He reached groping hands to hers. “You don’t mean”—he gasped, hardly able to make his lips move in speech—“you don’t intend——?”
“To kill myself? Not yet, by a long way.” The girl’s hand slipped cautiously out from the pocket of her jacket, showing him what seemed to be a small, square box of tin. But the light was too dim for him to make out the words on the paper label. “I got this from the shelf—just as we left the cabin.”
The hopeful tones in her voice was the happiest sound Ned had heard since he had come to the island.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“Nothing very much—but yet—a chance for freedom. Come into the cabin where we can scratch a match.”
They moved into the newer hut of logs, and there Bess showed him the humble article in which lay her hopes. It was merely a tin of fine snuff from among Doomsdorf’s personal supplies.
XXVIII
Talking in an undertone, not to be heard through the log walls, Bess and Ned made their hasty plans for deliverance. They gave no sign of the excitement under which they worked. Seemingly they were unshaken by the fact that life or death was the issue of the next hour,—the realization that the absolute crisis was upon them at last. Bess did not recall, in word or look, the trying experience just passed through. Like Ned she was wholly self-disciplined, her mind moving cool and sure. Never had their wilderness training stood them in better stead.
Here, in the cabin they occupied, the assault must be made. The reason was simply that their plan was defeated at the outset if they attempted to master Doomsdorf in the squaw’s presence. For all her seeming impassiveness, she would be like a panther in her lord’s defense: Bess had had full evidence of that fact the first day in the cabin. And it was easier to decoy Doomsdorf here than to attempt to entice the squaw away from her own house.
The fact that their two enemies must be handled singly required the united efforts of not only Ned and Bess, but Lenore. Two must wait here, as in ambush, and the third must make some pretext to entice Doomsdorf from his cabin. This, the easiest part of the work, could fall to Lenore. Both Ned and Bess realized that in their own hands must lie the success or failure of the actual assault.