When Zeke stopped to let Darrin down at the fork of the road Darrin asked another question. “Funny that Semler should skip out so sudden that day, wasn’t it?”
“You bet it uz funny,” Zeke agreed. “I’ve allus said it was.”
“Did you see him the day he left?”
Pitkin shook his head. “Huh-uh. I was busy all day, and over in North Fraternity in the aft’noon. Got to the store right after he lit out.”
Darrin walked to his camp, lighting his steps with an electric torch, and made a little fire for cheerfulness’ sake, and wrapped in his blankets for sleep. He had set a camera in the swamp that day, with a string attached to the shutter in a fashion that should give results if a moose came by. He wondered whether luck would be with him. His thoughts as sleep crept on him shifted back to Evered again. A puzzle there—a question of character, of reaction to emotional stimulus. He asked himself: “Now if I were an emotional, hot-tempered man and came upon my wife with another man, and saw her in swift peril of her life—what would I do?”
He was still wondering, still questioning, still trying to put himself in Evered’s shoes when at last he dropped asleep.
XIII
DARRIN and Ruth had come to that point in friendship where they could sit silently together, each busy with his or her own thoughts, without embarrassment. The girl liked to come down the hill of an afternoon for an hour with the man; and sometimes he read to her from one of the books of which he had a store. And sometimes he showed her the pictures he had made—strange glimpses of the life of the swamp. His camera trap caught curious scenes. Now and then a deer, occasionally a moose, once a wildcat screeching in the night. And again they had to look closely to see what it was that had tugged the trigger string; and sometimes it was a rabbit, and sometimes it was a mink; and at other times it was nothing at all that they could discover in the finished photograph. Once a great owl dropped on some prey upon the ground and touched the string; and the plate caught him, wings flying, talons reaching—a picture of the wild things that prey.
Most of the pictures were imperfect—blurred or shadowed or ill-focused. Out of them all there were only four or five that Darrin counted worth the saving; but he and Ruth found fascination in the study of even the worthless ones.
It was inevitable that the confidence between them should develop swiftly in these afternoons together. It was not surprising that Ruth one afternoon dared ask Darrin a question. She had been curiously silent, studying him, until he noticed it, and laughed at her for it; and she told him then, “I’m wondering—whether we really know you here.”