Even where fire had tried to obtain a foothold, and had been withstood by barriers of green and living sap, in burnt spaces where bits of twisted metal lay, tender shoots had pushed out in that eternal promise of resurrection which becomes a fable only upon a printed page.