"While I get some wood," he went on, "you can take some cans and go down to the creek for water. I'll trust you that far ... and don't you trust too much to the screen of willows to give you a chance for a getaway! I tell you, I'd overhaul you as sure as there is a God in heaven!" She caught up two cans and went down the slope toward the creek. To keep him from guessing how, all of a sudden, her heart was fluttering again, she sang a little song as she went. He stared after her, puzzled and wondering. Then with a short, savage grunt, he began gathering wood. Was now her time? This her chance? She sang more loudly, clearly and cheerily. She wanted to look back to see if he was watching her every step; yet she beat down the temptation, knowing that if he did watch and did see her turn he would know that she was overeager for flight. She came to the creek; she passed carelessly about a little clump of willows. Now she looked back, peering through the branches. He was stooping, gathering wood; his back was to her! "_Now!_" her impulses cried within her. "_Now!_" She looked about her hurriedly, in all directions. There was so much open country here; big pines, wide-spaced. If she ran down the slope he must surely see her when she had gone fifty or a hundred yards. And then he'd be after her! If she turned to right or left, the case was almost the same. If it were only dark! But the sun was rising.... She began singing again, so that he might hear. A sudden anger blazed up within her. With all his blunt ways, the man was not without his own sort of shrewdness; he had known that she had no chance here to escape him; no chance for such a head start as to give her an even break in a race with him. ... After ten minutes she came back to him; she carried a dripping can in each hand; she had bathed hands and arms and face and throat; she had combed her hair out through her fingers, making new thick braids, with loosely curling ends. She had taken time to twist those soft ends about her fingers. He was standing over his newly built fire; his rifle, with the chain tossed across it, lay against a rock; he gave no sign of noting her approach.... Yet, while they ate a hurriedly warmed breakfast, she caught him several times looking at her curiously.... Her heart began again to beat happily; never was hope long departed from the breast of Lynette Brooke. She kept telling herself, over and over, that he was not going to be brute and beast to her. Soon or late she would find her chance for escape from him; she would let him think her that weakling which it was his way to regard women in general; there would come the time when, once more free, she could laugh at him.... And she, when he did not observe, looked curiously at him many a time.