in to the
green fringe of the Little MacLeod. He knew that his senses had
tricked him as one's senses are so prone to do; that she had merely
stepped into sight from behind a shoulder of blackened cliff; that the
most brilliantly coloured rainbow is just so much sunlight and water.
And he knew, too, that she would have to pass close to him on her way
back to the Settlement unless she went to considerable effort to avoid
him.

He saw her shadow upon a patch of snow in the trail where the rock
protected it. He did not turn his head. He heard her step, knew when
it had stopped and her shadow had grown motionless. She was not ten
paces from him.

Stubbornly he ignored the silent challenge of her pausing. With slope
shoulders he sat motionless upon his rock, his face turned toward the
Little MacLeod, his freshly relighted pipe going calmly. Yet he was
aware, both from the faint sound of her tread upon the soft ground and
from her shadow, cast athwart the path, that she had come on another
couple of steps, that she had stopped again, that her gaze was now no
doubt concerned with his profile. He did not seek to make it the less
harsh, to soften the expression of bitterness and uncouth hardness
which his bit of a mirror had shown him in the dugout. He found that
without turning to see he could remember just what her eyes looked
like. And he had seen them only once and that when his chief concern
was a bullet hole in his side.

While Drennen drew five or six slow puffs at his pipe neither he nor
the girl moved. Then again she drew a pace nearer, again stopped. He
sent his eyes stubbornly up and down the willow fringed banks of the
Little MacLeod. His thought, used to obeying that thing apart, his
will, concerned itself with the question of just where the gold seekers
were driving their fools' search for his gold.

Stubbornness in the man had met a stubbornness no less in the girl.
Though his attitude might not be misread she refused to heed it. He
had half expected her to go on, and was idly looking for a shrug of the
shadow's shoulders and then a straightening of them as she went past;
he half expected her to address him with some commonplace remark. He
had not thought to have her stand there and laugh at him.

CHAPTER VII

"A PRINCESS SENT TO PACK WITH WOLVES!"

But laugh she did, softly, unaffectedly and with plainly unsimulated
amusement. She laughed as she might have done had he been a little