"Joe won't escape us in a hurry," he muttered. "Not in this cañon. And we'll see this thing through. Let's sit tight and watch."
And so, with that inexplicable sense that here in the wilderness they were not yet free from pursuit, they crouched in the bushes and bent every force of every sense to detect their fancied pursuers. But the forest land, sun-smitten, a playland of light and shadow and tremulous breeze, lay steeped in quiet about them, and they saw nothing moving save the gently stirring leaves and occasional birds; half a dozen sparrows briefly stayed their flight upon a shrub in flower with pale-pink blossoms; a bevy of quail, forty strong, marched away through the narrow roadways under the low, drooping branches, with crested topknots bobbing; the forest land murmured and whispered and sang softly, and seemed empty of any other human presence than their own. And yet they waited, and at the end of their waiting, grown nervous despite themselves, though they had had no slightest evidence that pursuit was drawing close upon their heels, they were not able to shake from them that feeling that danger, the danger from which they fled, was become a near-drawn menace. And all the more to be feared in that it approached so silently, covertly, hidden and ready to strike when their guard was down.
"Just the same," said Deveril, deep in his own musings, "it can't be Jim Taggart, for that's not Taggart's way, having the goods on a man, and, besides, I fancy I put him out of the running." Then he looked at her curiously, and added: "And it can't be Bruce Standing, since you put him down and out and...."
It was the first time that such a reference to the past had been made. Now she startled him by the quick vehemence of her denial, saying:
"I didn't shoot Bruce Standing! I tell you...."
He looked at her steadily, and she broke off, as she saw dawning in his eyes a look which was to be read as readily as were white stones to be glimpsed in the bottom of a clear pool. She had made her statement, and, whether true or false, he held it to be a lie.
"In case they should somehow lay us by the heels," he said dryly, "you would come a lot closer to clearing yourself by saying that you shot him in self-defense than in denying everything. But they haven't got their ropes over our running horns yet!... Do you still feel that we are followed?"
His look angered her; his words angered her still further. So to his question she made no reply. He looked at her again curiously. She refused to meet his eyes, coolly ignoring him. A little smile twitched at his lips.
"It's a poor time for good friends to fall out," he said lightly. "I don't care the snap of my fingers who shot him, or why. He ought to have been shot a dozen years ago. And now I'll tell you what, I think, explains this business of some one being close behind us, if you are right in it. The big chance is that some one has been trailing Mexicali Joe all along; and dropped in behind us when we dropped in behind Joe. We've been doing a first-class job of sticking to cover; mind you, we haven't caught a second glimpse of Joe all this time, and therefore it is as likely as not that the gent whom you feel to be trailing us hasn't caught a glimpse of us. If this is right, we've got a bully chance right now to prove it. We lie close where we are for ten minutes, and see if your hombre doesn't slip on by us, nosing along after Joe."
In silence she acquiesced. That sense of the nearness of another unseen human being was insistent upon her. For a long time, as still as the deep-rooted trees about them, they crouched, listening, watching. She heard the watch ticking in Babe Deveril's pocket. She heard her own breathing and his. She heard the brownie birds threshing among dead leaves. Then there was the eternal whispering of the pines and the faint murmurings from the stream far down in the cañon. At last it would have been a relief to straining nerves if a man, or two or three men, had stepped into sight in the trail from which she and Deveril had withdrawn. For more certain than ever was Lynette Brooke, though she could give neither rhyme nor reason for that certainty, that her instincts had not tricked her. Therefore, instead of being reassured at seeing or hearing no one, she was depressed and made anxious; the silence became sinister, filled with vague threat; that she saw no one was explicable to her by but the one ominous condition: that person or those persons were watching even now, and knew where she and Babe Deveril hid, and did not mean to stir until first their quarry stirred. Why all this caution? She could not explain that to herself; if some one followed, why should that some one hide? Why not step out with gun levelled, and put an end to this grim game of hide-and-seek.