The next day Clayton gathered the necessary materials, and they all set to work under his guidance to fashion weapons, even to Come.

The Dutch girl braided the bow strings from fibers from the long tough grasses they found in open spaces in the mountains. Clayton shot birds for the feathers, and taught the others how properly to fletch their arrows. The fashioning of the weapons was a pleasant interlude to long days of scaling cliffs, battling through jungle undergrowth, marching down one declivity only to climb up once more to descend another. It was the first time that the five had had any protracted social intercourse, for after each hard day's march their greatest need had been sleep.

The Dutch girl sat near Jerry Lucas. He watched her nimble fingers braiding the fibers, and thought that she had pretty hands-small and well shaped. He noticed, too, that notwithstanding two years of bitter hardships she still gave attention to her nails. He glanced at his own, ruefully. Some-

how, she always looked trim and neat. How she accomplished it was beyond him.

"It will be fun to hunt with these," she said to him in her precise, almost Oxford English.

"If we can hit anything," he replied. She speaks better English than I, he thought.

"We must practice a great deal," she said. "It is not right that we four grown-up people should be dependent upon Colonel Clayton for everything, as though we were little children."

"No," he said.

"Is he not wonderful?"

Jerry mumbled a "Yes," and went on with his work. With awkward, unaccustomed fingers he was trying to fletch an arrow. He wished the girl would keep still. He wished she were in Halifax. Why did there have to be girls around to spoil a man's world?

Carrie glanced up at him, puzzled. Her eyes reflected it. Then she noticed his awkward attempts to hold a feather in place and fasten it there with a bit of fiber. "Here," she said. "Let me help you. You hold the feather and I'll bind the fiber around the shaft. Hold it close in the groove. There, that's right." Her hands, passing the fiber around the arrow, often touched his. He found the contact pleasant; and because he found it so, it made him angry.

"Here," he said, almost rudely, "I can do this myself. You need not bother.

She looked up at him, surprised. Then she went back to braiding the bow strings. She did not say anything, but in that brief glance when their eyes had met he had seen surprise and hurt in hers. He had seen the same once in a deer he had shot, and he had never again shot a deer.

You're a damned heel, he thought of himself. Then, with a great effort of will power, he said, "I am sorry. I did not mean to be rude."

"You do not like me," she said. "Why? Have I done something to offend you?"

"Of course not.