Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/293

 dreaming thus, she wondered at them. But in the fact that she who had loved Gilbert Barradell now loved Lachlan McDonald she found nothing strange. All that had gone before seemed unreal, childish, utterly unimportant. Her life had begun when Lachlan McDonald came into it.

Mile after mile the buffalo path wound through the splendid virgin forest of the mountains and the upper foothills; and mile after mile Jolie rode on, seeing little, hearing little of what passed around her—the abounding wild life of the wilderness, the grouse and the turkeys which they startled from time to time, the deer standing at gaze in the forest glades. Suddenly Almayne flung up his hand and jerked his horse to a halt. The others halted also and Jolie, her reverie broken at last, bent forward on Selu's back, watching the hunter curiously.

She knew that he was listening, but she could hear nothing. He sat erect and rigid on his horse, his head cocked a little to the side, his long rifle gripped in his right hand. Then, with a quick motion of his arm urging haste, he wheeled to the right out of the buffalo path, riding diagonally up the steep wooded slope, the others following. Behind a kalmia thicket well above the path he halted them.

"Watch the path," he whispered. "You'll see something."

For perhaps a minute they waited. Then from below came a muffled snort and, later, a dull thudding, as of hoofs. Gazing through a gap in the kalmia