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THE WAY OF A WOMAN
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the cleanest, clearest spring water for the. girl he had made a circuitous, crashing detour to the brookside, and in leaning his full weight against a rotten tree, it had given way and sent him headlong and sprawling to the rocks below.
Pierre lay still and groaned softly. A thousand arrows were shooting thru the doubled-up leg that lay inert and refused to respond to his will. He lay a long while in agony, his eyes half-closed, and the sky swaying and tossing drunkenly above him.
With a desperate effort of will, he gathered his senses into one supreme moment and, reaching above him, inch by inch, succeeded in pulling down a struggling sapling to his side and in breaking it off. With this as a crutch, the giant cripple pulled himself upright and started a slow and painful journey back to his home.
"Looks like some of the blamed interference o' that female they call Fate," he muttered to himself, as he crept into the hut and rested himself on the floor a moment. "Well, she'll have to be a darned sight smarter than any other of the females I've run into to muss this job up — guess I'll have one over the old dame, even with a smashed hoof."
With a gun for a crutch, Pierre dragged himself to the inner room and found his captive kneeling, head on the couch, soundly sleeping. She looked like a little child in the flush of that troubled slumber — the quick, half-caught breathing telling of stress and tears, the angry flush staining her soft cheeks, her smooth brow wrinkled in puzzled anger. Pierre crept softly out again, after raising h e r to the couch and covering her gently. His eyes had lost their confident gleam — the
leap of his blood subsided at sight of the helpless girl, where it had refused to be quelled by her scorn or his own pain. He remembered how, in his first hunting days, he had snared a little, white rabbit, and the look it gave him out of its terror-stricken eyes. It was the most helpless, soft thing he had ever known. He had never hunted again. The base disadvantage at which the tiny animals were placed had not appealed to him. He liked fair play. From thence on he had wrestled with the giant trees, tamed the ground — now, for the second time, he had taken base advantage. He had snared a creature who was helpless — for whom he should have felt the deep, protective pity of the male. Pierre did not reason this out in so many words, but he knew the pity of the strong for the weak, the
THE ABDUCTION