k to me with the platform, to tell Miela and me
to come over the next evening to the end of the trail.

He and Anina meanwhile would keep close behind the men, and then when the
canyon was neared, get around in front of them, and bar their farther
advance. This would be easy since he could walk and run much faster than
they, and Anina could fly. He would drive them back out of the gorge, send
Anina to keep the appointment with me and bring me up to him with the
girls and the platform.

They reached the shore and landed within a few feet of where they had been
an hour before. The men were not in sight; nothing remained to show they
had been there, save pieces of cut cord lying about.

Anina now instructed the girls what to tell me, and in a moment more, with
the blanket and a few pieces of bread, she and Mercer were left standing
alone on the rocky beach. Anina was cold. He took off his fur jacket and
wrapped it about her shoulders.

She made a quaint little picture standing there, with her two long braids
of golden hair, and her blue-feathered wings which the jacket only partly
covered. They started up the trail together. It was almost dark in the
woods, but soon their eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, and they
could see a little better. They walked as rapidly, as Anina was able, for
the men had nearly an hour's start, and Mercer concluded they would be far
ahead.

They had gone perhaps a mile, climbing along over fallen logs, walking
sometimes on the larger tree trunks lying prone--rude bridges by which the
trail crossed some ravine--when Anina said: "I fly now. You wait here,
Ollie, and I find where they are."

She handed him the coat and flew up over the treetops, disappearing almost
immediately in the darkness. Mercer slung the coat around him and sat down
to wait. He sat there perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, staring up at the
silent, motionless treetops, and thinking all sorts of vague, impossible
dangers impending. Then he heard her wings flapping and saw her flitting
down through the trees.

"Very near, they are," she said as soon as she reached the ground. "A
fire--they have--and they are ready now to sleep."

They went on slowly along the trail, and soon saw the glimmer of a fire
ahead. "A camp for the night," whispered Mercer.

"It must be nearly morning now."

He looked about him and smiled as he realized that no light would come
with the morning. Always this same dim twilight here--and ete