ing themselves in his
brain convinced him. A woman had shot him. She had worked like the very
devil to kill him. And afterward she had saved him! He grinned. It was
final proof that his mind hadn't been playing tricks on him. No one but
a woman would have been quite so unreasonable. A man would have
completed the job.

He began to look for her up and down the white strip of sand. And in
looking he saw the gray and silver flash of the hard-working sandpiper.
He chuckled, for he was exceedingly comfortable, and also
exhilaratingly happy to know that the thing was over and he was not
dead. If the sandpiper had been a man, he would have called him up to
shake hands with him. For if it hadn't been for the bird getting
squarely in front of him and giving him away, there might have been a
more horrible end to it all. He shuddered as he thought of the mighty
effort he had made to fire a shot into the heart of the balsam
ambush--and perhaps into the heart of a woman!

He reached for the pail and drank deeply of the water in it. He felt no
pain. His dizziness was gone. His mind had grown suddenly clear and
alert. The warmth of the water told him almost instantly that it had
been taken from the river some time ago. He observed the change in sun
and shadows. With the instinct of a man trained to note details, he
pulled out his watch. It was almost six o'clock. More than three hours
had passed since the sandpiper had got in front of his gun. He did not
attempt to rise to his feet, but scanned with slower and more careful
scrutiny the edge of the forest and the river. He had been mystified
while cringing for his life behind the rock, but he was infinitely more
so now. Greater desire he had never had than this which thrilled him in
these present minutes of his readjustment--desire to look upon the
woman again. And then, all at once, there came back to him a mental
flash of the other. He remembered, as if something was coming back to
him out of a dream, how the whimsical twistings of his sick brain had
made him see two faces instead of one. Yet he knew that the first
picture of his mysterious assailant, the picture painted in his brain
when he had tried to raise his pistol, was the right one. He had seen
her dark eyes aglow; he had seen the sunlit sheen of her black hair
rippling in the wind; he had seen the white pallor in her face, the
slimness of her as she stood over him in horror--he remembered even the
clutch of her white hand