Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/149

 nearer. Their voices made music, savage and unearthly, but softened by the distance. The glow from the fire turned the massive pine trunks to bronze and the hanging Spanish moss to silver. Fifty feet away in the gloom she saw, for a moment, two round orbs which glittered in the light like emeralds, and she knew that they were the eyes of some great beast of the forest. Yet she was not afraid. Somehow all this seemed fitting, natural, vaguely familiar; and somehow it was fitting and natural, too, that she should be here in the depths of the midnight forest with these two men in buckskins, who seemed as much a part of that forest as the trees.

Over and over again she had pictured some such scene as this, constructing it out of vivid details in the letters that Gilbert Barradell had written to her after his coming to America. Always she had loved the open, had found delight in birds and other wild creatures, in trees, flowers, and the things of earth. In England she had dreamed of days and nights in the vast American woods, had lived them in spirit with Barradell as her companion. This that was happening now was all as it should be, all as she had visioned it—except that, instead of Gilbert Barradell, her companions were the tall hunter, Almayne, whom she disliked vaguely because she was aware that he disliked her, and the dark youth who had come so strangely into her life on a certain evening in her father's garden in Charles Town.