In her wearied state she could have sobbed with disappointment.  How much had he discovered?  If he knew nothing more than merely that she had returned with the boat, how could it be possible to elude him and come again the next night?  She thought of her father, and her heart was full of pity; she thought that her own plans were baffled, and she was enraged.  Both sentiments fused into keener hatred of Toyner; but she remembered—­yes, even then she remembered quite clearly and distinctly—­that if the worst came to the worst and she could save her father in no other way, she had one weapon in reserve, one in which she had perfect faith.

It was for this reason that she sat still for a minute in the boat, looking up at Toyner, trying to pry into his attitude toward her.  At the end of the minute he put out his hand to lift her up, and she leaned upon it.

Without hesitation she began to thread her way through the wood toward home, and he walked by her side.  He might have been escorting her from a dance, so quietly they walked together, except that the question of a man’s life or death which lay between them seemed to surround them with a strange atmosphere.

At length Bart spoke.  “I don’t know where you have been,” he said.  “I have been patrolling the shore all night.”  He paused awhile.  “I thought you were safe at home.”

She stopped short and turned upon him.  “Look here! what are you going to do now?  It’s a pretty mean sort of business this you’ve taken to, sneaking round your old friends to do them all the harm you can.”

“It’s the first time I knew that you’d ever been a friend of mine, Ann.”  He said this in a sort of sad aside, and then:  “You’ve sense enough to know that when a man shoots another man he’s got to be found and shut up for the good of the country and for his own good too.  It’s the kindest thing that can be done to a man sometimes, shutting him up in jail.”  He said this last quite as much by way of explanation to himself as to her.

“Or hanging him,” she suggested sarcastically.

He paused a moment.  “I hope he won’t come to that.”

“But you’ll do all you can to catch him, knowing that it’s like to come to that.  What’s the good of hoping?”

He had only said it to soothe her.  He had another self-justification.

“I can only do what I have to do:  it is not me that will decide whether Walker dies or not.  At any rate, it ain’t no use to justify it to you.  It’s natural that you should look upon me as an enemy just now; but all the police in the country are more your enemies than I am.  You’ve got him off now, I suppose; however you’ve done it I don’t pretend to know.  It’ll be some one else that catches him if he’s caught.”

She wondered if he was only saying this to try her, or if he really believed that Markham had gone far; yet there was small chance even then that he would cease to watch her the next night and the next.  He had shown both resolution and diligence in this business—­qualities, as far as she knew, so foreign to his character that she smiled bitterly.