But we had no luck. A few birds, which even the minimum pencil-ray flash had all but burned to a crisp, were all we had bagged. Evening came, with twilight settling so that the forest glades were deepening into purple. And then suddenly it seemed that we heard a rustling in the underbrush—a rustling which ought to be a deer.
We crouched in a thicket, waiting. The sound stopped. "Let's try the listener," I whispered.
Jim got out his little eavesdropping gadget. But he had no time to connect it. The rustling began again. It was obviously up a short slope no more than a hundred feet from us—some wild animal which seemed now to be retreating.
"I'll take a chance," I muttered. "If that's a deer, we'll lose it if I can't drill it now."
We knew it could not be a human, since our permit for today barred anyone else from the twenty square miles of Government preserve allotted to us. I fired at the sound, with my violet pencil-flash eating through the underbrush at the top of the slope.
There was a startled, weird outcry; and from the summit of the little rise a shape broke cover. A girl! She came bursting from a thicket no more than three feet to the side of the swath my flash had burned, and for a second or two she stood poised on a rock with the open evening sky a background above and behind her. A slim shape of bare legs and arms with a brief drape from shoulders to her thighs. The starlight and fading daylight gleamed on her bronzed skin as though she were a metal statue.
"Well—I say—" Jim muttered.
Thoughts are instant things. There was in my mind the vague idea that here, by some wild circumstances, was a girl in a fancy-dress party costume or something of the kind. But the thought, and Jim's muttered words of astonishment, were in another second stricken away. She paused for that instant on the rock, and then she leaped. Amazing, incredible leap! It carried her in a flat arc some ten or fifteen feet above the ground and twenty feet away, where light as a faun she landed on the toes of her bare feet. Nearer to us now; and seeing us, perhaps for the first time, she stood and stared.
I could see the silvery streaks running through the black hair that framed her face. It was a queerly beautiful face, apparently devoid of normal cosmetic-make-up. Negroid? Oriental? In that second I had the thought that it was neither—nor anything else that I could name. A girl with a mysterious wild beauty which stirred my pulses.