He said, slowly, then: “You saw the fellow more than I, though I have seen him twice. Did it ever cross your mind that he might be Olaf, Thorgrim’s son, lying in wait for me when I should come healed out of your bower?”
She cried out in mingled amazement and assent: “Olaf! Then he carried his news straight to the Jarl! Before we had crossed the first hill, guards were spurring after us!”
The whiteness of her face, as she peered back between the flowery branches, brought him out of his musing. Pressing forward, he took the hand she had involuntarily put out.
“Never will Helvin Jarl send guards after me, that I have reason to know for certain. Have faith in my assurance, and no fear.”
To get his eyes away from hers, he bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Whether or not she read his secret dread that Helvin himself would be the pursuer, he could not tell. She made no other answer than to give back his hand-clasp firmly, then turned and urged her tired horse forward.
Falling on the velvet sod, the hoofs brought forth no sound. With the ceasing of their voices, silence like a great sea closed about them. Whenever it was rippled by the splash of wind in the tops of the pines or by the soft trill of a bird, the song-maker knew a sense of relief. Nerve and sinew, he was strained forward towards the moment when they should have won through this scented and smothering stillness to some elevation from which he could look back over their track.
So gradually the slope arose that he might not have known when they reached the crest if he had not seen the bright head before him beginning to descend, sunlike. His nails sinking into the leather of his saddle from the force with which he gripped it, he turned and looked back.
Nothing to be seen amid the white drifts of the thorn-trees. Nothing among the furry gray willows bordering the brook. His eye leaped on down to the bottom of the hollow, carpeted with the white flowers of wild berry vines,—and leaping, lost a moving dark shape even as they caught it, a moving slinking shape. It might have been a skulking wolf,—and it might have been a man!
The girl riding ahead heard his voice just behind her, speaking with chill quietness:
“As soon as ever you come to that black-budded bush, turn to the left. I remember that a trail begins there. It does not matter where it leads to. It is not a beaten track; hood your head and bend low, if twigs catch at you.”