After that, with never a word, they went on, deeper into this shadowy realm of big trees. He watched her at every step. Fury filled her heart, but with compressed lips she maintained a silence like his own. Thor trotted along with them, now in front of his master, as though this were a way he had travelled before and knew well, now questing far afield, now in the rear, eying his master's captive and setting his dog's brains to the riddle.
Before they had walked another ten minutes, Standing threw down his pack and said abruptly:
"This is as far as we go."
She sat down, her back to a tree, her face averted from him. She was very tired and now she could have put her face into her hands and cried from very weariness. But instead she caught her lip up between her teeth and hid her face from him and ignored him. But in her heart she was wondering; had he travelled all day long and then this far from the spot where he had released his horse, just to pitch camp in a clump of trees? Was this the spot toward which he had striven on so stubbornly since daylight? Where was he going? Why? Old queries and doubts rushed back upon her.... She was vaguely grateful that they were questions which he and not she had to answer; that responsibilities were his instead of hers. She was tired enough to lie down where she was and cease to care what happened.... It was not as yet pitch-dark; the sun was not down on the heights. But here, among the tall pines, in this hollow, the shadows were thick; nothing stood out in detail to her slowly closing eyes; here was a place of black blots, distorted glooms, the weird formless outriders of the night.... She had not the remotest suspicion that, where she had slumped down, she was almost at the door of a cabin.
Rather, it would have been surprising had she known. For surely there was never cabin like this hermit camp of Bruce Standing's! Two sky-scraping pines stood close together; between them was the door, framed by their own straight trunks. Smaller trees grew about the ancient parents; these hid the walls which to escape notice required little enough hiding at any time; a man might have passed here within a few yards at noonday and not noticed all this which Lynette failed to see in the dusk. For the walls of the tiny cabin were of rough logs from which the bark had never been stripped, walls which blended so perfectly with the greater note struck by the woodland that they failed to draw the eye; the chimney, of loose-piled rocks, was viewless at this time of day behind the tree trunks and inconspicuous at any time. And low, over the flat roof drooped the concealing branches of the trees. Of all this Lynette glimpsed nothing until Timber-Wolf said, looking down at her:
"When all the tavern is prepared within,
Why nods the drowsy worshipper outside?"
She had striven in one way and another since she had had her first view of him, axe in hand, for a clew to the real Bruce Standing. Now, again, he set her jaded faculties to work: Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf, and man of violence, quoting poetry to her! And at such a moment and under such circumstances!... It is not merely the feminine soul which is indeterminable, mystifying, intriguing into the ultimate bournes of speculation; rather the human soul....
"I don't fancy guessing riddles this evening," she told him. "All that I can think of by way of repartee is: 'What meanest thou, Sir Tent-maker?'"