Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/87

 accentuating the hawk-like look of the lean, sun-tanned face; and at the same time a sudden light had flared momentarily in the gray-blue eyes. Then, very slowly, Sandy Jim turned his head.

Very, very slowly he turned it, inch by inch, so that the movement was barely perceptible, at the same time shifting his body slightly: and so—gradually and to all appearances very casually—his gaze described a half-circle, taking in the thinly wooded spaces to the right of him and behind.

At last his eyes rested on the trunk of the great black oak at the crest of the rise. Four feet of solid living oak stood between him and the grim watcher in that ambush; Mayfield's vision could not pierce the opaque wood and see that which lurked behind it. He saw nothing but the tree itself. Yet he looked no farther. As though he had completed his survey of the space behind him and was no longer interested, his eyes traveled somewhat more quickly back across the are of a half-circle and resumed their placid, patient scrutiny of the canes at the edge of the swamp from which he hoped a deer would presently emerge.

He had seen nothing, heard nothing. Yet, studying his deep-set eyes and hawk-like face, one would have guessed that something had been learned—something which stirred Sandy Jim Mayfield with a strange excitement.