“What!” he cried, astonished. “You wish to stay here—after last night! Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly.
“But if the man is really not right, he needs looking after. We ought to hurry after him.”
“It seems so,” she said, still with the air of those who speak what is strange to themselves; “but I have an intuition, a premonition—I don’t know what to call it! Something tells me that we do not yet know the truth.”
Stonor turned away helplessly. He could not argue against a woman’s reason like this.
“Ah, don’t be impatient with me,” she said appealingly. “Just wait to-day. If nothing happens during the day to throw any light on what puzzles us, I will make no more objections. I’ll be willing to start this afternoon, and camp up the river.”
“It will give him twelve hours’ start of us.”
Her surprising answer was: “I don’t think he’s gone.”
Stonor made his way over the old portage trail. He wished to have a look at the Great Falls before returning up-river. Clare, waiting for what she could not have told, had chosen to remain at the shack, and Mary Moosa was not afraid to stay with her by daylight. Like Stonor, Mary believed that the man had undoubtedly left the neighbourhood, and that no further danger was to be apprehended from that quarter.
Stonor went along abstractedly, climbing over the obstructions or cutting a way through, almost oblivious to his surroundings. His heart was jealous and sore. His instinct told him that the man who had prowled around the shack the night before was an evil-doer; yet Clare persisted in exalting him to the skies. In his present temper it seemed to Stonor as if Clare purposely made his task as hard as possible for him. In fact, the trooper had a grievance against the whole world.