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He was thinking very wearily of all these things as he sat on the fallen tree-trunk in the garden and stared unseeing across tangled ranks of roses. And after a while his thoughts, as they were wont to do, returned to Ste. Marie that looming shadow which darkened the sunlight, that incubus of fear which clung to him night and day.
In this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There must be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a wreath hung over it.
Came the day of the Annos, when one of them made the invention, which was thick-plaited sandals to armour the soles of their feet against the poisoned thorns with which Nalasu had taken three of their lives. The day, in truth, was the night, a black night, a night so black under a cloud-palled sky that a tree-trunk could not be seen an eighth of an inch beyond one's nose.
"It was right there I found your locket," he said, pushing his foot into a dense tuft of blueberry bushes. "I never saw anybody with such sharp eyes!" she answered. She sat down on the tree-trunk in the sun and he sat down beside her. "You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat," he said. She laughed with pleasure. "Oh, I guess it was the hat!" she rejoined.
Seth seated himself on a fallen tree-trunk, and now looked squarely into the wood-cutter's thin, mean face. "Y' see it's kind o' curious. I got that gal from the Injuns more'n six years back, as you'll likely remember. Her folks, her father an' her ma, was killed south o' the Reservations. Guess they were kind o' big folk in your country.
"Yes," said Mr. Carstyle slowly, "I thought they were running." "It certainly looked like it for a minute. Let's sit down, shall we? I feel rather breathless myself." Vibart saw that his friend could hardly stand. They seated themselves on a tree-trunk by the roadside, and Mr. Carstyle continued to wipe his forehead in silence.
I'll loan you my map, which you can study while waiting for a bite; and then again, you must carry the compass along, too. I reckon you know something about telling the points of the compass from the green moss or mould on the northwest side of nearly every tree-trunk. Yes, go if you feel disposed, but start back an hour or so before dark."
Then his eyes fell upon a sawed-off tree-trunk, in the hollow of which lay something wrapped in a white cloth, surrounded with snake-skins. He had come by this secret road into the actual presence of the great Ju-Ju. Curiously he inserted his hand, lifted the object out, and examined it. Inside was something of a strange, yet familiar shape, oval, and flattened at the ends.
So it came about next time the excited yapping of the cur-dog was heard on the slopes above them, followed by stealthy movements among the fallen pine needles, and at length by the appearance of the beautiful red creature slyly slinking away to shelter, not twenty yards from where they stood behind a tree-trunk, that Juliette whispered: "Tirez!
But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe, still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together, and find a single hour's rest and solace.
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