But once down on the rolling land, among the close-ranked trees, she began to experience a difficulty that had not hitherto troubled her. With the sun hanging low, she lost her absolute certainty of east and west, north and south. The forest seemed suddenly to grow confusingly dim and gloomier, almost menacing in its uncanny evening silence. The birds were hushed, and the wind.
She blundered on, not admitting to herself the possibility of being unable to find Cariboo Meadows. As best she could, and to the best of her belief, she held in a straight line for the town. But she walked far enough to have overrun it, and was yet upon unfamiliar ground. The twilight deepened. The sky above showed turquoise blue between the tall tree-tops, but the woods themselves grew blurred, dusky at a little distance ahead. Even to a seasoned woodsman, twilight in a timbered country that he does not know brings confusion; uncertainty leads him far wide of his mark. Hazel, all unused to woods travel, hurried the more, uneasy with the growing conviction that she had gone astray.
The shadows deepened until she tripped over roots and stones, and snagged her hair and clothing on branches she could not see in time to fend off. As a last resort, she turned straight for the light patch still showing in the northwest, hoping thus to cross the wagon road that ran from Soda Creek to the Meadows—it lay west, and she had gone northeast from town. And as she hurried, a fear began to tug at her that she had passed the Meadows unknowingly. If she could only cross a trail—trails always led somewhere, and she was going it blind. The immensity of the unpeopled areas she had been looking out over for a week appalled her.
Presently it was dark, and darkness in the woods is the darkness of the pit itself. She found a fallen tree, and climbed on it to rest and think. Night in gloomy places brings an eerie feeling sometimes to the bravest—dormant sense impressions, running back to the cave age and beyond, become active, harry the mind with subtle, unreasoning qualms—and she was a girl, brave enough, but out of the only environment she knew how to grapple with. All the fearsome tales of forest beasts she had ever heard rose up to harass her. She had not lifted up her voice while it was light because she was not the timid soul that cries in the face of a threatened danger. Also because she would not then admit the possibility of getting lost. And now she was afraid to call. She huddled on the log, shuddering with the growing chill of the night air, partly with dread of the long, black night itself that walled her in. She had no matches to light a fire.
After what seemed an age, she fancied she saw a gleam far distant in the timber. She watched the spot fixedly, and thought she saw the faint reflection of a light. That heartened her. She advanced toward it, hoping that it might be the gleam of a ranch window. Her progress was slow. She blundered over the litter of a forest floor, tripping over unseen obstacles. But ten minutes established beyond peradventure the fact that it was indeed a light. Whether a house light or the reflection of a camp fire she was not woodwise enough to tell. But a fire must mean human beings of one sort or another, and thereby a means to reach home.
She kept on. The wavering gleam came from behind a thicket—an open fire, she saw at length. Beyond the fire she heard a horse sneeze. Within a few yards of the thicket through which wavered the yellow gleam she halted, smitten with a sudden panic. This endured but a few seconds. All that she knew or had been told of frontier men reassured her. She had found them to a man courteous, awkwardly considerate. And she could not wander about all night.
She moved cautiously, however, to the edge of the thicket, to a point where she could see the fire. A man sat humped over the glowing embers, whereon sizzled a piece of meat. His head was bent forward, as if he were listening. Suddenly he looked up, and she gasped—for the firelight showed the features of Roaring Bill Wagstaff.
She was afraid of him. Why she did not know nor stop to reason. But her fear of him was greater than her fear of the pitch-black night and the unknown dangers of the forest. She turned to retreat. In the same instant Roaring Bill reached to his rifle and stood up.
"Hold on there!" he said coolly. "You've had a look at me—I want a look at you, old feller, whoever you are. Come on—show yourself."
He stepped sidewise out of the light as he spoke. Hazel started to run. The crack of a branch under foot betrayed her, and he closed in before she took three steps. He caught her rudely by the arm, and yanked her bodily into the firelight.