hat
vision of dark hair, dark eyes, and pale, beautiful face. Several times
he saw it with marvelous clearness, and each time he drifted away into
darkness again with the sound of a voice growing fainter and fainter in
his ears.

Then came a time of utter chaos and soundless gloom. He was in a pit,
where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing
oppression. At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale
and indistinct and a vast distance away. But it crept steadily up
through the eternity of darkness, and the nearer it came, the less
there was of the blackness of night. From a star it grew into a sun,
and with the sun came dawn. In that dawn he heard the singing of a
bird, and the bird was just over his head. When Carrigan opened his
eyes, and understanding came to him, he found himself under the silver
birch that belonged to the wood warbler.

For a space he did not ask himself how he had come there. He was
looking at the river and the white strip of sand. Out there were the
rock and his dunnage pack. Also his rifle. Instinctively his eyes
turned to the balsam ambush farther down. That, too, was in a blaze of
sunlight now. But where he lay, or sat, or stood--he was not sure what
he was doing at that moment--it was shady and deliciously cool. The
green of the cedar and spruce and balsam was close about him, inset
with the silver and gold of the thickly-leaved birch. He discovered
that he was bolstered up partly against the trunk of this birch and
partly against a spruce sapling. Between these two, where his head
rested, was a pile of soft moss freshly torn from the earth. And within
reach of him was his own kit pail filled with water.

He 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 reform