It felt good. Like the snarl that wasn't a snarl, only better. It seemed to come from way inside. He laughed again, sitting up. He laughed a third time, tight hesitant sounds that came out of his throat and stretched his lips until they wouldn't stretch any more. Tears were on his cheeks, and he was laughing very tightly, very steadily, and she was laughing the same way, and they lay that way for a few minutes until they were trembling and their stomachs ached, and the laughter was almost crying. He saw her face, so close by, and felt an impulse. He rolled over and started to scuffle with her. When she realized that he wasn't trying to kill her, that he was playing, she scuffled back, rubbing his face in the dirt harder than he had hers, because she was stronger. He spat dirt and grass and grinned at her, and they fell apart. Footsteps. * * * * * His knife was out and ready, and so was hers. Legs moved on the other side of the bushes, stopped. Silently, almost stepping between the leaves on the ground, Steven and the girl crawled out the other side of the bushes and took up positions against treetrunks, just enough of their heads protruding to see around. A man came probing into the head-high bushes from the path side ... stood there a moment looking around, only a vague brown shape through the leaves. He grunted, went out to the path again, walked on. Steven and the girl followed him by his sounds, trailing about twenty feet behind, until Steven got a good look at him when he passed an open space between the bushes. He was a big man in brownish-green clothes--new-looking clothes, not full of holes. He walked almost carelessly, as if he didn't care who heard him. And Steven saw the reason for that. Men with guns always walked louder. This man wore a holstered gun at his belt, and carried another one--a long gun something like a rifle, only bulkier. Steven's lips curled. He darted a look at the girl. Across his mind flashed the vague idea of sharing whatever the man had with her, but he didn't know how to let her know. She was looking at the guns, eyes wide. Afraid. She shook her head. Steven snarled silently at her, put a hand on her chest, shoved gently. She stayed there as he moved on. Silently he drifted from tree to tree, bush to bush, getting ahead of his quarry. The big man's shoes clumped noisily along. Steven had no trouble telling where he was. At last Steven spotted a good tree, a thick-foliaged one about forty feet up the path, where the sun would be in the man's eyes. If the man kept following the path-- He did. And when he passed below the tree, Steven was waiting on the low branch that overhung the path--waiting with his face taut and his eyes staring and his knife ready. One stab at the base of the skull, and the guns would be his. He jumped. * * * * *