With instinctive caution, he parted his eyelids, ever so slightly, and sought to peer upward through his thick lashes. The effort was painful, but less so than he had feared. Already, through natural buoyancy or else by reason of the unseen nurse's ministrations, the throbbing ache was becoming almost bearable.
At first, his dazed eyes could make out nothing. Then he could see, through his lashes, the velvety dark blue of the night sky and the big white Southern stars shining through a soft cloud. Inconsequentially, his vagrant mind recalled that, below Miami, the Southern Cross is smudgily visible on the horizon, somewhere around two in the morning. And he wondered if he could descry it, if that luminous cloud were not in the way.
Then, he knew it was not a cloud which shimmered between his eyes and the stars. It was a woman's filmy hair.
And the woman was bending down above him, as he lay with his head on her knee. She was bending down, sobbing softly to herself, and bathing his aching head with water from a bowl at her side.
He was minded to rouse himself and speak, or at least to get a less elusive look at her shadowed face, when running footsteps sounded from somewhere. And again by instinct, Brice shut his eyes and lay moveless.
The footsteps were coming nearer. They were springy and rhythmic, the footsteps of a powerful man.
Then came a panting voice out of the darkness
"Oh, there you are!" it exclaimed. "He got away. Got away, clean. I reached the head of the path, not ten feet behind him. But, in there, it's so black I couldn't see anything ahead of me. And I had no light, worse luck! So he—"
A deep-throated growl interrupted him,—a growl so fierce and menacing that Gavin once more halfparted his eyes, in sudden curiosity.
From beside his feet, Bobby Burns was rising. The collie had crouched there, evidently, with some idea of guarding Brice from further harm. He did not seem to have resented the woman's ministrations. But he was of no mind to let this man come any closer to his stricken idol.