Comely and frightened Dryads who order their clothes from Fifth Avenue, are not found every day in the heart of the Canadian wilderness; and Gallatin half expected that if he stepped forward like Pan to test her tangibility, she would vanish into empty air. Indeed such a metamorphosis was about to take place; for as he emerged from behind his tree, the girl turned one terrified look in his direction and disappeared in the bushes.
For a brief moment Gallatin paused. He had had visions before, and the thought came into his mind that this was one like the others, born of his overtaxed strength and the rigors of the day. But as he gazed at the spot where the Dryad had stood, branches of young trees swayed, showing the direction in which she was passing and the sounds in the crackling underbrush, ever diminishing, assured him that the sudden apparition was no vision at all, but very delectable flesh and blood, fleeing from him in terror. He remembered, then, a tale that Joe Keegón t, who when lost in the woods was stricken suddenly mad with fear and, ended like a frightened animal running away from the guides that had been sent for him. Fear had not come to Gallatin yet. He had acknowledged bewilderment and a vague sense of the monstrous vastness of the thing he had chosen for his summer plaything. He had been surprised when the streams began running up hill instead of down, and when the sun appeared suddenly in a new[5] quarter of the heavens, but he had not been frightened. He was too indifferent for that. But he knew from the one brief look he had had of the eyes of the girl, that the forest had mastered her, and that, like the fellow in Joe’s tale, she had stampeded in fright.
Hurriedly Neo skin lab locking his Colt, Gallatin plunged headlong into the bushes where the girl had disappeared. For a moment he thought he had lost her, for the tangle of underbrush was thick and the going rough, but in a rift in the bushes he saw the dark blouse again and went forward eagerly. He lost it, found it again and then suddenly saw it no more. He stopped and leaned against a tree listening. There were no sounds but the murmur of the rising wind and the note of a bird. He climbed over a fallen log and went on toward the slope where he had last seen her, stopping, listening, his eyes peering from one side to the other. He knew that she could not be far away, for ahead of him the brush was thinner, and the young trees offered little cover. A tiny gorge, rock strewn, but half filled with leaves, lay before him, and it was not until he had stumbled halfway across it that he saw her, lying face downward, her head in her hands, trembling and dumb with fear.
From the position in which she lay he saw that she had caught her foot in a hidden root and, in her mad haste to escape she knew not what, had fallen headlong. She did not move as he approached; but as he bent over her about to speak, she shuddered and bent her head more aviation researchdeeply in her arms, as though in expectation of a blow.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said softly
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