Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/81

 from concealment there was added yet another pair of hostile orbs.

The eyes that watched from the myrtle thicket and from the broom grass were in front of him, between his pine stump and the swamp. This third pair of eyes which had now come to play a part in the drama watched him from behind.

From the high land to the swamp-edge the ground sloped gently, and Mayfield's stump was about half way down the slope. On the slope itself the trees were mostly second-growth, but just at the crest of the rise, some forty yards from the pine stump, stood an enormous black oak behind whose huge trunk even the mightiest of wild beasts or the burliest of human killers might have lurked unseen. It was from the ambush of this gigantic black oak trunk that this third pair of eyes now studied Mayfield's motionless form as the old hunter sat waiting, with that long patience which the forest teaches, for the deer or the turkey whose coming he expected.

The eyes that watched from behind the black oak trunk were less intense, perhaps, than those that watched from the myrtle thicket. But they were far more formidable. There was no fear in them. Instead they were aglitter with triumph more menacing and more sinister than hatred. They were like the eyes of one, whether beast or man, who sees