The Flaming Jewel

In soft places, when she ventured to flash her torch, footprints cast curious shadows, and it was hard to make out tracks so oddly distorted by the light. Prints mingled and partly obliterated other prints. She identified her own tracks leading south, and guessed at the others, pointing north and south, where they had carried in the wounded and had gone back to bring in the dead.

But nowhere could she discover any impression resembling her step-father's, -- that great, firm stride and solid imprint which so often she had tracked through moss and swale and which she knew so well.

Once when she got up from her knees after close examination of the muddy trail, she became aware of the slightest taint in the night air -- stood with delicate nostrils quivering -- advanced, still conscious of the taint, listening, wary, every stealthy instinct alert.

She had not been mistaken: somewhere in the forest there was smoke. Somewhere a fire was burning. It might not be very far away; it might be distant. Whose fire? Her father's? Would a hunter of men build a fire?

The girl stood shivering in the darkness. There was not a sound.

Now, keeping her cautious feet in the trail by sense of touch alone, she moved on. Gradually, as she advanced, the odour of smoke became more distinct. She heard nothing, saw nothing; but there was a near reek of smoke in her nostrils and she stopped short.

After a little while in the intense silence of the forest she ventured to touch the switch of her torch, very cautiously.

In the faint, pale lustre she saw a tiny rivulet flowing westward from a spring, and, beside it, in the mud, imprints of a man's feet.

The tracks were small, narrow, slimmer than imprints made by any man she could think of. Under the glimmer of her torch they seemed quite fresh; contours were still sharp, some ready to crumble, and water stood in the heels.

A little way she traced them, saw where their maker had cut a pole, peeled it; saw, further on, where this unknown man had probed in moss and mud -- peppered some particularly suspicious swale with a series of holes as though a giant woodcock had been "boring" there.

Who was this man wandering all alone at night off the Drowned Valley trail probing the darkness with a pole?

She knew it was not her father. She knew that no native -- none of her father's men -- would behave in such a manner. Nor could any of these have left such narrow, almost delicate tracks.