“Thank you, Philip!” she said gratefully. “You make me feel as if I were not such a failure after all.”
“If you’ll trust me with the knife,” he said in a tone 286 that took some of the edge off her satisfaction, “I’ll clean him for you.”
She gave him the knife reluctantly, and did not leave his side until he had finished cleaning and cutting up the rabbit, when he handed the knife back to her with a gesture that made her blush again. Two things she did not know: that he had a knife in his pocket much better suited to his secret purpose; and that his purpose was a purpose no longer. But even he was not yet aware of this last.
It was not the next day, but the third, when the rabbit had been eaten to the bone, and the pangs of hunger prodded her, that Marion restored herself in her own eyes. In the edge of the forest, not more than two miles from the camp, she detected a mere brown patch in the browning bush. This time she did not forget her rifle. The brown patch moved just as she pulled the trigger; but when she reached the spot, in a fever of anxiety, she fairly shrieked to the wilderness. For there in the grass, still jerking spasmodically in its death agony, lay a doe, a larger one than that she had seen in the glade. No more “one a day for twenty-seven days!”
What followed haunted her dreams for many nights thereafter––a repulsive and sickening ordeal. She had seen Huntington do it, but then she had been able to turn her face away; and her hands––But necessity, responsibility, and pride, and perhaps some primitive instinct also, nerved her to the task. And she staggered back to camp, and stood before Philip, white and trembling, but triumphant.
“Take a drink of whisky!” ordered Haig sharply.
She obeyed him, gulping down the last of the precious contents of her flask.
“It’s down there––covered with leaves!” she gasped out at length. “Will anything––disturb it before I can––take Tuesday and the rope?”
“Do you mean you’ve cleaned the whole deer?” he asked curiously.