Deveril looked at her in astonishment.
"You don't! Why, couldn't you see that Taggart put the fear of the Lord into him? That Gallup, slick as wet soap, tricked him? That...."
She broke in impatiently, saying:
"Yet Joe.... He seemed to me to give in to them in something too much of a hurry ... as though he had his own wits about him, his own last card in the hole, as dad used to say. I wonder...."
He stared at her, puzzled.
"When you feel things," he muttered, none too pleasantly, "you get me guessing. I don't know yet how you came to know that the Taggart bunch was at our heels yesterday. But you did know; and you were right. As to this other hunch of yours...."
"You'll see," said Lynette serenely. "Joe isn't the biggest fool in that crowd of four. You wait and see."
"You'll give me the creeps yet," said Deveril.
They both laughed and went on—through brushy tangles; over rocky ridges; through spacious forests; across soft, springy meadows; up slope, down slope; on and on and endlessly on. Once they frightened a young bear that was tearing away as if its life depended upon it upon an old stump; the bear snorted and went lumbering away, as Deveril said, like a young freight-train gone mad; Lynette, as she admitted afterward, was twice as frightened, but did not run, herself, because the bear ran first and because she couldn't get the hang of her feet as quickly as he could! They came upon several bands of mountain-quail, which shot away, buzzing like overgrown bees; Deveril hurled stones and curses at many a scampering rabbit; once she and once he caught a glimpse of that dark gleam, come and gone in a flash, which might have been coyote or timber-wolf.... They did not speak of Bruce Standing. But they wondered, both of them....
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon they heard for the second time the crack of a rifle-shot. Farther to the south of them this time; a hint farther eastward; fainter than when first heard. Taggart, they held in full confidence, was following the trail which they had mapped for him; he was going on steadily; he was forging ahead of them. And yet they were content that this was so. They rested more often; they relaxed more and more.