“Just as you say, my lady. I think I heard him fall over back there.”

Once more the light turned. It wavered around the base of the bowlder, bobbed up and down among the jags and juts of the rock-heap, paused, swung slowly, came to rest on a furry huddle hanging limp over a misshapen stone. There dangled two powerful fore-legs, topped by massive shoulders, terminated by big paws. Between them hung a red ruin which had been a head.

“Whew!” whistled the man, studying the size of the legs and the breadth of the back. “What a brute! Never knew they grew so big. Lucky he was close enough to take those charges before they could spread. Otherwise that bird-shot would only have maddened him.”

[19]Turning, he picked his way back to the spot where the girl waited. He found her sitting up on a stone and frowning down at her left foot. For the first time he observed that her feet and the shapely ankles above them were bare. The left one was much swollen.

[19]

“He’s as dead as they make ’em,” he sang out cheerily. “We’re a bunged-up lot, aren’t we? Cat lost his head, your arm and foot are hurt, and my right shoulder’s kicked into the middle of my back from letting both barrels go at once. And even my gun is all mauled from falling on the rocks.”

“Ain’t that too bad?” The tone was amusedly sarcastic. “But I guess I’m the wust off—I’ve got more bad luck comin’.”

“How so?”

“I’ll catch hell when I git home,” was the naive explanation.

For a minute the man was speechless. Then he chuckled.

“So? Then why go home?”

The mountain girl’s answer was as straightforward as before.

“I don’t know any other place to go.”

Her sober face told that she spoke the gaunt truth, and that she dreaded the thought of returning to the house whence she had come. An awkward pause followed.

“Well, you may not get there to-night,” the man declared. “I doubt if I can find my way out of this mess of rocks before daylight, and you certainly can’t[20] go scrambling around on that bad foot. You’ll have to come to my 

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