After a while she drew from her pocket his handkerchief, and looked at it. The square of cambric bore his initials, J.S. Blood from her lip remained on it. She had not washed out the spots.
She put it to her lips again, mechanically. A faint odour of tobacco still clung to it.
By every law of loyalty, pride, self-respect, she should have held this man her enemy. Instead, she held his handkerchief against her lips, — crushed it there suddenly through her skin from throat to hair.
Then, wearily, she lifted her head and looked out into the grey and empty vista of her life, where the dreary years seemed to stretch like milestones away, away into an endless waste.
She put the handkerchief into her pocket, shouldered her rifle, moved on without looking about her, — a mistake which only the emotion of the moment could account for in a girl so habituated to caution, — for she had gone only a few rods before a man's strident voice halted her:
"Halte la! Crosse en air!"
"Drop that rifle!" came another voice from behind her. "You're covered!
Throw your gun to the ground!"
She stood as though paralysed. To the right and left she heard people trampling through the thicket toward her.
"Down with that gun, damn you!" repeated the voice, breathless from running. All around her men came floundering and crashing toward her through the undergrowth. She could see some of them.
As she stopped to place her rifle on the dead leaves, she drew the flat packet from her cartridge sack at the same time and slid it deftly under a rotting log. Then, calm but very pale, she stood upright to face events.