She rose, with an impulse to fly, to escape
a meeting she had not desired. And as she rose, the breath stopped in
her throat.
Twenty feet behind Monohan came Jack Fyfe with his hunter's stride,
soundlessly over the moss, a rifle drooping in the crook of his arm. A
sunbeam striking obliquely between two firs showed her his face plainly,
the faint curl of his upper lip.
Something in her look arrested Monohan. He glanced around, twisted
about, froze in his tracks, his back to her. Fyfe came up. Of the three
he was the coolest, the most rigorously self-possessed. He glanced from
Monohan to his wife, back to Monohan. After that his blue eyes never
left the other man's face.
"What did I say to you yesterday?" Fyfe opened his mouth at last. "But
then I might have known I was wasting my breath on you!"
"Well," Monohan retorted insolently, "what are you going to do about it?
This isn't the Stone Age."
Fyfe laughed unpleasantly.
"Lucky for you. You'd have been eliminated long ago," he said. "No, it
takes the present age to produce such rotten specimens as you."
A deep flush rose in Monohan's cheeks. He took a step toward Fyfe, his
hands clenched.
"You wouldn't say that if you weren't armed," he taunted hoarsely.
"No?" Fyfe cast the rifle to one side. It fell with a metallic clink
against a stone. "I do say it though, you see. You are a sort of a
yellow dog, Monohan. You know it, and you know that I know it. That's
why it stings you to be told so.
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