It did look so; and as they went on toward the turning it grew plain that they were approaching a clearing. “Wait, boys,” whispered the special agent. “This ought to be the place,--we don't want to move quite so carelessly now. Dick, you go around to the left, and I 'll take the right; Pink, you give us two or three minutes and then move in quietly toward the clearing. In that way we shall all three close in together. Wait a few minutes now.” The two men disappeared in the woods, one on each side of the road, and Pink was left alone in the shadows. At first he could hear now and then a low rustle as one or the other brushed through the bushes, but soon these sounds died away. He was standing in the shadow at the roadside, gazing with fixed eyes at the opening in the trees and stumps a hundred yards farther along. He wondered if the three minutes were up. It was too dark to use his watch. Waiting there under the stars, the minutes spun out amazingly; all sense of the passage of time seemed to have left him. He moved forward a few steps,--but no, it was too early; Dick and Beveridge had surely not had time to get to their positions. Still, what if he should wait too long, and not arrive in time to act in concert with the others? Out on the Lakes, with a slanting deck underfoot and a dim shore-line somewhere off in the night, Pink's soul would have thrilled in unison with the stars, but here, buried in the gloom of the pine stumps,--those straight, blackened poles that stood in endless monotony,--his soul was overwhelmed. A panic seized him; he knew he would be late; and he took to gliding along in the shadows, nearer and nearer, until, seeing plainly that the road swung around to the right, and that the clearing was overgrown with tall weeds and was surrounded by a stump fence, he paused again. His feet sinking at each step in the sand, he made no sound. He stood motionless. Over the weeds he made out the sagging roof of a small building. Then, forgetting that his own figure was invisible against the black of the forest, he dropped to the ground and, flat on his face, wriggled forward. A row of sunflowers grew inside the fence. At one point was a cluster of them, standing out high above the weeds. Cautiously inch by inch he crept nearer. The bunched stalks, outlined so distinctly against the sky, fascinated him by their resemblance to the hat, head, and shoulders of a human being.