By every law of loyalty, pride, self-respect, she should have held this man her enemy. Instead, she held his handkerchief against her lips, -- crushed it there suddenly through her skin from throat to hair.
Then, wearily, she lifted her head and looked out into the grey and empty vista of her life, where the dreary years seemed to stretch like milestones away, away into an endless waste.
She put the handkerchief into her pocket, shouldered her rifle, moved on without looking about her, -- a mistake which only the emotion of the moment could account for in a girl so habituated to caution, -- for she had gone only a few rods before a man's strident voice halted her: "Halte la! Crosse en air!"
"Drop that rifle!" came another voice from behind her. "You're covered! Throw your gun to the ground!"
She stood as though paralysed. To the right and left she heard people trampling through the thicket toward her.
"Down with that gun, damn you!" repeated the voice, breathless from running. All around her men came floundering and crashing toward her through the undergrowth. She could see some of them.
As she stopped to place her rifle on the dead leaves, she drew the flat packet from her cartridge sack at the same time and slid it deftly under a rotting log. Then, calm but very pale, she stood upright to face events.
The first man wore a red and yellow bandanna handkerchief over the lower half of his face, pulled tightly across a bony nose. He held a long pistol nearly parallel to his own body; and when he came up to where she was standing he poked the muzzle into her stomach.
She did no flinch; he said nothing; she looked intently into the two ratty eyes fastened on her over the edge of his bandanna.
Five other men were surrounding her, but they all wore white masks of vizard shape, revealing chin and mouth.
They were different otherwise, also, wearing various sorts and patterns of sport clothes, brand new, and giving them an odd, foreign appearance.
What troubled her most was the silence the maintained. The man wearing the bandanna was the only one who seemed at all a familiar figure, -- merely, perhaps, because he was American in build, clothing, and movement.
He took her by the shoulder, turned her around and gave her a shove forward. She staggered a step or two; he gave her another shove and she comprehended that she was to keep on going.
Presently she found herself in a steep, wet deer-trail rising upward through a gully. She knew that runway. It led up Star Peak.