He felt at home now, alone with the wild animals, on ground that he had learned the tricks of when he was like a wild animal himself. He knew his wood as well as any of them. He could make lairs beneath the hollies, glide imperceptibly among the trees, crawl on his belly from tussock to tussock, and startle the very foxes by creeping quite close before they smelled peril. So he hid and glided as the sun climbed the sky, and then waited and watched when the sun was high, now here, now there, but always very near the open rides along which people would be passing. And that day many passed, but not the man he wanted.
He was three days and nights in the wood; and on the morning of the fourth day somebody saw him.
He had moved stealthily to the stream to drink, and while creeping back on hands and knees among some holly bushes by a glade, he paused suddenly. Out there on the grass, so small that she had not shown above the lowest bushes, there was a little girl--a child of about five, in a tattered pinafore, picking daisies and making a daisy chain. Breathless and with a beating heart, he watched her, and he dared not move forward into the sunlight or backward into the shade. She had not seen him yet. She was playing with the chain of flowers--a small wood goblin sprung out of nowhere, a little black-haired devil fired up from hell through the solid earth and out into this empty glade to squat there right in his track. Then she stood upon her feet, and admired the length of the chain as she held it dangling.
Then she dropped the chain, gave a little cry like the note of a frightened bird, and scampered away--never looking back.
Never looking back. But she had seen him. He tried to hope that she had not seen him.
He was hungry now. His provisions were exhausted; he had eaten nothing since last night, and he felt excited and fretful. He said to himself: "If to-day my enemy is not delivered into my hands, I must go out into the open and seek him at all risks, at all costs." It was a dominant idea now. Nothing else mattered.
But that day the man came. When the day was almost over, when the whole wood was fading to the neutral tints of dusk, he came. He was on horseback, sitting easily and proudly, and his chestnut horse paced daintily and noiselessly over the moss.
Dale took off his hat. Then presently he came out of the bracken into the ride, gripped the horse by its bridle, and spoke to the rider.