And unto their caves they did go.

self-preservation. And that self-preservation entered very acutely into it I did not for a moment doubt. A person who had killed three times to achieve her ends -1 had no doubt at all as to the identity of the person in the control cabin, only the stewardess had seen me leave for the planeand protect her secret wouldn't hesitate to kill a fourth. And she knew her secret was no longer a secret, not while I lived, I had stupidly made my suspicions plain to her. And not only was she ready to kill, but she had the means to killof the fact that she carried a gun and was murderously ready to use it I'd had grisly evidence in the past few minutes. Nor need she hesitate to use it: apart from the fact that falling snow had a peculiarly blanketing effect on all sound, the south wind would carry the crack of a pistol-shot away from the cabin. Then something snapped inside my mind and I was all of a sudden fighting mad. Perhaps it was the thought of the four dead menfive, including the co-pilotperhaps it was the inevitable reaction from my panic-stricken fear of a moment ago, and perhaps, too, it had no little to do with the realisation that I, too, had a gun. I brought it out from my pocket, transferred the torch to my left hand, jumped up, pressed the torch button and started running down the aisle. It was proof enough of my utter inexperience in this murderous game of hide-and-seek that it was not until I was almost at the door at the forward end of the cabin that I remembered how easy it would have been for anyone to crouch down behind the backs of one of the rearward facing front seats and shoot me at point-blank range as I passed. But there was no one there and as I plunged through the door I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark muffled figure, no more than a featureless silhouette in the none too powerful beam of my torch, wriggling out through the smashed windscreen of the control cabin. I brought up my automaticthe thought that I could be indicted on a murder charge for killing a fleeing person, no matter how criminal a person, never entered my mindand squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger again, and before I remembered the existence of such a thing as a safety-catch the windscreen was no more than an empty frame for the thickening snow that swirled greyly in the darkness beyond, and I plainly heard the thud of feet hitting the ground.Cursing my stupidity, and again oblivious of the perfect target I was presenting, I leaned far out of the window. Again I was lucky, again I had another brief sight lens for olympus digital camera of the figure, this time scurrying round the tip of the left wing before vanishing into the snow and the dark. Three seconds later I was on the ground myself. I landed awkwardly but picked myself up at once and skirted round the wing, pounding after the fleeing figure with all the speed I could muster in the hampering bulkiness of my furs. She was running straight back to the cabin, following the line of bamboo sticks, and I could both hear the thudding of feet in the frozen snow and see the wildly erratic swinging of a torch, the beam one moment pooling whitely on the ground beside the flying feet, the next reaching ahead to light up the bamboo line. She was moving swiftly, much more so than I would have thought her capable of doing, but nevertheless I was steadily overhauling her when suddenly the torch beam ahead curved away in a new direction, as the runner angled off into the darkness, about forty-five degrees to the left. I turned after her, still following both my sight of the torch and sound of the feet. Thirty yards, forty, fiftythen I stopped and stood very still indeed. The torch ahead had gone out and I could hear nothing at all. For the second time that night I cursed my unthinking folly. What I should have done, of course, was to carry straight on back to the cabin and await the moment she turned up there, as she inevitably must: no person could hope to survive for any great length of time, without shelter of some kind, in the deadly cold of that arctic night. But it wasn't too late yet. The wind had been blowing almost directly in my face as I had been running: all I had to do was walk back, keeping it on my left cheek, and I would be bound to hit the line of bamboos at right angles, and the chances of my passing unwittingly between two of them, with the light of my torch to help me, did not exist. I turned, took one step, then two, then halted in my tracks. Why had I been lured out here away from the bamboo line? Not so that she could thereby escape meshe couldn't do it that way. As long as we both lived, we were both utterly dependent on the cabin and would have to meet there sooner or later. As long as we both lived! God, what a fool I was, what a veriest amateur at this game. The only way she could escape me, really and permanently escape me, was if I no longer lived. I could be shot down here and no one would ever know. And as she had stopped running before I had and been first to switch out her torch, she must