a bruised elbow,
not counting his torn clothing, they reached the goal.

There Marion made a wide bed against the exposed top roots of the
tree, filling the spaces among the pine boughs with moss, and placing
the two saddles at the head for pillows. Night had come before she had
completed this labor, and gathered another supply of dead limbs and
rotted logs, and cooked their meager supper. Then she wrapped Haig in
his blankets, and rolled herself in her own, and lay down at his side.
What with watching and replenishing the fire, and listening to
night-cries heard or imagined, and waking from restless slumber
chilled to the bone, she slept as little as on the preceding night,
and was glad of the dawn, which came peacefully enough on the heels of
a storm that raged on Thunder Mountain and sent a cold and beating
rain upon the valley.

This day brought its own bitter disappointment. After her bath in the
clear pool among the willows, and their mere taste of bacon and bread
in the name of breakfast, and a promise exacted from Haig, as a
condition of her leaving him, that he would do nothing of which she
would disapprove, she set out to get her deer. Rifle on shoulder, and
eyes alert, she skirted the edge of the wood along the base of the
cliff, through tall grasses of a golden green, among yellowing aspen
groves, and under a fair blue sky. But presently she plunged into the
thick of the forest, of which the trees towered to a height exceeding
that of any she had ever seen before. In their tops the breeze was
singing sonorously, but among their massive boles the silence was so
tense that twigs cracking under her feet sounded like gun-shots
echoing through the dim aisles.

For some hours she wandered fruitlessly in that dark labyrinth, not
only mindful of Philip's warning that she must not penetrate too deep
into its depth, but fearful on her own account of an encounter with
some such wild beast as that whose cry had terrified her. In time the
hollow indifference of the woods began to weigh upon her spirits,
which had been high and hopeful on her setting out. Worn out at last,
she was just on the point of turning back toward the camp, defeated,
when she came upon an open space, a lovely little glade, in which the
grass grew rank and green, unripened by the sun. She started to cross
it, but stopped suddenly, staring straight ahead. In the very middle
of the lush and silent glade, a young doe rose swiftly to its feet,
and l