when she had forgotten to save her strength and had gone over-fast.  She rested, lying on her back, her eyes closed.  She opened her eyes, she saw the stars, she rose and went on.  She had gone miles; how many she could not guess.  Always, after for a little while she had dropped down wearily, she rose again and went on; she learned that, though beaten down, one might rise again.  That was Mark King’s way; it would be her way.  Despite the rags about her boots her feet were soon dangerously cold.  She passed into the embrace of a forest of black trees casting blacker shadows.  Their branches seemed motionless, but they sang to her with hushed voices.  And always there was the trail King had made, leading her on; where he had gone before, she followed.

Where he had made slow progress, seeking game and breaking trail, she went swiftly on the packed snow.  So, in the full splendour of the moon, she came at last to the final ridge, whence, looking down into the canon, she saw the end of her trail:  hanging from a bent pine sapling was what she knew must be his bear.  Down the steep slope she went, half sliding, half rolling.  In the bed of the ravine she landed softly in the drift; here she rested, sitting in a nest of snow.  And before she had stirred to begin the last short span of her journey, there came suddenly out of the silence a strange, quivering cry, bursting out upon her; a sobbing, throbbing scream.

“A woman!” cried Gloria, aghast.

A woman in an agony of terror, she thought.  Or a lost soul, the wandering spirit of the dead, or God knew what impossible thing.  Sudden terror leaped out upon her, striking like a knife into her heart.  Fear, banished all this time, surprised her and clutched at her throat and paralysed her muscles.  Blind panic gripped her.  Then came the piercing scream again, and with it enlightenment, and Gloria sank back, seeming to melt into the snow about her.  Yonder, just upon the next ridge where the moonlight carved in fine details the outline of a big bare boulder, stood the thing that had screamed; in this light its great body was weirdly magnified, so that the entire length of seven or eight feet appeared to Gloria’s frightened eyes twice that.  Long-bodied and lithe, small-headed and merciless, steel-muscled and chisel-clawed, the big cat in silhouette twitched its restless tail back and forth nervously, and from snarling jaws sent forth its almost human call to cut across vast, still distances.

Gloria drew back and back where she crouched, her body pressed into the snow-bank, in a panicky desire to hide.  The big cat had smelled the meat, she guessed swiftly.  When it leaped upward, seeking to snatch down the swinging weight, or clambered up the pine, then she must spring up and run, run as she had never run in her life, away from this terrible, murderous thing, back to King.  Unconscious of cold and wet, she cowered and waited, scarce breathing.  She saw how the big beast put up its head and sniffed; did it in reality smell the meat?  Or had it sensed her presence?