Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/89

 cold, and they were incalculably cruel. They were eyes that could know no pity, eyes harder than stone or steel, eyes utterly savage, utterly implacable.

For nearly a quarter of an hour they remained fixed upon the form on the pine stump. Mayfield made not the slightest move. He was as still as though the deadly-cold glare of those unseen, unsuspected orbs in the canes had turned his blood to ice. As a matter of fact, he was thinking hard, thinking not about the implacable eyes in the canes—for he was unaware of their existence—but about the thing which lurked in the ambush of the black oak trunk up the slope behind him.

Some men grow restless when their brains work at utmost speed. Mayfield was of another type. In him intense mental concentration was often accompanied by complete physical repose. If throughout his long vigil he had demonstrated his woodsman's faculty of sitting still in one spot, his stillness was now so perfect that he seemed to have become inanimate.

It was this that hastened the crisis. So inanimate did he seem that to one of the four watching him from ambush he became inanimate. The watcher in the myrtle thicket and the watcher in the broom grass had witnessed his coming and therefore were not to be deceived by his present immobility; the stony-eyed watcher behind the