She fled, and called herself a fool for growing scarlet, as she knew that she did; as though two burning rays had been directed full upon her back, she could feel his look as she ran from him; she could not quickly enough vanish from his keen eyes, beyond the thicket. And how on earth she was going to get dry again until the sun stood high in the sky, she did not in the least know. She could wring out the free water; she could make flails of her arms and run up and down until she got warm.... If only she had a fire; but that would be foolhardy, the smoke arising to stand a signal for miles of their whereabouts....
And until this moment she had not thought of how they were to convert freshly caught fish into an edible breakfast! How, without fire? She began to shiver again, from head to foot now, and, confronted by her own problem, that of getting warm and dry, she was content to leave all other solutions to Deveril.
When half an hour later she returned to him, she found him smoking a cigarette and crouching over a bed of dying coals, whereon certain tempting morsels lay; Deveril was turning them this way and that; with the savory odor of the grilling fish there arose from the embers a whiff of the green sage-leaves which he had plucked at the slope of the cañon and laid first on his bed of coals. Crisp mountain-trout, garnished with sage! And plenty of clear, cold, sparkling water to drink thereafter! Truly a morning repast for king and queen.
"I hope they keep us on the run for a month!" Deveril greeted her. "I haven't had this much fun for a dozen years!"
"But your fire?" she asked anxiously. "Aren't you afraid? The smoke?"
"Where there's smoke, there's always fire," he told her lightly. "But when a man's on the dodge, as we are, he can have a fire that gives out almighty little smoke! It's all bone-dry wood, with only the handful of sage and a few crisscross willow sticks. Look up, and see how much smoke you can see!"
He had built his small blaze, ringed about by some rocks, in the heart of a small grove of trees which stood forty or fifty feet high; he had got his fire burning with strong, clean flames, from a handful of dry leaves and twigs; Lynette, looking up, could make out only the faintest bluish-gray wisp of smoke against the gray-green of the leaves. She understood; always it was inevitable that they must accept whatever chances the moment brought them, yet it was not at all likely that their faint plume of smoke, vanishing among the treetops, would ever draw the glance of any human eye other than their own.
"I'll tell you ..." began Deveril, and broke short off there, as she and he, alert and tense once more, reminded that they were fugitives, listened to a sudden sound disturbing their silence. A sound unmistakable—a man at no great distance from them, but, fortunately, upon the farther side of the stream, and thus beyond the double screen of willows, was breaking his way through the brush. Both Deveril and Lynette crouched low, peering through the bushes. They could only make out that the man was coming up-stream. Once they caught a vague, blurred glimpse of his legs, faded overalls and ragged boots. Then they lost him entirely. They knew when he stopped and both waited breathlessly to know if he had come upon some sign of their own trail. But once more he went on, but now in such silence, as he crossed a little open spot, that they could scarcely make out a sound. Had it not been for the willows intervening, they could then have answered their own question, "Who is it?"—a question just now of supreme importance, of the importance of life and death. They lay lower; they strove as never before to catch some glimpse that would tell them what they wanted to know. The man stopped again; again went on. There was something guarded about his movements; they felt that he must have seen their tracks, that he was seeking in a roundabout way to come unexpectedly upon them. And then, because there was a narrow natural avenue through the brush, they were given one clear, though fleeting glimpse, of him ... of his face—a face as tense and watchful as their own had been ... the face of Mexicali Joe.