The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
The Hunted Man
THE day was hot and windless with an unclouded sky, and memories of the dreadful yesterday but deepened the sense of to-day's serenity.
In flooding sunlight the woodlands basked and steamed, and a great stillness brooded over all the wilderness. Long before any sound audible to human ears disturbed the noonday hush, a bobcat sunning on a log in a glade to which no trail led, pricked ears, rose, glanced over-shoulder with a snarl, and—of a sudden—was no more there.
Perhaps two minutes later a succession of remote crashings began to be heard, the sound made by some heavy body forcing a way through the underbrush. Soon a man broke into the clearing and reeled to a seat on the log, shuddering uncontrollably in all his limbs.
He was a young man and had been personable. Just now his face was crimson with congested blood and streaked with sweat and grime; his lips were cracked and swollen, his eyes haggard, his hands bleeding. Woods equipment he had none beyond a hunting-knife. All else had been consumed in the forest fire or stolen by his Indian guide.
Now the man was lost. After a night passed without a fire he had waked to discover the sun rising in the west and the rest of the universe sympathetically upside-down. Aimlessly, ever since, he had stumbled and blundered—possessed by a notion that he was dogged by furtive enemies—and within the last hour the puppet of blind, witless panic.
Even now, as he strove to calm himself and rest, the feeling that something was peering at him grew intolerably acute. He jumped up, flung himself frantically through the brush in pursuit of the something, and—found nothing.
With a great effort he pulled himself together and turned back to the clearing.
There, upon the log on which he had rested, he found—but refused to believe he saw—a playing card—a Trey of Hearts.
With a gesture of horror Alan Law fled the place.
Then a grinning half-breed guide stole like a shadow to the log, picked up and pocketed the card, and set out in tireless, catfooted pursuit.
An hour later, topping a ridge, Alan caught the music of clashing waters. Tortured by thirst, he began at once to descend in reckless haste. What was at first a gentle slope grew swiftly more 
IN THAT HOUR TRINE SWORE AN AWFUL REVENGE AGAINST LAW.
JUDITH WAS THE PET OF HER FATHER.
The shelving moss-beds afforded uncertain footing, and the scanty cedar growth but small support. Alan came at headlong pace within sight of the eaves of a cliff, and precisely then the hillside seemed to slip from under him. His heels flourished in the air, his back thumped a bed of pebbles. He began to slide, grasped a puny little cedar which came away in his hand, and amid a shower of stones shot over the edge and down a drop of more than thirty feet. He was aware of the sun, a molten ball wheeling madly in the sky. Then dark waters closed over him.
He came up gasping, and struck out for something dark that rode the waters near at hand—a canoe. But his strength was spent. Within a stroke of an outstretched paddle he flung up a hand and went down.
Instantly one occupant of the canoe, a young and very beautiful woman in a man's hunting clothes, spoke a word of command, and, as her guide steadied the vessel with his paddle, rose carefully in her place and curved her lithe body over the bows, headforemost into the pool.