Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/88

 This, then, was one development in the drama of the unseen eyes. Somehow, though neither sight nor sound had warned him, Mayfield's attention had been drawn to the huge trunk of the black oak on the brow of the slope behind him. As though fate had decided that events should now move swiftly to a crisis, there took place a few minutes afterwards another development in that drama.

To the three pairs of eyes which were watching Sandy Jim where he sat on his pine stump near the margin of the swamp, a fourth pair was added. These eyes were in the swamp itself, or rather just at its edge—in the fringe of short, close-growing canes at which the hunter was gazing. Yet, so dense were the canes, that Mayfield, although he was looking almost directly at the spot, could not see these eyes or the shape to which they belonged.

That shape remained for many minutes absolutely motionless in the cover of the canes while the eyes glared fixedly at the dun figure on the pine stump. They were eyes at once beautiful and terrible but far more terrible than beautiful. They were even more intense than the eyes in the myrtle thicket, even more ruthless than the eyes behind the black oak trunk. They were large, luminous, marvelously bright. Fire burned in them, yellow fire in which green lights glinted. Yet brilliant and piercing as they were, they seemed somehow pale and