On one side of the road was a level pasture affording no shelter; on the other side, a rolling field mounted to a strip of woodland.
“At the edge of those trees would be the best place,” he decided, and the girl agreed with a nod.
Laboriously they clambered over the wall beside the road and set off toward this refuge. The field was very rough and seemed interminable, and more than once Stewart thought that he must drop where he stood; but they reached the wood at last and threw themselves down beneath the first clump of undergrowth.
Stewart was asleep almost before he touched the ground; but the girl lay for a long time with eyes open, staring up into the night. Then, very softly, she crawled to Stewart’s side, raised herself on one elbow and looked down into his face.
It was not at all the face of the man she had met at the Kölner Hof two days before. It was thinner and paler; there were dark circles of exhaustion under the eyes; a stubbly beard covered the haggard cheeks, across one of which was an ugly scratch. Yet the girl seemed to find it beautiful. Her eyes filled with tears as she gazed at it; she brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over the forehead, and bent as though to press a kiss there—but stopped, with a quick shake of the head, and drew away.
“Not yet!” she whispered. “Not yet!” and crawling a little way apart, she lay down again among the bushes.
Again Stewart awoke with the sun in his eyes, and after a moment’s confused blinking, he looked around to find himself alone.
The dull pain in his shoulder as he sat up reminded him of his wound. Crawling a little distance back among the bushes, he slipped out of his coat. His shirt was soaked with blood half-way down the right side—a good sign, Stewart told himself. He knew how great a show a little blood can make, and he was glad that the wound had bled freely. He unbuttoned his shirt and gingerly pulled it back from the shoulder, for the blood had dried in places and stuck fast; then he removed the folded handkerchief, and the wound lay revealed.
He could just see it by twisting his head around, and he regarded it with satisfaction, for, as he had thought, it was not much more than a scratch. A bullet had grazed the shoulder-bone, plowed through the muscle and sped on its way, leaving behind, as the only sign of its passage, a tiny black mark.