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344
THE INDIAN DRUM

in an attempt to grasp her; he lunged to follow her, and she ran a few steps away and stopped. At his next step, his foot entangled in the mesh of the broken snowshoe, and he stooped, cursing, to strip it off and hurl it from him; then he tore off the one from the other foot, and threw it away, and lurched after her again; but now he sank above his knees and floundered in the snow. She stood for a moment while the half-mad, half-drunken figure struggled toward her along the side of the ravine; then she ran to where the tree trunks hid her from him, but where she could look out from the shadow and see him. He gained the top of the slope and turned in the direction she had gone; assured then, apparently, that she had fled in fear of him, he started back more swiftly toward the beach. She followed, keeping out of his sight among the trees.

To twenty-six, he had counted—to twenty-six, each time! That told that he knew one was living among those who had been upon the ferry! The Drum—it was not easy to count with exactness those wild, irregularly leaping sounds; one might make of them almost what one wished—or feared! And if, in his terror here, Henry made the count twenty-six, it was because he knew—he knew that one was living! What one? It could only be one of two to dismay him so; there had been only two on the ferry whose rescue he had feared; only two who, living, he would have let lie upon this beach which he had chosen and set aside for his patrol, while he waited for him to die!

She forced herself on, unsparingly, as she saw Henry gain the shore and as, believing himself alone, he hurried northward. She went with him, paralleling his course among the trees. On the wind-swept ridges of