“Hain’t been gone more ’n couple of minutes. Feller, all excited up, stopped and says somethin’ to him, and off he goes like somebody was robbin’ his hen-house.” She was too late! He was gone! Where? Marie guessed. Somebody else had warned him, and he was off for Crab Creek Trestle. “Who was with him? Did he go alone?” “Just up and rushed off like sixty. Didn’t wait for nothin’ or nobody.” It was like him. Sudden Jim! He had not paused for help, but had plunged ahead alone. How futile it was! What could he do alone save rush into danger? Marie felt there was danger. A business matter Moran had called it, yet in the heart of the woods that might happen which could not be considered a business transaction. Jim might come upon Moran’s agents as they set their fire. What then? Would they pause to consider if here were business? Would Jim pause to think of business? No. There would be violence—and Jim alone. There is a cave-dweller hidden in each of us. At some hour it will emerge, our varnish of civilization will peel from us, and we shall stand forth primitive, thinking, functioning as did the remote ancestors of the race. This was Marie’s hour. Her man was rushing into danger—and she was not with him. She did not consider if her presence would help; if she could do better service otherwise. Her instinct was to be with him, to share what came to him. She would warn him, delay him, if possible. But that was not the chief thing. The foremost thought was to stand at his side, to feel his presence. Unconscious of the stares of astonishment that followed her, the buzz of comment and surmise that remained behind, she followed the path Jim had taken, heading toward the railroad. But she did not follow the rails as Jim had done. She crossed the track and plunged into a marshy country, treacherous underfoot, grown thickly with undergrowth that tore at her garments, scratched her face. She was cutting across a curve in the railroad, hoping so to overtake Jim. Now she floundered and fell, was up again to struggle forward. Her feet sank in marsh ooze; sometimes she waded stagnant water that gurgled above her shoe-tops. But she stopped for nothing. Another might have become confused in the blackness of the night, for the moon was hidden by clouds which promised storm, but Marie had traversed those woods again and again. She was the daughter of a lumberjack, and woodcraft was bred into the very fiber of her. Once her ankle turned under her with a sickening pain; but she forced herself to rise and limp onward. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” she whispered to herself over and over again, unconscious that she was whispering. Her body was not inured to such endeavors, but her will was master of her body. When exhaustion would have brought her to the ground her will held her upright, gave her strength to flounder onward, always to the accompaniment of that hysterical whisper: “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”