To David Carrigan this interesting experience in his life might have covered an hour, a day, or a month.  Or a year for that matter, for he seemed to have had an indefinite association with Pretty Eyes.  He had known her for a long time and very intimately, it seemed.  Yet he had no memory of the long fight in the hot sun, or of the river, or of the singing warblers, or of the inquisitive sandpiper that had marked out the line which his enemy’s last bullet had traveled.  He had entered into a new world in which everything was vague and unreal except that vision of dark hair, dark eyes, and pale, beautiful face.  Several times he saw it with marvelous clearness, and each time he drifted away into darkness again with the sound of a voice growing fainter and fainter in his ears.

Then came a time of utter chaos and soundless gloom.  He was in a pit, where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing oppression.  At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale and indistinct and a vast distance away.  But it crept steadily up through the eternity of darkness, and the nearer it came, the less there was of the blackness of night.  From a star it grew into a sun, and with the sun came dawn.  In that dawn he heard the singing of a bird, and the bird was just over his head.  When Carrigan opened his eyes, and understanding came to him, he found himself under the silver birch that belonged to the wood warbler.

For a space he did not ask himself how he had come there.  He was looking at the river and the white strip of sand.  Out there were the rock and his dunnage pack.  Also his rifle.  Instinctively his eyes turned to the balsam ambush farther down.  That, too, was in a blaze of sunlight now.  But where he lay, or sat, or stood—­he was not sure what he was doing at that moment—­it was shady and deliciously cool.  The green of the cedar and spruce and balsam was close about him, inset with the silver and gold of the thickly-leaved birch.  He discovered that he was bolstered up partly against the trunk of this birch and partly against a spruce sapling.  Between these two, where his head rested, was a pile of soft moss freshly torn from the earth.  And within reach of him was his own kit pail filled with water.

He moved himself cautiously and raised a hand to his head.  His fingers came in contact with a bandage.

For a minute or two after that he sat without moving while his amazed senses seized upon the significance of it all.  In the first place he was alive.  But even this fact of living was less remarkable than the other things that had happened.  He remembered the final moments of the unequal duel.  His enemy had got him.  And that enemy was a woman!  Moreover, after she had blown away a part of his head and had him helpless in the sand, she had—­in place of finishing him there—­dragged him to this cool nook and tied up his wound.  It was hard for him to believe, but the pail of water, the