Explore "Into the Primitive" by Robert Ames Bennet on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When, an hour or more after dawn the next morning, the girl slowly drew open her door and came out of the cave, Blake was nowhere in sight. She sighed, vastly relieved, and hastened across to bathe her flushed face in the spring. Stopping every few moments to listen for his step down the cleft, she gathered up a hamper of food and fled to the tree-ladder.
As she drew herself up on the cliff, she noticed a thin column of smoke rising from the last smouldering brands of a beacon fire that had been built in the midst of the bird colony, on the extreme outer edge of the headland. She did not, however, observe that, while the smoke column streamed up from the fire directly skyward, beyond it there was a much larger volume of smoke, which seemed to have eddied down the cliff face and was now rolling up into view from out over the sea. She gave no heed to this, for the sight of the beacon had instantly alarmed her with the possibility that Blake was still on the headland, and would imagine that she was seeking him.