He called her “Eve” only when circumstances had become gravely threatening.  At other times it was usually “Yellow-hair!”

“Then you believe that this man, Gray, has been sent into Les Errues to aid us to carry on independently the operation in which we have so far failed?”

“I begin to think so.”  The girl’s golden eyes became lost in retrospection.

“And yet,” she ventured after a few moments’ thought, “he must have come into Les Errues learning that we also had entered it; and apparently he has made no effort to find us.”

“We can’t know that, Eve.”

“He must be a woodsman,” she argued, “and also he must suppose that we are more or less familiar with American woodcraft, and fairly well versed in its signs.  Yet—­he has left no sign that we could understand where a Hun could not.”

“Because we have discovered no sign we can not be certain that this man Gray has made none for us to read,” said McKay.

“No....  And yet he has left nothing that we have discovered—­no blaze; no moss or leaf, no stone or cairn—­not a broken twig, not a peeled stick, and no trail!”

“How do we know that the traces of a trail marked by flattened leaves might not be his trail?  Once, on that little sheet of sand left by rain in the torrent’s wake, you found the imprint of a hobnailed shoe such as the Hun hunters wear,” she reminded him.  “And there we first saw the flattened trail of last year’s leaves—­if indeed it be truly a trail.”

“But, Eve dear, never have we discovered in any dead and flattened leaf the imprint of hobnails,—­let alone the imprint of a human foot.”

“Suppose, whoever made that path, had pulled over his shoes a heavy woolen sock.”  He nodded.

“I feel, somehow, that the Hun flattened out those leaves,” she went on.  “I am sure that had an American made the trail he would also have contrived to let us know—­given us some indication of his identity.”

The girl’s low voice suddenly failed and her hand clutched McKay’s shoulder.

They lay among the alpine roses like two stones, never stirring, the dappled sunlight falling over them as harmoniously and with no more and no less accent than it spotted tree-trunk and rock and moss around them.

And, as they lay there, motionless, her head resting on his thigh, a man came out of the dimmer woods into the white sunshine that flooded the verge of the granite chasm.

The man was very much weather-beaten; his tweeds were torn; he carried a rifle in his right hand.  And his left was bound in bloody rags.  But what instantly arrested McKay’s attention was the pack strapped to his back and supported by a “tump-line.”

Never before had McKay seen such a pack carried in such a manner excepting only in American forests.

The man stood facing the sun.  His visage was burnt brick colour, a hue which seemed to accentuate the intense blue of his eyes and make his light-coloured hair seem almost white.