Her rifle had grown a heart-breaking weight, until it seemed that it would drag her arms from their sockets to hold it up; the pack of meat on her back was like lead.

She wondered if King had missed her; if he were awake and wondering at her absence.  She wondered if he would miss her soon; how soon?  At the first glint of dawn?  Would he begin to see, that she was at least, and at last, trying?  Well, she had tried; though she died, still she had tried.  She was cold to the bone; her teeth chattered, her body quaked.  Yet she kept on.  She fell; she lay with the tears of exhaustion rolling down her face; she struggled to get to her feet; she fell again.  But always she rose and always she kept on.  And so, in the fulness of time, after long frightful, hellish hours, Sec.he came to the last terror of the night.

The new day was bright on the mountain tops when she felt at first a dull sort of surprise and then a sudden, stimulating gladness, noting the familiar look of the ridge ahead.  Yonder the cave would be.  The cave and King, success and rest.  She straightened up a little, brushing her hand across her straining eyes, making sure that she was right.  She heard the insistent scream behind her, but now she did not heed it, for in front of her, stock-still in the trail, was a man.  It was Benny.

To-night she had thrilled to an ecstasy descending from the stars, welling up in her own heart, and she had shivered with fear and had dropped with weariness akin to despair.  Now suddenly all emotions were upgathered into searing anger.  Her thought was:  “He will take the meat from me!  The meat I have brought for Mark.”  She grew rigid in her tracks.  She jerked up her rifle in front of her; her tired eyes hardened.  She had gone to the limits of endurance in a labour of love; she had succeeded; and now she would fight for what she had brought back.

Then she noted that Benny had not seen her.  Though he was in full view on the ridge, he had had no eyes for her.  He was stooping.  She saw that he had a small pack on his back; food, no doubt.  On the ground by him was a second pack, something in a crash sack; Benny was struggling to lift it to his shoulders.  It must be very heavy.  Gloria drew back hastily, glancing about her, found the only hiding-place offered, and slipped behind the big rock.

Presently Benny came on.  She heard him from a distance; he was talking to himself excitedly, jabbering broken fragments of sentences, twice breaking into his hideous dry cackle of laughter.  She shivered; his utterances sounded mad.

And mad they were.  Perhaps his drug had run out; certainly for a nervous man there had been ample cause for jangling nerves.  He jabbered constantly, his mutterings at last coming to her in jumbled words as Benny drew on.