He did not attempt to rise to his feet,
but scanned with slower and more careful scrutiny the edge of the
forest and the river. He had been mystified while cringing for his
life behind the rock, but he was infinitely more so now. Greater
desire he had never had than this which thrilled him in these
present minutes of his readjustment--desire to look upon the woman
again. And then, all at once, there came back to him a mental
flash of the other. He remembered, as if something was coming back
to him out of a dream, how the whimsical twistings of his sick
brain had made him see two faces instead of one. Yet he knew that
the first picture of his mysterious assailant, the picture painted
in his brain when he had tried to raise his pistol, was the right
one. He had seen her dark eyes aglow; he had seen the sunlit sheen
of her black hair rippling in the wind; he had seen the white
pallor in her face, the slimness of her as she stood over him in
horror--he remembered even the clutch of her white hand at her
throat. A moment before she had tried to kill him. And then he had
looked up and had seen her like that! It must have been some
unaccountable trick in his brain that had flooded her hair with
golden fire at times.
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