The girl swayed where she stood, fighting to retain consciousness.

“How did you discover the Via Mala?” he inquired with blunt curiosity.

“You showed it to me!”

“You slut!” he said between his teeth.  Then, still brutishly curious:  “How did you know that spring had been poisoned?  By those dead birds and animals, I suppose....  And that’s what I told everybody, too.  The wild things are bound to come and drink.  But you and your running-mate are foxes.  You made us believe you had gone over the cliff.  Yes, even I believed it.  It was well done—­a true Yankee trick.  All the same, foxes are only foxes after all.  And here you are.”

He got up; she shrank back, and he began to laugh at her.

“Foxes are only foxes, my pretty, dirty one!—­but men are men, and a Prussian is a super-man.  You had forgotten that, hadn’t you, little Yankee?”

He came nearer.  She sprang aside and past him and ran for the river; but he caught her at the edge of a black pool that whirled and flung sticky chunks of foam over the bowlders.  For a while they fought there in silence, then he said, breathing heavily, “A fox can’t drown.  Didn’t you know that, little fool?”

Her strength was ebbing.  He forced her back to the glade and stood there holding her, his inflamed face a sneering, leering mask for the hot hell that her nearness and resistance had awakened in him.  Suddenly, still holding her, he jerked his head aside and stared behind him.  Then he pushed her violently from him, clutched at his holster, and started to run.  And a pistol cracked and he pitched forward across the log upon which he had sat, and lay so, dripping dark blood, and fouling the wild-flowers with the flow.

“Kay!” she said in a weak voice.

McKay, his pack strapped to his back, his blood-shot eyes brilliant in his haggard visage, ran forward and bent over the thing.  Then he shot him again, behind the ear.

The rage of the river drowned the sound of the shots; the man in the hut across the stream did not come to the door.  But McKay caught sight of the shack; his fierce eyes questioned the girl, and she nodded.

He crossed the stream, leaping from bowlder to bowlder, and she saw him run up to the door of the hut, level his weapon, then enter.  She could not hear the shots; she waited, half-dead, until he came out again, reloading his pistol.

She struggled desperately to retain her senses—­to fight off the deadly faintness that assailed her.  She could scarcely see him as he came swiftly toward her—­she put out her arms blindly, felt his fierce clasp envelop her, passed so into blessed unconsciousness.

A drop or two of almost scalding broth aroused her.  He held her in his arms and fed her—­not much—­and then let her stretch out on the sun-hot moss again.

Before sunset he awakened her again, and he fed her—­more this time.

Afterward she lay on the moss with her golden-brown eyes partly open.  And he had constructed a sponge of clean, velvety moss, and with this he washed her swollen mouth and bruised cheek, and her eyes and throat and hands and feet.