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The Voice of the Pack

by Edison Marshall · English · Gutenberg #33877 · 366,851 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Voice of the Pack

Author: Edison Marshall


        
Release date: October 20, 2010 [eBook #33877]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOICE OF THE PACK ***




Produced by Darleen Dove, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









                        THE VOICE OF THE PACK

                          By EDISON MARSHALL



    A. L. BURT COMPANY
    Publishers      New York

    Published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company

    _Copyright, 1920_,
    By Little, Brown, and Company.

    _All rights reserved_

    Published, April, 1920
    Reprinted, May, 1920

    TO MY FATHER
    GEORGE EDWARD MARSHALL
    OF MEDFORD, OREGON
    HIMSELF A SON OF FRONTIERSMEN




CONTENTS


PROLOGUE

BOOK ONE--REPATRIATION

BOOK TWO--THE DEBT

BOOK THREE--THE PAYMENT




THE VOICE OF THE PACK




PROLOGUE

     If one can just lie close enough to the breast of the
     wilderness, he can't help but be imbued with some of the life
     that pulses therein.--_From a Frontiersman's Diary_.


Long ago, when the great city of Gitcheapolis was a rather small, untidy
hamlet in the middle of a plain, it used to be that a pool of water,
possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immediately back
of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy in Gitcheapolis in
winter; and the pond was nothing more than snow water that the
inefficient drainage system of the city did not quite absorb. Now snow
water is occasionally the most limpid, melted-crystal thing in the
world. There are places just two thousand miles west of Gitcheapolis
where you can see it pouring pure and fresh off of the snow fields,
scouring out a ravine from the great rock wall of a mountain side,
leaping faster than a deer leaps--and when you speak of the speed of a
descending deer you speak of something the usual mortal eye can
scarcely follow--from cataract to cataract; and the sight is always a
pleasing one to behold. Incidentally, these same snow streams are quite
often simply swarming with trout,--brook and cutthroat, steelhead and
even those speckled fellows that fishermen call Dolly Vardens for some
reason that no one has ever quite been able to make out. They are to be
found in every ripple, and they bite at a fly as if they were going to
crush the steel hook into dust between their teeth, and the cold water
gives them spirit to fight until the last breath of strength is gone
from their beautiful bodies. How they came there, and what their purpose
is in ever climbing up the river that leads nowhere but to a snow bank,
no one exactly knows.

The snow water back of the courthouse was not like this at all. Besides
being the despair of the plumbers and the city engineer, it was a severe
strain on the beauty-loving instincts of every inhabitant in the town
who had any such instincts. It was muddy and murky and generally
distasteful; and lastly, there were no trout in it. Neither were there
any mud cat such as were occasionally to be caught in the Gitcheapolis
River.

A little boy played at the edge of the water, this spring day of long
ago. Except for his interest in the pond, it would have been scarcely
worth while to go to the trouble of explaining that it contained no
fish. He, however, bitterly regretted the fact. In truth, he sometimes
liked to believe that it did contain fish, very sleepy fish that never
made a ripple, and as he had an uncommon imagination he was sometimes
able to convince himself that this was so. But he never took hook and
line and played at fishing. He was too much afraid of the laughter of
his boy friends. His mother probably wouldn't object if he fished here,
he thought, particularly if he were careful not to get his shoes covered
with mud. But she wouldn't let him go down to Gitcheapolis Creek to fish
with the other boys for mud cat. He was not very strong, she thought,
and it was a rough sport anyway, and besides,--she didn't think he
wanted to go very badly. As mothers are usually particularly
understanding, this was a curious thing.

The truth was that little Dan Failing wanted to fish almost as much as
he wanted to live. He would dream about it of nights. His blood would
glow with the thought of it in the spring-time. Women the world over
will have a hard time believing what an intense, heart-devouring passion
the love of the chase can be, whether it is for fishing or hunting or
merely knocking golf balls into a little hole upon a green. Sometimes
they don't remember that this instinct is just as much a part of most
men, and thus most boys, as their hands or their lips. It was acquired
by just as laborious a process,--the lives of uncounted thousands of
ancestors who fished and hunted for a living.

It was true that little Dan didn't look the part. Even then he showed
signs of physical frailty. His eyes looked rather large, and his cheeks
were not the color of fresh sirloin as they should have been. In fact,
one would have had to look very hard to see any color in them at all.
These facts are interesting from the light they throw upon the next
glimpse of Dan, fully twenty years later.

This story isn't about the pool of snow water; it is only partly about
Gitcheapolis. "Gitche" means great in the Indian language, and every one
knows what "apolis" means. There are a dozen cities in the
middle-western part of the United States just like it--with Indian
names, with muddy, snow-water pools, with slow rivers in which only mud
cat live--utterly surrounded by endless fields that slope levelly and
evenly to a drab horizon. And because that land is what it is, because
there are such cities as Gitcheapolis, there has sprung up in this
decade a far-seeing breed of men. They couldn't help but learn to see
far, on such prairies. And, like little Dan by the pool, they did all
their hunting and their fishing and exercised many of the instincts that
a thousand generations of wild men had instilled in them, in their
dreams alone. It was great exercise for the imagination. And perhaps
that has had something to do with the size of the crop of writers and
poets and artists that is now being harvested in the Middle West.

Except for the fact that it was the background for the earliest picture
of little Dan, the pool back of the courthouse has very little
importance in his story. It did, however, afford an illustration to him
of one of the really astonishing truths of life. He saw a shadow in the
water that he pretended he thought might be a fish. He threw a stone at
it.

The only thing that happened was a splash, and then a slowly widening
ripple. The circumference of the ripple grew ever larger, extended and
widened, and finally died at the edge of the shore. It set little Dan to
thinking. He wondered if, had the pool been larger, the ripple still
would have spread; and if the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple
would have gone on forever. At the time he did not know the laws of
cause and effect. Later, when Gitcheapolis was great and prosperous and
no longer untidy, he was going to find out that a cause is nothing but a
rock thrown into a pond of infinity, and the ripple that is its effect
keeps growing and growing forever.

It is a very old theme, but the astonishment it creates is always new. A
man once figured out that if Clovis had spared one life that he
took--say that of the under-chief whose skull he shattered to pay him
for breaking the vase of Soissons--there would be to-day the same races
but an entirely different set of individuals. The effect would grow and
grow as the years passed. The man's progeny each in turn would leave his
mark upon the world, and the result would be--too vast to contemplate.
The little incident that is the real beginning of this story was of no
more importance than a pebble thrown into the snow-water pond; but its
effect was to remove the life of Dan Failing, since grown up, far out of
the realms of the ordinary.

And that brings all matters down to 1919, in the last days of a
particularly sleepy summer. You would hardly know Gitcheapolis now. It
is true that the snows still fall deep in winter, but the city engineer
has finally solved the problem of the pool back of the courthouse. In
fact, the courthouse itself is gone, and rebuilt in a more pretentious
section of the city. The business district has increased tenfold. And
the place where used to be the pool and the playground of Dan Failing is
now laid off in as green and pretty a city park as one could wish to
see.

The evidence points to the conclusion that the story some of the oldest
settlers told about this district was really so. They say that forty and
fifty and maybe seventy-five years ago, the quarter-section where the
park was laid out was a green little glade, with a real, natural lake in
the center. Later the lake was drained to raise corn, and the fish
therein--many of them such noble fish as perch and bass--all died in the
sun-baked mud. The pool that had gathered yearly was just the lake
trying, like a spent prize fighter, to come back. And it is rather
singular that buildings have been torn down and money has been spent to
restore the little glade to its original charm; and now construction has
been started to build an artificial lake in the center. One would be
inclined to wonder why things weren't kept the way they were in the
first place. But that is the way of cities.

Some day, when the city becomes more prosperous, a pair of swans and a
herd of deer are going to be introduced, to restore some of the natural
wild life of the park. But in the summer of 1919, a few small birds and
possibly half a dozen pairs of squirrels were the extent and limit of
the wild creatures. And at the moment this story opens, one of these
squirrels was perched on a wide-spreading limb over-arching a gravel
path that slanted through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. He
wished that some one would come along with a nut.

There was a bench beneath the tree. If there had not been, the life of
Dan Failing would have been entirely different. In fact, as the events
will show, there wouldn't have been any life worth talking about at all.
If the squirrel had been on any other tree, if he hadn't been hungry, if
any one of a dozen other things hadn't been as they were, Dan Failing
would have never gone back to the land of his people. The little
bushy-tailed fellow on the tree limb was the squirrel of Destiny!




BOOK ONE

REPATRIATION




I


Dan Failing stepped out of the elevator and was at once absorbed in the
crowd that ever surged up and down Broad Street. Where the crowd came
from, or what it was doing, or where it was going was one of the
mysteries of Gitcheapolis. It appealed to a person rather as does a
river: eternal, infinite, having no control over its direction or
movement, but only subject to vast, underlying natural laws. In this
case, the laws were neither gravity nor cohesion, but rather unnamed
laws that go clear back to the struggle for existence and
self-preservation. Once in the crowd, Failing surrendered up all
individuality. He was just one of the ordinary drops of water, not an
interesting, elaborate, physical and chemical combination to be studied
on the slide of a microscope. No one glanced at him in particular. He
was enough like the other drops of water not to attract attention. He
wore fairly passable clothes, neither rich nor shabby. He was a tall
man, but gave no impression of strength because of the exceeding
spareness of his frame. As long as he remained in the crowd, he wasn't
important enough to be studied. But soon he turned off, through the
park, and straightway found himself alone.

The noise and bustle of the crowd--never loud or startling, but so
continuous that the senses are scarcely more aware of them than of the
beating of one's own heart--suddenly and utterly died almost at the very
border of the park. It was as if an ax had chopped them off, and left
the silence of the wild place. The gravel path that slanted through the
green lawns did not lead anywhere in particular. It made a big loop and
came out almost where it went in. Perhaps that is the reason that the
busy crowds did not launch forth upon it. Crowds, like electricity, take
the shortest course. Moreover, the hour was still some distance from
noon, and the afternoon pleasure seekers had not yet come. But the
morning had advanced far enough so that all the old castaways that had
slept in the park had departed. Dan had the path all to himself.

Although he had plenty of other things to think about, the phenomena of
the sudden silence came home to him very straight indeed. The noise from
the street seemed wholly unable to penetrate the thick branches of the
trees. He could even hear the leaves whisking and flicking together,
and when a man can discern this, he can hear the cushions of a mountain
lion on a trail at night. Of course Dan Failing had never heard a
mountain lion. Except on the railroad tracks between, he had never
really been away from cities in his life.

At once his thought went back to the doctor's words. Dan had a very
retentive memory, as well as an extra fine imagination. The two always
seem to go together. The words were still repeating themselves over and
over in his ears, and the doctor's face was still before his eyes. It
had been a kind face; the lips had even curled in a little smile of
encouragement. But the doctor had been perfectly frank, entirely
straightforward. Dan was glad that he had. At least, he was rid of the
dreadful uncertainty. There had been no evasion in his verdict.

"I've made every test," he said. "They're pretty well shot. Of course,
you can go to some sanitarium, if you've got the money. If you
haven't--enjoy yourself all you can for about six months."

Dan's voice had been perfectly cool and sure when he replied. He had
smiled a little, too. He was still rather proud of that smile. "Six
months? Isn't that rather short?"

"Maybe a whole lot shorter. I think that's the limit."

There was the situation: Dan Failing had but six months to live. Of
course, the doctor said, if he had the money he could go to a
sanitarium. But he had spoken entirely hopelessly. Besides, Dan didn't
have the money. He pushed all thought of sanitariums out of his mind.
Instead, he began to wonder whether his mother had been entirely wise in
her effort to keep him from the "rough games" of the boys of his own
age. He realized now that he had been an under-weight all his
life,--that the frailty that had thrust him to the edge of the grave had
begun in his earliest boyhood. But it wasn't that he was born with
physical handicaps. He had weighed a full ten pounds; and the doctor had
told his father that a sturdier little chap was not to be found in any
maternity bed in the whole city. But his mother was convinced that the
child was delicate and must be sheltered. Never in all the history of
his family, so far as Dan knew, had there been a death from the malady
that afflicted him. Yet his sentence was signed and sealed.

But he harbored no resentment against his mother. It was all in the
game. She had done what she thought was best. And he began to wonder in
what way he could get the greatest pleasure from his last six months of
life.

"Good Lord!" he suddenly breathed. "I may not even be here to see the
snows come!" Perhaps there was a grim note in his voice. There was
certainly no tragedy, no offensive sentimentality. He was looking the
matter in the face. But it was true that Dan had always been partial to
the winter season. When the snow lay all over the farmlands and bowed
down the limbs of the trees, it had always wakened a curious flood of
feelings in the wasted man. It seemed to him that he could remember
other winters, wherein the snow lay for endless miles over an endless
wilderness, and here and there were strange, many-toed tracks that could
be followed in the icy dawns. He didn't ever know just what made the
tracks, except that they were creatures of fang and talon that no law
had ever tamed. But of course it was just a fancy. He wasn't in the
least misled about it. He knew that he had never, in his lifetime, seen
the wilderness. Of course his grandfather had been a frontiersman of the
first order, and all his ancestors before him--a rangy, hardy breed
whose wings would crumple in civilization--but he himself had always
lived in cities. Yet the falling snows, soft and gentle but with a kind
of remorselessness he could sense but could not understand, had always
stirred him. He'd often imagined that he would like to see the forests
in winter. He knew something about forests. He had gone one year to
college and had studied all the forestry that the university heads would
let him take. Later he had read endless books on the same subject. But
the knowledge had never done him any good. Except for a few boyish
dreams, he never imagined that it would.

In him you could see a reflection of the boy that played beside the pond
of snow water, twenty years before. His dark gray eyes were still rather
large and perhaps the wasted flesh around them made them seem larger
than they were. But it was a little hard to see them, as he wore large
glasses. His mother had been sure, years before, that he needed glasses;
and she had easily found an oculist that agreed with her.

Now that he was alone on the path, the utter absence of color in his
cheeks was startling. That meant the absence of red,--that warm glow of
the blood, eager and alive in his veins. There was, indeed, another
color, visible only because of the stark whiteness of his skin. He was
newly shaven, and his lips and chin looked somewhat blue from the heavy
growth of hair under the skin. Perhaps an observer would have noticed
lean hands, with big-knuckled fingers, a rather firm mouth, and closely
cropped dark hair. He was twenty-nine years of age, but he looked
somewhat older. He knew now that he was never going to be any older. A
doctor as sure of himself as the one he had just consulted couldn't
possibly be mistaken.

It was rather refreshing to get into the park. Dan could think ever so
much more clearly. He never could think in a crowd. Someway, the
hurrying people always seemed to bewilder him. Here the leaves were
flicking and rustling over his head, and the shadows made a curious
patchwork on the green lawns. He became quite calm and reflective. And
then he sat down on a park bench, just beneath the spreading limb of a
great tree. He would sit here, he thought, until he finally decided what
he would do with his remaining six months.

He hadn't been able to go to war. The recruiting officer had been very
kind but most determined. The boys had brought him great tales of
France. It might be nice to go to France and live in some country inn
until he died. But he didn't have very long to think upon this vein. For
at that instant the squirrel came down to see if he had a nut.

It was the squirrel of Destiny. But Dan didn't know it then.

Now it is true that it takes more than one generation for any wild
creature to get completely away from its natural timidity. Quite often a
person is met who has taken quail eggs from a nest and hatched them
beneath the warm body of a domestic hen. Just what is the value of such
a proceeding is rather hard to explain, as quail have neither the
instincts nor the training to enjoy life in a barnyard. Yet occasionally
it is done, and the little quail spend most of their days running
frantically up and down the coop, yearning for the wild, free spaces for
which they were created. But they haven't, as a rule, many days to spend
in this manner. Mostly they run until they die.

The rule is said to work both ways. A tame canary, freed, will usually
try to return to his cage. And this is known to be true of human beings
just as of the wild creatures. There are certain breeds of men, used to
the far-lying hills, who, if inclosed in cities, run up and down them
until they die. The Indians, for instance, haven't ever been able to
adjust themselves to civilization. There are several thousand of them
now where once were millions.

Bushy-tail was not particularly afraid of the human beings that passed
up and down the park, because he had learned by experience that they
usually attempted no harm to him. But, nevertheless, he had his
instincts. He didn't entirely trust them. Occasionally a child would
come with a bag of nuts, and he would sit on the grass not a dozen feet
away to gather such as were thrown to him. But all the time he kept one
sharp eye open for any sudden or dangerous motions. And every instinct
warned him against coming nearer than a dozen feet. After several
generations, probably the squirrels of this park would climb all over
its visitors and sniff in their ears and investigate the back of their
necks. But this wasn't the way of Bushy-tail. He had come too recently
from the wild places. And he wondered, most intensely, whether this
tall, forked creature had a pocket full of nuts. He swung down on the
grass to see.

"Why, you little devil!" Dan said in a whisper. His eyes suddenly
sparkled with delight. And he forgot all about the doctor's words and
his own prospects in his bitter regrets that he had not brought a
pocketful of nuts. Unfortunately, he had never acquired the peanut
habit. His mother had always thought it vulgar.

And then Dan did a curious thing. Even later, he didn't know why he did
it, or what gave him the idea that he could decoy the squirrel up to
him by doing it. That was his only purpose,--just to see how close the
squirrel would come to him. He thought he would like to look into the
bright eyes at close range. All he did was suddenly to freeze into one
position,--in an instant rendered as motionless as the rather
questionable-looking stone stork that was perched on the fountain.

He didn't know it, at the time, but it was a most meritorious piece of
work. The truth was that he was acting solely by instinct. Men who have
lived long in the wilderness learn a very important secret in dealing
with wild animals. They know, in the first place, that intimacy with
them is solely a matter of sitting still and making no sudden motions.
It is motion, not shape, that frightens them. If a hunter is among a
herd of deer and wishes to pick the bucks off, one by one, he simply
sits still, moving his rifle with infinite caution, and the animal
intelligence does not extend far enough to interpret him as an enemy.
Instead of being afraid, the deer are usually only curious.

Dan simply sat still. The squirrel was very close to him, and Dan seemed
to know by instinct that the movement of a single muscle would give him
away. So he sat as if he were posing before a photographer's camera.
The fact that he was able to do it is in itself important. It is
considerably easier to exercise with dumb-bells for five minutes than to
sit absolutely without motion for the same length of time. Hunters and
naturalists acquire the art with training. It was therefore rather
curious that Dan succeeded so well the first time he tried it. He had
sense enough to relax first, before he froze. Thus he didn't put such a
severe strain on his muscles. And this was another bit of wisdom that in
a tenderfoot would have caused much wonder in certain hairy old hunters
in the West.

The squirrel, after ten seconds had elapsed, stood on his haunches to
see better. First he looked a long time with his left eye. Then he
turned his head and looked very carefully with his right. Then he backed
off a short distance and tried to get a focus with both. Then he came
some half-dozen steps nearer.

A moment before he had been certain that a living creature--in fact one
of the most terrible and powerful living creatures in the world--had
been sitting on the park bench. Now his poor little brain was completely
addled. He was entirely ready to believe that his eyes had deceived him.

All the time, Dan was sitting in perfectly plain sight. It wasn't as if
he were hiding. But the squirrel had learned to judge all life by its
motion alone, and he was completely at a loss to interpret or understand
a motionless figure.

Bushy-tail drew off a little further, fully convinced at last that his
hopes of a nut from a child's hand were blasted. But he turned to look
once more. The figure still sat utterly inert. And all at once he forgot
his devouring hunger in the face of an overwhelming curiosity.

He came somewhat nearer and looked a long time. Then he made a
half-circle about the bench, turning his head as he moved. He was more
puzzled than ever, but he was no longer afraid. His curiosity had become
so intense that no room for fear was left. And then he sprang upon the
park bench.

Dan moved then. The movement consisted of a sudden heightening of the
light in his eyes. But the squirrel didn't see it. It takes a muscular
response to be visible to the eyes of the wild things.

The squirrel crept slowly along the bench, stopping to sniff, stopping
to stare with one eye and another, just devoured from head to tail with
curiosity. And then he leaped on Dan's knee.

He was quite convinced, by now, that this warm perch on which he stood
was the most singular and interesting object of his young life. It was
true that he was faintly worried by the smell that reached his nostrils.
But all it really did was further to incite his curiosity. He followed
the leg up to the hip and then perched on the elbow. And an instant more
he was poking a cold nose into Dan's neck.

But if the squirrel was excited by all these developments, its amazement
was nothing compared to Dan's. It had been the most astounding incident
in the man's life. He sat still, tingling with delight. And in a single
flash of inspiration he knew he had come among his own people at last.

The creatures of the wild,--they were the folk he had always secretly
loved and instinctively understood. His ancestors, for literally
generations, had been frontiersmen and outdoor naturalists who never
wrote books. Was it possible that they had bequeathed to him an
understanding and love of the wild that most men did not have? But
before he had time to meditate on this question, an idea seemed to pop
and flame like a Roman candle in his brain. He knew where he would spend
his last six months of life.

His own grandfather had been a hunter and trapper and frontiersman in a
certain vast but little known Oregon forest. His son had moved to the
Eastern cities, but in Dan's garret there used to be old mementoes and
curios from these savage days,--a few claws and teeth, and a fragment of
an old diary. The call had come to him at last. Tenderfoot though he
was, Dan would go back to those forests, to spend his last six months of
life among the wild creatures that made them their home.




II


The dinner hour found Dan Failing in the public library of Gitcheapolis,
asking the girl who sat behind the desk if he might look at maps of
Oregon. He got out the whole question without coughing once, but in
spite of it she felt that he ought to be asking for California or
Arizona maps, rather than Oregon. People did not usually go to Oregon to
rid themselves of his malady. A librarian, as a rule, is a wonderfully
well-informed person; but her mental picture of Oregon was simply one
large rainstorm. She remembered that she used to believe that Oregon
people actually grew webs between their toes, and the place was thus
known as the Webfoot State. She didn't know that Oregon has almost as
many climates as the whole of nature has in stock,--snow in the east,
rain in the north, winds in the west, and sunshine in the south, with
all the grades between. There are certain sections where in midwinter
all hunters who do not particularly care to sink over their heads in
the level snow walk exclusively on snowshoes. There are others, not one
hundred miles distant, where any kind of snowstorm is as rare a
phenomenon as the seventeen-year locusts. Distances are rather vasty in
the West. For instance, the map that Dan Failing looked at did not seem
much larger than the map, say, of Maryland. Figures showed, however,
that at least two counties of Oregon were each as large as the whole
area of the former State.

He remembered that his grandfather had lived in Southern Oregon. He
looked along the bottom of his map and discovered a whole empire,
ranging from gigantic sage plains to the east to dense forests along the
Pacific Ocean. Those sage flats, by the way, contain not only sage hens
as thick as poultry in a hen-yard and jack rabbits of a particularly
long-legged and hardy breed, but also America's one species of antelope.
Had Dan known that this was true, had he only been aware that these
antelope are without exception the fastest-running creatures upon the
face of the earth, he might have been tempted to go there instead of to
the land of his fathers. But all he saw on the map was a large brown
space marked at exceedingly long intervals with the name of a fort or
town. He began to search for Linkville.

Time was when Linkville was one of the principal towns of Oregon. Dan
remembered the place because some of the time-yellowed letters his
grandfather had sent him had been mailed at a town that bore this name.
But he couldn't find Linkville on the map. Later he was to know the
reason,--that the town, halfway between the sage plains and the
mountains, had prospered and changed its name. He remembered that it was
located on one of those great fresh-water lakes of Southern Oregon; so,
giving up that search, he began to look for lakes. He found them in
plenty,--vast, unmeasured lakes that seemed to be distributed without
reason or sense over the whole southern end of the State. Near the
Klamath Lakes, seemingly the most imposing of all the fresh-water lakes
that the map revealed, he found a city named Klamath Falls. He put the
name down in his notebook.

The map showed a particularly high, far-spreading range of mountains due
west of the city. Of course they were the Cascades; the map said so very
plainly. Then Dan knew he was getting home. His grandfather had lived
and trapped and died in these same wooded hills. Finally he located and
recorded the name of the largest city on the main railroad line that was
adjacent to the Cascades.

The preparation for his departure took many days. He read many books on
flora and fauna. He bought sporting equipment. Knowing the usual ratio
between the respective pleasures of anticipation and realization, he did
not hurry himself at all. And one midnight he boarded a west-bound
train.

There were none that he cared about bidding good-by. The sudden
realization of the fact brought a moment's wonder. He had not realized
that he had led such a lonely existence. There were men who were fitted
for living in cities, but perhaps he was not one of them. He saw the
station lights grow dim as the train pulled out. Soon he could discern
just a spark, here and there, from the city's outlying homes. And not
long after this, the silence and darkness of the farm lands closed down
upon the train.

He sat for a long time in the vestibule of the sleeping car, thinking in
anticipation of this final adventure of his life. It is true that he had
not experienced many adventures. He had lived most of them in
imagination alone; or else, with tired eyes, he had read of the exploits
of other men. He was rather tremulous and exultant as he sank down into
his berth.

He saw to it that at least a measure of preparation was made for his
coming. That night a long wire went out to the Chamber of Commerce of
one of the larger Southern Oregon cities. In it, he told the date of his
arrival and asked certain directions. He wanted to know the name of some
mountain rancher where possibly he might find board and room for the
remainder of the summer and the fall. He wanted shooting, and he
particularly cared to be near a river where trout might be found. They
never came up Gitcheapolis River, or leaped for flies in the pond back
of the courthouse. The further back from the paths of men, he wrote, the
greater would be his pleasure. And he signed the wire with his full
name: Dan Failing with a Henry in the middle, and a "III" at the end.

He usually didn't sign his name in quite this manner. The people of
Gitcheapolis did not have particularly vivid memories of Dan's
grandfather. But it might be that a legend of the gray, straight
frontiersman who was his ancestor had still survived in these remote
Oregon wilds. The use of the full name would do no harm.

Instead of hurting, it was a positive inspiration. The Chamber of
Commerce of the busy little Oregon city was not usually exceptionally
interested in stray hunters that wanted a boarding place for the summer.
Its business was finding country homes for orchardists in the pleasant
river valleys. But it happened that the recipient of the wire was one of
the oldest residents, a frontiersman himself, and it was one of the
traditions of the Old West that friendships were not soon forgotten. Dan
Failing I had been a legend in the old trapping and shooting days when
this man was young. So it came about that when Dan's train stopped at
Cheyenne, he found a telegram waiting him:

     "Any relation to Dan Failing of the Umpqua Divide?"

Dan had never heard of the Umpqua Divide, but he couldn't doubt but that
the sender of the wire referred to his grandfather. He wired in the
affirmative. The head of the Chamber of Commerce received the wire, read
it, thrust it into his desk, and in the face of a really important piece
of business proceeded to forget all about it. Thus it came about that,
except for one thing, Dan Failing would have probably stepped off the
train at his destination wholly unheralded and unmet. The one thing that
changed his destiny was that at a meeting of a certain widely known
fraternal order the next night, the Chamber of Commerce crossed trails
with the Frontier in the person of another old resident who had his
home in the farthest reaches of the Umpqua Divide. The latter asked the
former to come up for a few days' shooting--the deer being fatter and
more numerous than any previous season since the days of the grizzlies.
For it is true that one of the most magnificent breed of bears that ever
walked the face of the earth once left their footprints, as of
flour-sacks in the mud, from one end of the region to another.

"Too busy, I'm afraid," the Chamber of Commerce had replied. "But
Lennox--that reminds me. Do you remember old Dan Failing?"

Lennox probed back into the years for a single instant, straightened out
all the kinks of his memory in less time than the wind straightens out
the folds of a flag, and turned a most interested face. "Remember him!"
he exclaimed. "I should say I do." The middle-aged man half-closed his
piercing, gray eyes. Those piercing eyes are a characteristic peculiar
to the mountain men, and whether they come from gazing over endless
miles of winter snow, or from some quality of steel that life in the
mountains imbues, no one is quite able to determine.

"Listen, Steele," he said. "I saw Dan Failing make a bet once. I was
just a kid, but I wake up in my sleep to marvel at it. We had a full
long glimpse of a black-tail bounding up a long slope. It was just a
spike-buck, and Dan Failing said he could take the left-hand spike off
with one shot from his old Sharpe's. Three of us bet him--the whole
thing in less than two seconds. With the next shot, he'd get the deer.
He won the bet, and now if I ever forget Dan Failing, I want to die."

"You're just the man I'm looking for, then. You're not going out till
the day after to-morrow?"

"No."

"On the limited, hitting here to-morrow morning, there's a grandson of
Dan Failing. His name is Dan Failing too, and he wants to go up to your
place to hunt. Stay all summer and pay board."

Lennox's eyes said that he couldn't believe it was true. After a while
his tongue spoke, too. "Good Lord," he said. "I used to foller Dan
around--like old Shag, before he died, followed Snowbird. Of course he
can come. But he can't pay board."

It was rather characteristic of the mountain men,--that the grandson of
Dan Failing couldn't possibly pay board. But Steele knew the ways of
cities and of men, and he only smiled. "He won't come, then," he
explained. "Anyway, have that out with him at the end of his stay. He
wants fishing, and you've got that in the North fork. He wants shooting,
and if there is a place in the United States with more wild animals
around the back door than at your house, I don't know where it is.
Moreover, you're a thousand miles back--"

"Only one hundred, if you must know. But Steele--do you suppose he's the
man his grandfather was before him--that all the Failings have been
since the first days of the Oregon trail? If he is--well, my hat's off
to him before he steps off the train."

The mountaineer's bronzed face was earnest and intent in the bright
lights of the club. Steele thought he had known this breed. Now he began
to have doubts of his own knowledge. "He won't be; don't count on it,"
he said humbly. "The Failings have done much for this region, and I'm
glad enough to do a little to pay it back, but don't count much on this
Eastern boy. He's lived in cities; besides, he's a sick man. He said so
in his wire. You ought to know it before you take him in."

The bronzed face changed; possibly a shadow of disappointment came into
his eyes. "A lunger, eh?" Lennox repeated. "Yes--it's true that if he'd
been like the other Failings, he'd never have been that. Why, Steele,
you couldn't have given that old man a cold if you'd tied him in the
Rogue River overnight. Of course you couldn't count on the line keeping
up forever. But I'll take him, for the memory of his grandfather."

"You're not afraid to?"

"Afraid, Hell! He can't infect those two strapping children of mine.
Snowbird weighs one hundred and twenty pounds and is hard as steel.
Never knew a sick day in her life. And you know Bill, of course."

Yes, Steele knew Bill. Bill weighed two hundred pounds, and he would
choose the biggest of the steers he drove down to the lower levels in
the winter and, twisting its horns, would make it lay over on its side.
Besides, both of the men assumed that Dan must be only in the first
stages of his malady.

And even as the men talked, the train that bore Dan Failing to the home
of his ancestors was entering for the first time the dark forests of
pine and fir that make the eternal background of the Northwest. The wind
came cool and infinitely fresh into the windows of the sleeping car, and
it brought, as camels bring myrrh from the East, strange, pungent odors
of balsam and mountain flower and warm earth, cooling after a day of
blasting sun. And these smells all came straight home to Dan. He was
wholly unable to understand the strange feeling of familiarity that he
had with them, a sensation that in his dreams he had known them always,
and that he must never go out of the range of them again.




III


Dan didn't see his host at first. For the first instant he was entirely
engrossed by a surging sense of disappointment,--a feeling that he had
been tricked and had only come to another city after all. He got down on
to the gravel of the station yard, and out on the gray street pavement
he heard the clang of a trolley car. Trolley cars didn't fit into his
picture of the West at all. Many automobiles were parked just beside the
station, some of them foreign cars of expensive makes, such as he
supposed would be wholly unknown on the frontier. A man in golf clothes
brushed his shoulder.

It wasn't a large city; but there was certainly lack of any suggestion
of the frontier. But there were a number of things that Dan Failing did
not know about the West. One of the most important of them was the
curious way in which wildernesses and busy cities are sometimes mixed up
indiscriminately together, and how one can step out of a modern country
club to hear the coyotes wailing on the hills. He really had no right to
feel disappointed. He had simply come to the real West--that bewildering
land in which To-morrow and Yesterday sit right next to each other, with
no To-day between. The cities, often built on the dreams of the future,
sometimes are modern to such a point that they give many a sophisticated
Eastern man a decided shock. But quite often this quality extends to the
corporation limits and not a step further. Then, likely as not, they
drop sheer off, as over a precipice, into the utter wildness of the
Past.

Dan looked up to the hills, and he felt better. He couldn't see them
plainly. The faint smoke of a distant forest fire half obscured them.
Yet he saw fold on fold of ridges of a rather peculiar blue in color,
and even his untrained eyes could see that they were clothed in forests
of evergreen. It is a strange thing about evergreen forests that they
never, even when one is close to them, appear to be really green. To a
distant eye, they range all the way from lavender to a pale sort of blue
for which no name has ever been invented. Just before dark, when, as all
mountaineers know, the sky turns green, the forests are simply curious,
dusky shadows. The pines are always dark. Perhaps, after all, they are
simply the symbol of the wilderness,--eternal, silent, and in a vague
way rather dark and sad. No one who really knows the mountains can
completely get away from their tone of sadness. Over the heads of the
green hills Dan could see a few great peaks; McLaughlin, even and
regular as a painted mountain; Wagner, with queer white gashes where the
snow still lay in its ravines, and to the southeast the misty range of
snow-covered hills that were the Siskeyous. He felt decidedly better.
And when he saw old Silas Lennox waiting patiently beside the station,
he felt he had come to the right place.

It would be interesting to explain why Dan at once recognized the older
man for the breed he was. But unfortunately, there are certain of the
many voices that speak within the minds of human beings of which
scientists have never been able to take phonographic records. They
simply whisper their messages, and their hearer, without knowing why,
knows that he has heard the truth. Silas Lennox was not dressed in a way
that would distinguish him. It was true that he wore a flannel shirt,
riding trousers, and rather heavy, leathern boots. But sportsmen all
over the face of the earth wear this costume at sundry times. Mountain
men have a peculiar stride by which experienced persons can occasionally
recognize them; but Silas Lennox was standing still when Dan got his
first glimpse of him. The case resolves itself into a simple matter of
the things that could be read in Lennox's face.

Dan disbelieved wholly in a book that told how to read characters at
sight. Yet at the first glance of the lean, bronzed face his heart gave
a curious little bound. A pair of gray eyes met his,--two fine black
points in a rather hard gray iris. They didn't look past him, or at
either side of him, or at his chin or his forehead. They looked right at
his own eyes. The skin around the eyes was burned brown by the sun, and
the flesh was so lean that the cheek bones showed plainly. The mouth was
straight; but yet it was neither savage nor cruel. It was simply
determined.

But the strangest part of all was that Dan felt an actual sense of
familiarity with this kind of man. To his knowledge, he had never known
one before; and it was extremely doubtful if, in his middle-western
city, he had even seen the type. In spite of the fact that he thinks
nothing of starting out thirty miles across the snow on snowshoes, the
mountain man cannot be called an extensive traveler. He plans to go to
some great city once in a lifetime and dreams about it of nights, but
rather often the Death that is every one's next-door neighbor in the
wilderness comes in and cheats him out of the trip. Few of the breed had
ever come to Gitcheapolis. Yet all his life, Dan felt, he had known this
straight, gray-eyed mountain breed even better than he knew the boys
that went to college with him. At the time he didn't stop to wonder at
the feeling. He was too busy looking about. But the time was to come
when he would wonder and conclude that it was just another bit of
evidence pointing to the same conclusion. And besides this unexplainable
feeling of familiarity, he felt a sudden sense of peace, even a quiet
sort of exultation, such as a man feels when he gets back into his own
home country at last.

Lennox came up with a light, silent tread and extended his hand. "You're
Dan Failing's grandson, aren't you?" he asked. "I'm Silas Lennox, who
used to know him when he lived on the Divide. You are coming to spend
the summer and fall on my ranch."

The immediate result of these words, besides relief, was to set Dan
wondering how the old mountaineer had recognized him. He wondered if he
had any physical resemblance to his grandfather. But this hope was shot
to earth at once. His telegram had explained about his malady, and of
course the mountaineer had picked him out simply because he had the
mark of the disease on his face. As he shook hands, he tried his best
to read the mountaineer's expression. It was all too plain: an
undeniable look of disappointment.

The truth was that even in spite of all the Chamber of Commerce head had
told him, Lennox had still hoped to find some image of the elder Dan
Failing in the face and body of his grandson. But at first there seemed
to be none at all. The great hunter and trapper who had tamed the
wilderness about the region of the Divide--as far as mortal man could
tame it--had a skin that was rather the color of old leather. The face
of this young man was wholly without tinge of color. Because of the
thick glasses, Lennox could not see the young man's eyes; but he didn't
think it likely they were at all like the eyes with which the elder
Failing saw his way through the wilderness at night. Of course he was
tall, just as the famous frontiersman had been, but while the elder
weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, bone and muscle, this man did not
touch one hundred and thirty. Evidently the years had brought degeneracy
to the Failing clan. Lennox was desolated by the thought.

He helped Dan with his bag to a little wiry automobile that waited
beside the station. They got into the two front seats.

"You'll be wondering at my taking you in a car--clear to the Divide,"
Lennox explained. "But we mountain men can't afford to drive horses any
more where a car will go. This time of year I can make it fairly
easy--only about fifteen miles on low gear. But in the winter--it's
either a case of coming down on snowshoes or staying there."

And a moment later they were starting up the long, curved road that led
to the Divide.

During the hour that they were crossing over the foothills, on the way
to the big timber, Silas Lennox talked a great deal about the
frontiersman that had been Dan's grandfather. A mountain man does not
use profuse adjectives. He talks very simply and very straight, and
often there are long silences between his sentences. Yet he conveys his
ideas with entire clearness.

Dan realized at once that if he could be, in Lennox's eyes, one fifth of
the man his grandfather had been, he would never have to fear again the
look of disappointment with which his host had greeted him at the
station. But instead of reaching that high place, he had only--death. He
was never to be one of this strong breed from which his people sprang.
Always they would accept him for the memories that they held of his
ancestors, pity him for his weakness, and possibly be kind enough to
deplore his death. He never need fear any actual expressions of scorn.
Lennox had a natural refinement that forbade it. Dan never knew a more
intense desire than that to make good in the eyes of these mountain men.
Far back, they had been his own people; and all men know that the
upholding of a family's name and honor has been one of the greatest
impulses for good conduct and great deeds since the beginnings of
civilization. But Dan pushed the hope out of his mind at once. He knew
what his destiny was in these quiet hills. And it was true that he began
to have secret regrets that he had come. But it wasn't that he was
disappointed in the land that was opening up before him. It fulfilled
every promise. His sole reason for regrets lay in the fact that now the
whole mountain world would know of the decay that had come upon his
people. Perhaps it would have been better to have left them to their
traditions.

He had never dreamed that the fame of his grandfather had spread so far.
For the first ten miles, Dan listened to stories,--legends of a cold
nerve that simply could not be shaken; of a powerful, tireless physique;
of moral and physical strength that was seemingly without limit. Then,
as the foothills began to give way to the higher ridges, and the shadow
of the deeper forests fell upon the narrow, brown road, there began to
be long gaps in the talk. And soon they rode in utter silence, evidently
both of them absorbed in their own thoughts.

Dan did not wonder at it at all. Perhaps he began to faintly understand
the reason for the silence and the reticence that is such a predominant
trait in the forest men. There is a quality in the big timber that
doesn't make for conversation, and no one has ever been completely
successful in explaining what it is. Perhaps there is a feeling of
insignificance, a sensation that is particularly insistent in the winter
snows. No man can feel like talking very loudly when he is the only
living creature within endless miles. The trees, towering and old, seem
to ignore him as a being too unimportant to notice. And besides, the
silence of the forest itself seems to get into the spirit, and the
great, quiet spaces that lie between tree and tree simply dry up the
springs of conversation. Dan did not feel oppressed at all. He merely
seemed to fall into the spirit of the woods, and no words came to his
lips. He began to watch the ever-changing vista that the curving road
revealed.

First there had been brown hills, and here and there great heaps of
stone. The brush had been rather scrubby, and the trees somewhat sickly
and brown. But now, as the men mounted higher, they were coming into
open forest. The trees stood one and one, perfect, dark-limbed, and only
the carpet of their needles lay between. The change was evidenced in the
streams, too. They seemingly had not suffered from the drought that had
sucked up the valley streams. They were faster, whiter with foam, and
the noise of their falling waters carried farther through the still
woods. The road followed the long shoulder of a ridge, an easy grade of
perhaps six per cent, but Dan counted ridges sloping off until he was
tired.

By now the smaller wild things of the mountains began to present
themselves a breathless instant beside the road. These little people
have an actual purpose in the hills other than to furnish food for the
larger forest creatures. They give a note of sociability, of
companionship, that is sorely needed to dull the edge of the utter,
stark lonesomeness and severity that is the usual tone of the mountains.
The fact that they all live under the snow in winter is one reason why
this season is especially dreadful to the spirit.

Every tree trunk seemed to have its chipmunks, and they all appeared to
be suffering from the same delusion. They all were afflicted with the
idea that the car was trying to cut off their retreat, and only by
crossing the road in front of it could they save themselves. This idea
is a particularly prevalent one with wild animals; and it is the same
instinct that makes a domestic cow almost invariably cross the road in
front of a motorist. And it also explains why certain cowardly animals,
such as the wolf or cougar, will sometimes seemingly without a cause on
earth, make a desperate charge on a hunter. They think their retreat is
cut off, and they have to fight. Again and again the chipmunks crossed
at the risk of their lives. Sometimes the two men saw those big,
flat-footed rabbits that are especially constructed for moving about in
the winter snows, and more than once the grouse rose with a whir and
beat of wings.

Every mile was an added delight to Dan. Not even wine could have brought
a brighter sparkle to his eyes. He had begun to experience a vague sort
of excitement, an emotion that was almost kin to exultation, over the
constant stir and movement of the forest life. He didn't know that a
bird dog feels the same when it gets to the uplands where the quail are
hiding. He had no acquaintance with bird dogs whatever. He hadn't
remembered that he had qualities in common with them,--a long line of
ancestors who had lived by hunting.

Once, as they stopped the car to refill the radiator from a mountain
stream, Lennox looked at him with sudden curiosity. "You are getting a
thrill out of this, aren't you?" he asked wonderingly.

It was a curious tone. Perhaps it was a hopeful tone, too. He spoke as
if he hardly understood.

"A thrill!" Dan echoed. He spoke as a man speaks in the presence of some
great wonder. "Good Heavens, I never saw anything like it in my life."

"In this very stream," the mountaineer told him joyously, "you may
occasionally catch trout that weigh three pounds."

But as he got back into the car, the look of interest died out of
Lennox's eyes. Of course any man would be somewhat excited by his first
glimpse of the wilderness. It was not that he had inherited any of the
traits of his grandfather. It was absurd to hope that he had. And he
would soon get tired of the silences and want to go back to his cities.
He told his thought--that it would all soon grow old to him; and Dan
turned almost in anger.

"You don't know," he said. "I didn't know myself, how I would feel about
it. I'm never going to leave the hills again."

"You don't mean that."

"But I do." He tried to speak further, but he coughed instead. "But I
couldn't if I wanted to. That cough tells you why, I guess."

"You mean to say--" Silas Lennox turned in amazement. "You mean that
you're a--a goner? That you've given up hope of recovering?"

"That's the impression I meant to convey. I've got a little over four
months--though I don't see that I'm any weaker than I was when the
doctor said I had six months. Those four will take me all through the
fall and the early winter. And I hope you won't feel that you've been
imposed upon--to have a dying man on your hands."

"It isn't that." Silas Lennox threw his car into gear and started up the
long grade. And he drove clear to the top of it and into another glen
before he spoke again. Then he pointed to what looked to Dan like a
brown streak that melted into the thick brush. "That was a deer," he
said slowly. "Just a glimpse, but your grandfather could have got him
between the eyes. Most like as not, though, he'd have let him go. He
never killed except when he needed meat. But that--as you say--ain't the
impression I'm trying to convey."

He seemed to be groping for words.

"What is it, Mr. Lennox?" Dan asked.

"Instead of being sorry, I'm mighty glad you've come," Lennox told him.
"It's not that I expect you to be like your grandfather. You haven't had
his chance. But it's always the way of true men, the world over, to come
back to their own kind to die. That deer we just saw--he's your people,
and so are all these ranchers that grub their lives out of the
forests--they are your people too. The bears and the elk, and even the
porcupines. Though you likely won't care for 'em, it's almost as if they
were your grandfather's own folks. And you couldn't have pleased the old
man's old friends any better, or done more for his memory, than to come
back to his own land for your last days."

There were great depths of meaning in the simple words. There were
significances, such as the love that the mountain men have for their own
land, that came but dimly to Dan's perceptions. The words were strange,
yet Dan intuitively understood. It was as if a prodigal son had returned
at last, and although his birthright was squandered and he came only to
die, the people of his home would give him kindness and forgiveness,
even though they could not give him their respect.




IV


The Lennox home was a typical mountain ranch-house,--square, solid,
comforting in storm and wind. Bill was out to the gate when the car
drove up. He was a son of his father, a strong man in body and
personality. He too had heard of the elder Failing, and he opened his
eyes when he saw the slender youth that was his grandson. And he led the
way into the white-walled living room.

The shadows of twilight were just falling; and Bill had already lighted
a fire in the fireplace to remove the chill that always descends with
the mountain night. The whole long room was ruddy and cheerful in its
glare. At once the elder Lennox drew a chair close to it for Dan.

"You must be chilly and worn-out from the long ride," he suggested
quietly. He spoke in the tone a strong man invariably uses toward an
invalid. But while a moment before Dan had welcomed the sight of the
leaping, life-giving flames, he felt a curious resentment at the words.

"I'm not cold," he said. "It's hardly dark yet. I'd sooner go outdoors
and look around."

The elder man regarded him curiously, perhaps with the faintest glimmer
of admiration. "You'd better wait till to-morrow, Dan," he replied.
"Bill will have supper soon, anyway. To-morrow we'll walk up the ridge
and I'll see if I can show you a deer. You don't want to overdo too
much, right at first."

"But, good Heavens! I'm not going to try to spare myself while I'm here.
It's too late for that."

"Of course--but sit down now, anyway. I'm sorry that Snowbird isn't
here."

"Snowbird is--"

"My daughter. My boy, she can make a biscuit! That's not her name, of
course, but we've always called her that. She got tired of keeping house
and is working this summer. Poor Bill has to keep house for her, and no
wonder he's eager to take the stock down to the lower levels. I only
wish he hadn't brought 'em up this spring at all; I've lost dozens from
the coyotes."

"But a coyote can't kill cattle--"

"It can if it has hydrophobia, a common thing in the varmints this time
of year. But as I say, Bill will take the stock down next season, and
then Snowbird's work will be through, and she'll come back here."

"Then she's down in the valley?"

"Far from it. She's a mountain girl if one ever lived. Perhaps you don't
know the recent policy of the forest service to hire women when they can
be obtained. It was a policy started in wartimes and kept up now because
it is economical and efficient. She and a girl from college have a cabin
not five miles from here on old Bald Mountain, and they're doing lookout
duty."

Dan wondered intensely what lookout duty might be. His thoughts went
back to his early study of forestry. "You see, Dan," Lennox said in
explanation, "the government loses thousands of dollars every year by
forest fire. A fire can be stopped easily if it is seen soon after it
starts. But let it burn awhile, in this dry season, and it's a terror--a
wall of flame that races through the forests and can hardly be stopped.
And maybe you don't realize how enormous this region is--literally
hundreds of miles across. We're the last outpost--there are four cabins,
if you can find them, in the first seventy miles back to town. So they
have to put lookouts on the high points, and now they're coming to the
use of aeroplanes so they can keep even a better watch. All summer and
until the rains come in the fall, they have to guard every minute, and
even then sometimes the fires get away from them. And one of the first
things a forester learns, Dan, is to be careful with fire."

"Is that the way they are started--from the carelessness of campers?"

"Partly. There's an old rule in the hills: put out every fire before you
leave it. Be careful with the cigar butts, too--even the coals of a
pipe. But of course the lightning starts many fires, and, I regret to
say, hundreds of them are started with matches."

"But why on earth--"

"It doesn't make very good sense, does it? Well, one reason is that
certain stockmen think that a burned forest makes good range--that the
undervegetation that springs up when the trees are burned makes good
feed for stock. And you must know, too, that there are two kinds of men
in the mountains. One kind--the real mountain man, such as your
grandfather was--lives just as well, just as clean as the ranchers in
the valley. Some of this kind are trappers or herders. But there's
another class too--the most unbelievably shiftless, ignorant people in
America. They have a few acres to raise crops, and they kill deer for
their hides, and most of all they make their living fighting forest
fires. A fire means work for every hill-billy in the region--often five
or six dollars a day and better food than they're used to. Moreover,
they can loaf on the job, put in claims for extra hours, and make what
to them is a fortune.

"You'll likely see a few of the breed before--before your visit here is
ended. There's a family of 'em not three miles away--and that's real
neighborly in the mountains--by the name of Cranston. Bert Cranston
traps a little and makes moonshine; you'll probably see plenty of him
before the trip is over. Sometime I'll tell you of a little difficulty
that I had with him once. You needn't worry about him coming to this
house; he's already received his instructions in that matter.

"But I see I'm getting all tangled up in my traces. Snowbird and a girl
friend from college got jobs this summer as lookouts--all through the
forest service they are hiring women for the work. They are more
vigilant than men, less inclined to take chances, and work cheaper.
These two girls have a cabin near a spring, and they cook their own
food, and are making what is big wages in the mountains. I'm rather
hoping she'll drop over for a few minutes to-night."

"Good Lord--does she travel over these hills in the darkness?"

The mountaineer laughed--a delighted sound that came somewhat curiously
from the bearded lips of the stern, dark man. "Dan, I'll swear she's
afraid of nothing that walks the face of the earth--and it isn't because
she hasn't had experiences either. She's a dead shot with a pistol, for
one thing. She's physically strong, and every muscle is hard as nails.
She used to have Shag, too--the best dog in all these mountains. She's a
mountain girl, I tell you; whoever wins her has got to be able to tame
her!" The mountaineer laughed again. "I sent her to school, of course,
but there was only one boy she'd look at--the athletic coach! And it
wasn't his fault that he didn't follow her back to the mountains."

The call to supper came then, and Dan got his first sight of mountain
food. There were potatoes, newly dug, mountain vegetables that were
crisp and cold, a steak of peculiar shape, and a great bowl of purple
berries to be eaten with sugar and cream. Dan's appetite was not as a
rule particularly good. But evidently the long ride had affected him. He
simply didn't have the moral courage to refuse when the elder Lennox
heaped his plate.

"Good Heavens, I can't eat all that," he said, as it was passed to him.
But the others laughed and told him to take heart.

He took heart. It was a singular thing, but at that first bite his
sudden confidence in his gustatory ability almost overwhelmed him. All
his life he had avoided meat. His mother had always been convinced that
such a delicate child as he had been could not properly digest it. But
all at once he decided to forego his mother's philosophies for good and
all. There was certainly nothing to be gained by following them any
longer. So he cut himself a bite of the tender steak--fully half as
generous as the bites that Bill was consuming across the table. And its
first flavor simply filled him with delight.

"What is this meat?" he asked. "I've certainly tasted it before."

"I'll bet a few dollars that you haven't, if you've lived all your life
in the Middle West," Lennox answered. "Maybe you've got what the
scientists call an inherited memory of it. It's the kind of meat your
grandfather used to live on--venison."

Both of them had seemed pleased that he liked the venison. And both
seemed boyishly eager to test his reaction to the great, wild
huckleberries that were the dessert of the simple meal. He tried them
with much ceremony.

Their flavor really surprised him. They had a tang, a fragrance that was
quite unlike anything he had ever tasted, yet which brought a curious
flood of dim, half-understood memories. It seemed to him that always he
had stood on the hillsides, picking these berries as they grew, and
staining his lips with them. But at once he pushed the thoughts out of
his mind, thinking that his imagination was playing tricks upon him. And
soon after this, Lennox led him out of the house for his first glimpse
of the hills in the darkness.

They walked together out to the gate, across the first of the wide
pastures where, at certain seasons, Lennox kept his cattle; and at last
they came out upon the tree-covered ridge. The moon was just rising.
They could see it casting a curious glint over the very tips of the
pines. But it couldn't get down between them. They stood too close, too
tall and thick for that. And for a moment, Dan's only sensation was one
of silence.

"You have to stand still a moment, to really know anything," Lennox told
him.

They both stood still. Dan was as motionless as that day in the park,
long weeks before, when the squirrel had climbed on his shoulder. The
first effect was a sensation that the silence was deepening around them.
It wasn't really true. It was simply that he had become aware of the
little continuous sounds of which usually he was unconscious, and they
tended to accentuate the hush of the night. He heard his watch ticking
in his pocket, the whispered stir of his own breathing, and he was quite
certain that he could hear the fevered beat of his own heart in his
breast. But then slowly he began to become aware of other sounds, so
faint and indistinct that he really could not be sure that he heard
them. There was a faint rustle and stir, as of the tops of the pine
trees far away. Possibly he heard the wind too, the faintest whisper in
the world through the underbrush. And finally, most wonderful of all, he
began to hear one by one, over the ridge on which he stood, little
whispered sounds of living creatures stirring in the thickets. He knew,
just as all mountaineers know, that the wilderness about him was
stirring and pulsing with life. Some of the sounds were quite clear--an
occasional stir of a pebble or the crack of a twig, and some, like the
faintest twitching of leaves in the brush not ten feet distant, could
only be guessed at.

"What is making the sounds?" he asked.

He didn't know it, at the time, but Lennox turned quickly toward him. It
wasn't that the question had surprised the mountaineer. Rather it was
the tone in which Dan had spoken. It was perfectly cool, perfectly
self-contained.

"The one right close is a chipmunk. I don't know what the others are; no
one ever does know. Perhaps ground squirrels, or rabbits, or birds, and
maybe even one of those harmless old black bears who is curious about
the house. The bears have more curiosity than they can well carry
around, and they say they'll sometimes come up and put their front feet
on a window sill of a house, and peer through the window. They must
think men are the craziest things! And of course it might be a
coyote--and a mad one at that. I guess I told you that they're subject
to rabies at this time of year. I'll confess I'd rather have it be
anything else. And tell me--can you _smell_ anything--"

"Good Lord, Lennox! I can smell all kinds of things."

"I'm glad. Some men can't. No one can enjoy the woods if he can't smell.
Part of the smells are of flowers, and part of balsam, and God only
knows what the others are. They are just the wilderness--"

Dan could not only perceive the smells and sounds, but he felt that they
were leaving an imprint on the very fiber of his soul. He knew one
thing. He knew he could never forget this first introduction to the
mountain night. The whole scene moved him in strange, deep ways in which
he had never been stirred before; it left him exultant and, in deep
wells of his nature far below the usual currents of excitement, a little
excited too. And all the time he had that indefinable sense of
familiarity, a knowledge that this was his own land, and after a long,
long time of wandering in far places, he had come back to it.

Then both of them were startled out of their reflections by the clear,
unmistakable sound of footsteps on the ridge. Both of them turned, and
Lennox laughed softly in the darkness. "My daughter," he said. "I knew
she wouldn't be afraid to come."




V


Dan could see only Snowbird's outline at first, just her shadow against
the moonlit hillside. His glasses were none too good at long range. And
possibly, when she came within range, the first thing that he noticed
about her was her stride. The girls he knew didn't walk in quite that
free, strong way. She took almost a man-size step; and yet it was
curious that she did not seem ungraceful. Dan had a distinct impression
that she was floating down to him on the moonlight. She seemed to come
with such unutterable smoothness. And then he heard her call lightly
through the darkness.

The sound gave him a distinct sense of surprise. Some way, he hadn't
associated a voice like this with a mountain girl; he had supposed that
there would be so many harshening influences in this wild place. Yet the
tone was as clear and full as a trained singer's. It was not a high
voice; and yet it seemed simply brimming, as a cup brims with wine, with
the rapture of life. It was a self-confident voice too, wholly
unaffected and sincere, and wholly without embarrassment.

Then she came close, and Dan saw the moonlight on her face. And so it
came about, whether in dreams or wakefulness, he could see nothing else
for many hours to come.

Beauty, after all, is wholly a matter of the nearest possible approach
to the physical perfection that many centuries of human faces have
established as a standard. Thus perfection in this case does not mean
some ideal that has been imaged by a poet, but just the nearest approach
to the perfect physical body that nature intended, and which is the
flawless example of the type that composes the race. Thus a typical
feature is the most beautiful, and by this reasoning a composite picture
of all the young girl faces in the Anglo-Saxon nations would be the most
beautiful face that any painter could conceive. It follows that health
is above all the most essential quality to beauty, because disease, from
the nature of things, means thwarted growth that could not possibly
reach the typical of the race.

The girl who stood in the moonlight had health. She was simply vibrant
with health. It brought a light to her eyes, and a color to her cheeks,
and life and shimmer to her moonlit hair. It brought curves to her
body, and strength and firmness to her limbs, and the grace of a deer to
her carriage. Whether she had regular features or not Dan would have
been unable to state. He didn't even notice. They weren't important when
health was present. Yet there was nothing of the coarse or bold or
voluptuous about her. She was just a slender girl, perhaps twenty years
of age, and weighing even less than the figure occasionally to be read
in the health magazines for girls of her height. And she was fresh and
cool beyond all words to tell.

And Dan had no delusions about her attitude toward him. For a long
instant she turned her keen, young eyes to his white, thin face; and at
once it became abundantly evident that beyond a few girlish speculations
she felt no interest in him. After a single moment of rather strained,
polite conversation with Dan--just enough to satisfy her idea of the
conventions--she began a thrilling girlhood tale to her father. And she
was still telling it when they reached the house.

Dan held a chair for her in front of the fireplace, and she took it with
entire naturalness. He was careful to put it where the firelight was at
its height. He wanted to see its effect on the flushed cheeks, the soft
dark hair. And then, standing in the shadows, he simply watched her.
With the eye of an artist he delighted in her gestures, her rippling
enthusiasm, her utter, irrepressible girlishness that all of Time had
not years enough to kill.

He decided that she had gray eyes. Gray eyes seemed to be characteristic
of the mountain people. Sometimes, when the shadows fell across them,
they looked very dark, as if the pines had been reflected in them all
day and the image had not yet faded out. But in an instant the shadow
flicked away and left only light,--light that danced and light that
laughed and light that went into him and did all manner of things to his
spirit.

Bill stood watching her, his hands deep in his pockets, evidently a
companion of the best. Her father gazed at her with amused tolerance.
And Dan,--he didn't know in just what way he did look at her. And he
didn't have time to decide. In less than fifteen minutes, and wholly
without warning, she sprang up from her chair and started toward the
door.

"Good Lord!" Dan breathed. "If you make such sudden motions as that I'll
have heart failure. Where are you going now?"

"Back to my watch," she answered, her tone wholly lacking the personal
note which men have learned to expect in the voices of women. And an
instant later the three of them saw her retreating shadow as she
vanished among the pines.

Dan had to be helped to bed. The long ride had been too hard on his
shattered lungs; and nerves and body collapsed an instant after the door
was closed behind the departing girl. He laughed weakly and begged their
pardon; and the two men were really very gentle. They told him it was
their own fault for permitting him to overdo. Lennox himself blew out
the candle in the big, cold bedroom.

Dan saw the door close behind him, and he had an instant's glimpse of
the long sweep of moonlit ridge that stretched beneath the window. Then,
all at once, seemingly without warning, it simply blinked out. Not until
the next morning did he really know why. Insomnia was an old
acquaintance of Dan's, and he had expected to have some trouble in
getting to sleep. His only real trouble was waking up again when Lennox
called him to breakfast. He couldn't believe that the light at his
window shade was really that of morning.

"Good Heavens!" his host exploded. "You sleep the sleep of the just."

Dan was about to tell him that on the contrary he was a very nervous
sleeper, but he thought better of it. Something had surely happened to
his insomnia. The next instant he even forgot to wonder about it in the
realization that his tired body had been wonderfully refreshed. He had
no dread now of the long tramp up the ridge that his host had planned.

But first came target practice. In Dan's baggage he had a certain very
plain but serviceable sporting rifle of about thirty-forty caliber,--a
gun that the information department of the large sporting-goods store in
Gitcheapolis had recommended for his purpose. Except for the few moments
in the store, Dan had never held a rifle in his hands.

Of course the actual aiming of a rifle is an extremely simple
proposition. A man with fair use of his hands and eyes can pick it up in
less time than it takes to tell it. The fine art of marksmanship
consists partly in the finer sighting,--the instinctive realization of
just what fraction of the front sight should be visible through the
rear. But most of all it depends on the control that the nerves have
over the muscles. Some men are born rifle shots; and on others it is
quite impossible to thrust any skill whatever.

The nerve impulses and the muscular reflexes must be exquisitely tuned,
so that the finger presses back on the trigger the identical instant
that the mark is seen on the line of the sights. One quarter of a
second's delay will usually disturb the aim. There must be no muscular
jerk as the trigger is pressed. Shooting was never a sport for blasted
nerves. And usually such attributes as the ability to judge distances,
the speed and direction of a fleeing object, and the velocity of the
wind can only be learned by tireless practice.

When Dan first took the rifle in his hands, Lennox was rather amazed at
the ease and naturalness with which he held it. It seemed to come up
naturally to his shoulder. Lennox scarcely had to tell him how to rest
the butt and to drop his chin as he aimed. He began to look rather
puzzled. Dan seemed to know all these things by instinct. The first
shot, Dan hit the trunk of a five-foot pine at thirty paces.

"But I couldn't very well have missed it!" he replied to Lennox's cheer.
"You see, I aimed at the middle--but I just grazed the edge."

The second shot was not so good, missing the tree altogether. And it was
a singular thing that he aimed longer and tried harder on this shot than
on the first. The third time he tried still harder, and made by far the
worst shot of all.

"What's the matter?" he demanded. "I'm getting worse all the time."

Lennox didn't know for sure. But he made a long guess. "It might be
beginner's luck," he said, "but I'm inclined to think you're trying too
hard. Take it easier--depend more on your instincts. Some marksmen are
born good shots and cook themselves trying to follow rules. It might be,
by the longest chance, that you're one of them--at least it won't hurt
to try."

Dan's reply was to lift the rifle lightly to his shoulder, glance
quickly along the trigger, and fire. The bullet struck within one inch
of the center of the pine.

For a long second Lennox gazed at him in open-mouthed astonishment. "My
stars, boy!" he cried at last. "Was I mistaken in thinking you were a
born tenderfoot--after all? Can it be that a little of your old
grandfather's skill has been passed down to you? But you can't do it
again."

But Dan did do it again. If anything, the bullet was a little nearer the
center. And then he aimed at a more distant tree.

But the hammer snapped down ineffectively on the breech. He turned with
a look of question.

"Your gun only holds five shots," Lennox explained. Reloading, Dan tried
a more difficult target--a trunk almost one hundred yards distant. Of
course it would have been only child's play to an experienced hunter;
but to a tenderfoot it was the difficult mark indeed. Twice out of four
shots Dan hit the tree trunk, and one of his two hits was practically a
bull's-eye. His two misses were the result of the same mistake he had
made before,--attempting to hold his aim too long.

The shots rang far through the quiet woods, long-drawn from the echoes
that came rocking back from the hills. In contrast with the deep silence
that is really an eternal part of the mountains, the sound seemed
preternaturally loud. All over the great sweep of canyon, the wild
creatures heard and were startled. One could easily imagine the
Columbian deer, gone to their buckbrush to sleep, springing up and
lifting pointed ears. There is no more graceful action in the whole
animal world than this first, startled spring of a frightened buck. Then
old Woof, feeding in the berry bushes, heard the sound too. Woof has
considerably more understanding than most of the wild inhabitants of the
forest, and maybe that is why he left his banquet and started falling
all over his awkward self in descending the hill. It might be that
Lennox would want to procure his guest a sample of bear steak; and Woof
didn't care to be around to suggest such a thing. At least, that would
be his train of thought according to those naturalists who insist on
ascribing human intelligence to all the forest creatures. But it is true
that Woof had learned to recognize a rifle shot, and he feared it worse
than anything on earth.

Far away on the ridge top, a pair of wolves sat together with no more
evidence of life than two shadows. One of the most effective
accomplishments a wolf possesses is its ability to freeze into a
motionless thing, so the sharpest eye can scarcely detect him in the
thickets. It is an advantage in hunting, and it is an even greater
advantage when being hunted. Yet at the same second they sprang up,
simply seemed to spin in the dead pine needles, and brought up with
sharp noses pointed and ears erect, facing the valley.

A human being likely would have wondered at their action. It is doubtful
that human ears could have detected that faint tremor in the air which
was all that was left of the rifle report. But of course this is a
question that would be extremely difficult to prove; for as a rule the
senses of the larger forest creatures, with the great exception of
scent, are not as perfectly developed as those of a human being. A wolf
can see better than a man in the darkness, but not nearly as far in the
daylight. But the wolves knew this sound. Too many times they had seen
their pack-fellows die in the snow when such a report as this, only
intensified a thousand times, cracked at them through the winter air. No
animal in all the forest has been as relentlessly hunted as the wolves,
and they have learned their lessons. For longer years than most men
would care to attempt to count, men have waged a ceaseless war upon
them. And they have learned that their safety lies in flight.

Very quietly, and quite without panic, the wolves turned and headed
farther into the forests. Possibly no other animal would have been
frightened at such a distance. And it is certainly true that in the
deep, winter snows not even the wolves would have heeded the sound. The
snows bring Famine; and when Famine comes to keep its sentry-duty over
the land, all the other forest laws are immediately forgotten or
ignored. The pack forgets all its knowledge of the deadliness of men in
the starving times.

The grouse heard the sound, and, silly creatures that they are, even
they raised their heads for a single instant from their food. The
felines--the great, tawny mountain lions and their smaller cousins, the
lynx--all devoted at least an instant of concentrated attention to it.
A raccoon, sleeping in a pine, opened its eyes, and a lone bull elk,
such as some people think is beyond all other things the monarch of the
forest, rubbed his neck against a tree trunk and wondered.

But yet there remained two of the larger forest creatures that did not
heed at all. One was Urson, the porcupine, whose stupidity is beyond all
measuring. He was too slow and patient and dull to give attention to a
rifle bullet. And the other was Graycoat the coyote, gray and strange
and foam-lipped, on the hillside. Graycoat could hear nothing but
strange whinings and voices that rang ever in his ears. All other sounds
were obscured. The reason was extremely simple. In the dog days a
certain malady sometimes comes to the wild creatures, and it is dreaded
worse than drought or cold or any of the manifold terrors of their
lives. No one knows what name they have for this sickness. Human beings
call it hydrophobia. And the coyotes are particularly susceptible to it.

Ordinarily the name of coyote is, among the beasts, a synonym for
cowardice as well as a certain kind of detested cunning. All the
cowardice of a mountain lion and a wolf and a lynx put together doesn't
equal the amount that Graycoat carried in the end of his tail. That
doesn't mean timidity. Timidity is a trait of the deer, a gift of nature
for self-preservation, and no one holds it against them. In fact, it
makes them rather appealing. Cowardice is a lack of moral courage to
remain and fight when nature has afforded the necessary weapons to fight
with. It is sort of a betrayal of nature,--a misuse of powers. No one
calls a rabbit a coward because it runs away. A warlike rabbit is
something that no man has ever seen since the beginning of the world,
and probably never will. Nature hasn't given the little animal any
weapons.

But this is not true of the wolf or cougar. A wolf has ninety pounds of
lightning-quick muscles, and teeth that are nothing but a set of very
well-sharpened and perfectly arranged daggers. A cougar not only has
fangs, but talons that can rend flesh more terribly than the cogs of a
machine, and strength to make the air hum under his paw as he strikes it
down. And so it is an extremely disappointing thing to see either of
these animals flee in terror from an Airedale not half their size,--a
sight that most mountain men see rather often. The fact that they act
with greater courage in the famine times, and that either of them will
fight to the very death when brought to bay, are not extenuating
circumstances to their cowardice. A mouse will bite the hand that picks
it up if it has no other choice.

A coyote is, at least in a measure, equipped for fighting. He is smaller
than a wolf, and his fangs are almost as terrible. Yet a herd of
determined sheep, turning to face him, puts him in a panic. The smallest
dog simply petrifies him with terror. And a rifle report,--he has been
known to put a large part of a county between himself and the source of
the sound in the shortest possible time. If a mountain man feels like
fighting, he simply calls another a coyote. It is more effective than
impugning the virtue of his female ancestors. To be called a coyote
means to be termed the lowest, most despised creature of which the
imagination can conceive.

And besides being a perfect, unprincipled coward, he is utterly without
pride. And that is saying a great deal. Most large animals have more
pride than they have intelligence, particularly the bear and the moose.
A mature bear, dying before his foes, will often refrain from howling
even in the greatest agony. He is simply too proud. A moose greatly
dislikes to appear to run away in the presence of enemies. He will walk
with the dignity of a bishop until he thinks the brush has obscured him;
and then he will simply fly! And there was a dog once, long ago, which,
meeting on the highways a dog that was much larger and that could not
possibly be mastered, would simply turn away his eyes and pretend not to
see him.

A coyote is wholly without this virtue, as well as most of the other
virtues of the animal world. He not only eats carrion--because if one
started to condemn all the carrion-eating animals of the forest he would
soon have precious few of them left--but he also eats old shoes off
rubbish piles. Unlike the wolf, he does not even find his courage in the
famine times. He has cunning, but cunning is not greatly beloved in men
or beasts. Most folk prefer a kindly, blundering awkwardness, a
simplicity of heart and spirit, such as are to be found in Woof the
bear.

But Graycoat has one tendency that makes all the other forest creatures
regard him with consternation: he is extremely liable to madness. Along
in dog days he is seen suddenly to begin to rush through the thickets,
barking and howling and snapping at invisible enemies, with foam
dropping from his terrible lips. His eyes grow yellow and strange. And
this is the time that even the bull elk turns off his trail. No one
cares to meet Graycoat when the hydrophobia is upon him. At such time
all his cunning and his terror are quite forgotten in his agony, and he
is likely to make an unprovoked charge on Woof himself.

Now Graycoat came walking stiff-legged down through the thickets. And
the forest creatures, from the smallest to the great, forgot the far-off
peal of the rifle bullets to get out of his way.




VI


Dan and Lennox started together up the long slope of the ridge. Dan
alone was armed; Lennox went with him solely as a guide. The deer season
had just opened, and it might be that Dan would want to procure one of
these creatures.

"But I'm not sure I want to hunt deer," Dan told him. "You speak of them
as being so beautiful--"

"They are beautiful, and your grandfather would never hunt them either,
except for meat. But maybe you'll change your mind when you see a buck.
Besides, we might run into a lynx or a panther. But not very likely,
without dogs."

They trudged up, over the carpet of pine needles. They fought their way
through a thicket of buckbrush. Once they saw the gray squirrels in the
tree tops. And before Lennox had as much as supposed they were near the
haunts of big game, a yearling doe sprang up from its bed in the
thickets.

For an instant she stood motionless, presenting a perfect target. It was
evident that she had heard the sound of the approaching hunters, but had
not as yet located or identified them with her near-sighted eyes. Lennox
whirled to find Dan standing very still, peering along the barrel of his
rifle. But he didn't shoot. A light danced in his eyes, and his fingers
crooked nervously about the trigger, but yet there was no pressure. The
deer, seeing Lennox move, leaped into her terror-pace,--that astounding
run that is one of the fastest gaits in the whole animal world. In the
wink of an eye, she was out of sight.

"Why didn't you shoot?" Lennox demanded.

"Shoot? It was a doe, wasn't it?"

"Good Lord, of course it was a doe! But there are no game laws that go
back this far. Besides--you aimed at it."

"I aimed just to see if I could catch it through my sights. And I could.
My glasses sort of made it blur--but I think--perhaps--that I could have
shot it. But I'm not going to kill does. There must be some reason for
the game laws, or they wouldn't exist."

"You're a funny one. Come three thousand miles to hunt and then pass up
the first deer you see. You could almost have been your grandfather, to
have done that. He thought killing a deer needlessly was almost as bad
as killing a man. They are beautiful things, aren't they?"

Dan answered him with startling emphasis. But the look that he wore said
more than his words.

They trudged on, and Lennox grew thoughtful. He was recalling the
picture that he had seen when he had whirled to look at Dan, immediately
after the deer had leaped from its bed. It puzzled him a little. He had
turned to find the younger man in a perfect posture to shoot, his feet
placed in exactly the position that years of experience had taught
Lennox was correct; and withal, absolutely motionless. Of all the many
things to learn in the wilderness, to stand perfectly still in the
presence of game is one of the hardest. The natural impulse is to
start,--a nervous reflex that usually terrifies the game. The principle
of standing still is, of course, that it takes a certain length of time
for the deer to look about after it makes its first leap from its bed,
and if the hunter is motionless, the deer is usually unable to identify
him as a thing to fear. It gives a better chance for a shot. What many
hunters take years to learn, Dan had seemed to know by instinct. Could
it be, after all, that this slender weakling, even now bowed down with
a terrible malady, had inherited the true frontiersman's instincts of
his ancestors?

Then all at once Lennox halted in his tracks, evidently with no other
purpose than to study the tall form that now was walking up the trail in
front of him. And he uttered a little exclamation of amazement.

"Listen, Dan!" he cried suddenly. "Haven't you ever been in the woods
before?"

Dan turned, smiling. "No. What have I done now?"

"What have you done! You're doing something that I never saw a
tenderfoot do in my life, before. I've known men to hunt for
years--literally years--and not know how to do it. And that is--to place
your feet."

"Place my feet? I'm afraid I don't understand."

"I mean--to walk silently. To stalk, damn it, Dan! This brush is dry.
It's dry as tinder. A cougar can get over it like so much smoke, and a
man who's lived all his life in the hills can usually climb a ridge and
not make any more noise than a young avalanche. Just now I had a feeling
that I wasn't hearing you walk, and I thought my ears must be going back
on me. I stopped to see. You were doing it, Dan. You were
stalking--putting down your feet like a cat. It's the hardest thing to
learn there is, and you're doing it the first half-hour."

Dan laughed, delighted more than he cared to show. "Well, what of it?"
he asked.

"What of it? That's it--what of it. And what caused it, and all about
it. Go on and let me think."

The result of all this thought was at least to hover in the near
vicinity of a certain conclusion. That conclusion was that at least a
few of the characteristics of his grandfather had been passed down to
Dan. It meant that possibly, if time remained, he would not turn out
such a weakling, after all. Of course his courage, his nerve, had yet to
be tested; but the fact remained that long generations of frontiersmen
ancestors had left this influence upon him. The wild was calling to him,
wakening instincts long smothered in cities, but sure and true as ever.
It was the beginning of regeneration. Voices of the long past were
speaking to him, and the Failings once more had begun to run true to
form. Inherited tendencies were in a moment changing this weak, diseased
youth into a frontiersman and wilderness inhabitant such as his
ancestors had been before him.

But before ever Lennox had a chance to think all around the subject, to
actually convince himself that Dan really was a throwback and recurrence
of type, there ensued on that gaunt ridge a curious adventure. The test
of nerve and courage was nearer than either of them had guessed.

They were slipping along over the pine needles, their eyes intent on the
trail ahead. And then Lennox saw a curious thing. He beheld Dan suddenly
stop in the trail and turn his eyes towards a heavy thicket that lay
perhaps one hundred yards to their right. For an instant he looked
almost like a wild creature himself. His head was lowered, as if he were
listening. His muscles were set and ready.

Lennox had prided himself that he had retained all the powers of his
five senses, and that few men in the mountains had keener ears than he.
Yet it was truth that at first he only knew the silence, and the stir
and pulse of his own blood. He assumed then that Dan was watching
something that from his position, twenty feet behind, he could not see.
He tried to probe the thickets with his eyes.

Then Dan whispered. Ever so soft a sound, but yet distinct in the
silence. "There's something living in that thicket."

Then Lennox heard it too. As they stood still, the sound became ever
clearer and more pronounced. Some living creature was advancing toward
them; and twigs were cracking beneath its feet. The sounds were rather
subdued, and yet, as the animal approached, both of them instinctively
knew that they were extremely loud for the usual footsteps of any of the
wild creatures.

"What is it?" Dan asked quietly.

Lennox was so intrigued by the sounds that he was not even observant of
the peculiar, subdued quality in Dan's voice. Otherwise, he would have
wondered at it. "I'm free to confess I don't know," he said. "It's
booming right towards us, like most animals don't care to do. Of course
it may be a human being. You must watch out for that."

They waited. The sound ended. They stood straining for a long moment
without speech.

"That was the dumdest thing!" Lennox went on. "Of course it might have
been a bear--you never know what they're going to do. It might have got
sight of us and turned off. But I can't believe that it was just a
deer--"

But then his words chopped squarely off in his throat. The plodding
advance commenced again. And the next instant a gray form revealed
itself at the edge of the thicket.

It was Graycoat, half-blind with his madness, and desperate in his
agony.

There was no more deadly thing in all the hills than he. Even the bite
of a rattlesnake would have been welcomed beside his. He stood a long
instant, and all his instincts and reflexes that would have ordinarily
made him flee in abject terror were thwarted and twisted by the fever of
his madness. He stared a moment at the two figures, and his red eyes
could not interpret them. They were simply foes, for it was true that
when this racking agony was upon him, even lifeless trees seemed foes
sometimes. He seemed eerie and unreal as he gazed at them out of his
burning eyes; and the white foam gathered at his fangs. And then, wholly
without warning, he charged down at them.

He came with unbelievable speed. The elder Lennox cried once in warning
and cursed himself for venturing forth on the ridge without a gun. He
was fully twenty feet distant from Dan; yet he saw in an instant his
only course. This was no time to trust their lives to the marksmanship
of an amateur. He sprang towards Dan, intending to wrench the weapon
from his hand.

But he didn't achieve his purpose. At the first step his foot caught in
a projecting root, and he was shot to his face on the trail. But a long
life in the wilderness had developed Lennox's reflexes to an abnormal
degree; many crises had taught him muscle and nerve control; and only
for a fraction of an instant, a period of time that few instruments are
fine enough to measure, did he lie supinely upon the ground. He rolled
on, into a position of defense. But he knew now he could not reach the
younger man before the mad coyote would be upon them. The matter was out
of his hands. Everything depended on the aim and self-control of the
tenderfoot.

And at the same instant he wondered, so intensely that all other mental
processes were subjugated to it, why he had not heard Dan shoot.

He looked up, and the whole weird picture was thrown upon the retina of
his eyes. The coyote was still racing straight toward Dan, a gray demon
that in his madness was more terrible than any charging bear or elk. For
there is an element of horror about the insane, whether beasts or men,
that cannot be denied. Both men felt it, with a chill that seemed to
penetrate clear to their hearts. The eyes flamed, the white fangs of
Graycoat caught the sunlight. And Dan stood erect in his path, his rifle
half raised to his shoulder; and even in that first frenzied instant in
which Lennox looked at him, he saw there was a strange impassiveness, a
singular imperturbability on his face.

"Shoot, man!" Lennox shouted. "What are you waiting for?"

But Dan didn't shoot. His hand whipped to his face, and he snatched off
his thick-lensed glasses. The eyes that were revealed were narrow and
deeply intent. And by now, the frenzied coyote was not fifty feet
distant.

All that had occurred since the animal charged had possibly taken five
seconds. Sometimes five seconds is just a breath; but as Lennox waited
for Dan to shoot, it seemed like a period wholly without limit. He
wondered if the younger man had fallen into that strange paralysis that
a great terror sometimes imbues. "Shoot!" he screamed again.

But it is doubtful if Dan even heard his shout. At that instant his gun
slid into place, his head lowered, his eyes seemed to burn along the
glittering barrel. His finger pressed back against the trigger, and the
roar of the report rocked through the summer air.

The gun was of large caliber; and no living creature could stand against
the furious, shocking power of the great bullet. The lead went straight
home, full through the neck and slanting down through the breast, and
the coyote recoiled as if an irresistible hand had smitten him. It is
doubtful if there was even a muscular quiver after Graycoat struck the
ground, not twenty feet from where Dan stood. And the rifle report
echoed back to find only silence.

Lennox got up off the ground and moved over toward the dead coyote. He
looked a long time at the gray body. And then he stepped back to where
Dan waited on the trail.

"I take it all back," he said simply.

"You take what back?"

"What I thought about you--that the Failing line had gone to the dogs.
I'll never call you a tenderfoot again."

"You are very kind," Dan answered. He looked rather tired, but was
wholly unshaken. For an instant Lennox looked at his eyes and his steady
hands.

"But tell me one thing," Lennox asked. "I saw the way you looked down
the barrel. I could see how firm you held the rifle--the way you kept
your head. And that is all like your grandfather. But why, when you had
a repeating rifle, did you wait so long to shoot?"

"I just had one cartridge in my gun. I fired nine times back at the
trees and only re-loaded once. I didn't think of it until the coyote
charged."

Lennox's answer was the last thing in the world to be expected. He
opened his straight mouth and uttered a great, boyish yell of joy. His
eyes seemed to light. It is a phenomenon that is ever so much oftener
imagined than really seen; but the sudden, elated sparkle that came in
those gray orbs was past denial. The eyes of the two men met, and Lennox
shook him by the shoulder.

"You're not Dan Failing's grandson--you're Dan Failing himself!" he
shouted. "No one but him would have had the self-control to wait till
the game was almost on top of him--no one but him would have kept his
head in a time like this. You're Dan Failing himself, I tell you, come
back to earth. Grandson nothing! You're a throwback, and now you've got
those glasses off, I can see his eyes looking right out of yours. Step
on 'em, Dan. You'll never need 'em again. And give up that idea of dying
in four months right now; I'm going to make you live. We'll fight that
disease to a finish--and win!"

And that is the way that Dan Failing came into his heritage in the land
of his own people, and in which a new spirit was born in him to
fight--and win--and live.




BOOK TWO

THE DEBT




I


September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,--that far
wilderness of endless, tree-clad ridges where Dan Failing had gone for
his last days. September, in this place, was a season all by itself. It
wasn't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice
formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in
length so fast that Whisperfoot the cougar had time for a dozen killings
in a single night. Fall only begins when the rains start; and there
hadn't been a trickle of rain since April. It was rather a cross between
the two seasons,--the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.

It was true that the leaves were shedding from the underbrush. They came
yellow and they came red, and the north wind, always the first breath of
winter, blew them in all directions. They made a perfect background for
the tawny tints of Whisperfoot, and quite often the near-sighted deer
would walk right up to him without detecting him. But the cougar always
saw to it they didn't do it a second time. It had been a particularly
bad season for Whisperfoot, and he was glad that his luck had changed.
The woods were so dry from the long drought that even he--and as all men
know, he is one of the most silent creatures in the wilderness when he
wants to be, which are the times that he doesn't want to make as much
noise as a steam engine--found it hard to crawl down a deer trail
without being heard. The twigs would sometimes crack beneath his feet,
and this is a disgrace with any cougar. Their first lessons are to learn
to walk with silence.

Woof the bear loved this month above all others. It wasn't that he
needed protective coloring. He was not a hunter at all, except of grubs
and berries and such small fry. He had a black coat and a clumsy stride;
and he couldn't have caught a deer if his life had depended upon it. But
he did like to shuffle through the fallen leaves and make beds of them
in the warm afternoons; and besides, the berries were always biggest and
ripest in September. The bee trees were almost full of honey. Even the
fat beetles under the stumps were many and lazy.

Everywhere the forest people were preparing for the winter that would
fall so quickly when these golden September days were done. The Under
Plane of the forest--those smaller peoples that live in the dust and
have beautiful, tropical forests in the ferns--found themselves digging
holes and filling them with stores of food. Of course they had no idea
on earth why they were doing it, except that a quiver at the end of
their tails told them to do so; but the result was entirely the same.
They would have a shelter for the winter. Certain of the birds were
beginning to wonder what the land was like to the south, and now and
then waking up in the crisp dawns with decided longings for travel. The
young mallards on the lakes were particularly restless, and occasionally
a long flock of them would rise in the morning from the blue waters with
a glint of wings,--and quite fail to come back. And one night all the
forest listened to the wail of the first flock of south-going geese. But
the main army of waterfowl would of course not pass until fall came in
reality.

But the most noticeable change of all, in these last days of summer, was
a distinct tone of sadness that sounded throughout the forest. Of course
the wilderness note is always somewhat sad; but now, as the leaves fell
and the grasses died, it seemed particularly pronounced. All the forest
voices added to it,--the wail of the geese, the sad fluttering of
fallen leaves, and even the whisper of the north wind. The pines seemed
darker, and now and then gray clouds gathered, promised rain, but passed
without dropping their burdens on the parched hillsides. Of course all
the tones and voices of the wilderness sound clearest at night--for that
is the time that the forest really comes to life--and Dan Failing,
sitting in front of Lennox's house, watching the late September moon
rise over Bald Mountain, could hear them very plainly.

It was true that in the two months he had spent in the mountains he had
learned to be very receptive to the voices of the wilderness. Lennox had
not been mistaken in thinking him a natural woodsman. He had imagination
and insight and sympathy; but most of all he had a heritage of wood lore
from his frontiersmen ancestors. Two months before he had been a
resident of cities. Now the wilderness had claimed him, body and soul.

These had been rare days. At first he had to limit his expeditions to a
few miles each day, and even then he would come in at night staggering
from weariness. He climbed hills that seemed to tear his diseased lungs
to shreds. Lennox wouldn't have been afraid, in a crisis, to trust his
marksmanship now. He had the natural cold nerve of a marksman, and one
twilight he brought the body of a lynx tumbling through the branches of
a pine at a distance of two hundred yards. A shotgun is never a
mountaineer's weapon--except a sawed-off specimen for family
contingencies--yet Dan acquired a certain measure of skill at small game
hunting, too. He got so he could shatter a grouse out of the air in the
half of a second or so in which its bronze wings glinted in the
shrubbery; and when a man may do this a fair number of times out of ten,
he is on the straight road toward greatness.

Then there came a day when Dan caught his first steelhead in the North
Fork. There was no finer sport in the whole West than this,--the play of
the fly, the strike, the electric jar that carries along the line and
through the arm and into the soul from where it is never quite effaced,
and finally the furious strife and exultant throb when the fish is
hooked. There is no more beautiful thing in the wilderness world than a
steelhead trout in action. He simply seems to dance on the surface of
the water, leaping again and again, and racing at an unheard-of speed
down the ripples. He weighs only from three to fifteen pounds. But now
and again amateur fishermen without souls have tried to pull him in with
main strength, and are still somewhat dazed by the result. It might be
done with a steel cable, but an ordinary line or leader breaks like a
cobweb. When his majesty the steelhead takes the fly and decides to run,
it can be learned after a time that the one thing that may be done is to
let out all the line and with prayer and humbleness try to keep up with
him.

Dan fished for lake trout in the lakes of the plateau; he shot waterfowl
in the tule marshes; he hunted all manner of living things with his
camera. But most of all he simply studied, as his frontiersmen ancestors
had done before him. He found unceasing delight in the sagacity of the
bear, the grace of the felines, the beauty of the deer. He knew the
chipmunks and the gray squirrels and the snowshoe rabbits. And every day
his muscles had hardened and his gaunt frame had filled out.

He no longer wore his glasses. Every day his eyes had strengthened. He
could see more clearly now, with his unaided eyes, than he had ever seen
before with the help of the lens. And the moonlight came down through a
rift in the trees and showed that his face had changed too. It was no
longer so white. The eyes were more intent. The lips were straighter.

"It's been two months," Silas Lennox told him, "half the four that you
gave yourself after you arrived here. And you're twice as good now as
when you came."

Dan nodded. "Twice! Ten times as good! I was a wreck when I came. To-day
I climbed halfway up Baldy--within a half mile of Snowbird's
cabin--without stopping to rest."

Lennox looked thoughtful. More than once, of late, Dan had climbed up
toward Snowbird's cabin. It was true that his guest and his daughter had
become the best of companions in the two months; but on second thought,
Lennox was not in the least afraid of complications. The love of the
mountain women does not go out to physical inferiors. "Whoever gets
her," he had said, "will have to tame her," and his words still held
good. The mountain women rarely mistook a maternal tenderness for an
appealing man for love. It wasn't that Dan was weak except from the
ravages of his disease; but he was still a long way from Snowbird's
ideal.

And the explanation was simply that life in the mountains gets down to a
primitive basis, and its laws are the laws of the cave. Emotions are
simple and direct, dangers are real, and the family relations have
remained unchanged since the first days of the race. Men do not woo one
another's wives in the mountains. There is no softness, no compromise:
the male of the species provides, and the female keeps the hut. It is
good, the mountain women know, when the snows come, to have a strong arm
to lean upon. The man of strong muscles, of quick aim, of cool nerve in
a crisis is the man that can be safely counted on not to leave a
youthful widow to a lone battle for existence. Although Dan had courage
and that same rigid self-control that was an old quality in his breed,
he was still a long way from a physically strong man. It was still an
even break whether he would ever wholly recover from his malady.

But Dan was not thinking about this now. All his perceptions had
sharpened down to the finest focal point, and he was trying to catch the
spirit of the endless forest that stretched in front of the house. The
moon was above the pines at last, and its light was a magic. He sat
breathless, his eyes intent on the silvery patches between the trees.
Now and then he saw a shadow waver.

His pipe had gone out, and for a long time Lennox hadn't spoken. He
seemed to be straining too, with ineffective senses, trying to recognize
and name the faint sounds that came so tingling and tremulous out of the
darkness. As always, they heard the stir and rustle of the gnawing
people: the chipmunks in the shrubbery, the gophers who, like blind
misers, had ventured forth from their dark burrows; and perhaps even the
scaly glide of those most-dreaded poison people that had lairs in the
rock piles.

Then, more distinct still, they heard the far-off yowl of a cougar. Yet
it wasn't quite like the cougar utterances that Dan had heard on
previous nights. It was not so high, so piercing and triumphant; but had
rather an angry, snarling tone made up of _ows_ and broad, nasal _yahs_.
It came tingling up through hundreds of yards of still forest; and both
of them leaned forward.

"Another deer killed," Dan suggested softly.

"No. Not this time. He missed, and he's mad about it. They often snarl
that way when they miss their stroke, just like an angry cat. But
listen--"

Again they heard a sound, and from some far-lying ridge, they heard a
curious echo. So far it had come that only a tremor of it remained; yet
every accent and intonation was perfect, and Dan was dimly reminded of
some work of art cunningly wrought in miniature. In one quality alone it
resembled the cougar's cry. It was unquestionably a wilderness
voice,--no sound made by men or the instruments of men; and like the
cougar's cry, it was simply imbued with the barbaric spirit of the wild.
But while the cougar had simply yowled in disappointment, a sound wholly
without rhythm or harmony, this sound was after the manner of a song,
rising and falling unutterably wild and strange.




II


Dan felt that at last the wilderness itself was speaking to him. He had
waited a long time to hear its voice. His thought went back to the wise
men of the ancient world, waiting to hear the riddle of the universe
from the lips of the Sphinx, and how he himself--more in his unconscious
self, rather than conscious--had sought the eternal riddle of the
wilderness. It had seemed to him that if once he could make it speak, if
he could make it break for one instant its great, brooding silence, that
the whole mystery and meaning of life would be in a measure revealed. He
had asked questions--never in the form of words but only ineffable
yearnings of his soul--and at last it had responded. The strange rising
and falling song was its own voice, the articulation of the very heart
and soul of the wilderness.

And because it was, it was also the song of life itself,--life in the
raw, life as it is when all the superficialities that blunt the vision
had been struck away. Dan had known that it would be thus. It brought
strange pictures to his mind. He saw the winter snows, the spirits of
Cold and Famine walking over them. He saw Fear in many guises--in the
forest fire, in the landslide, in the lightning cleaving the sky. In the
song were centered and made clear all the many lesser voices with which
the forest had spoken to him these two months and which he had but dimly
understood,--the passion, the exultation, the blood-lust, the strength,
the cruelty, the remorseless, unceasing struggle for existence that
makes the wilderness an eternal battle ground. But over it all was
sadness. He couldn't doubt that. He heard it all too plainly. The wild
was revealed to him as it never had been before.

"It's the wolf pack," Lennox told him softly. "As long as I have been in
the mountains, it always hits me the same. The wolves have just joined
together for the fall rutting. There's not another song like it in the
whole world."

Dan could readily believe it. The two men sat still a long time, hoping
that they might hear the song again. And then they got up and moved
across the cleared field to the ridge beyond. The silence closed deeper
around them.

"Then it means the end of the summer?" Dan asked.

"In a way, but yet we don't count the summer ended until the rains
break. Heavens, I wish they would start! I've never seen the hills so
dry, and I'm afraid that either Bert Cranston or some of his friends
will decide it's time to make a little money fighting forest fires. Dan,
I'm suspicious of that gang. I believe they've got a regular arson ring,
maybe with unscrupulous stockmen behind them, and perhaps just a
penny-winning deal of their own. I suppose you know about Landy
Hildreth,--how he's promised to turn State's evidence that will send
about a dozen of these vipers to the penitentiary?"

"Snowbird told me something about it."

"He's got a cabin over toward the marshes, and it has come to me that
he's going to start to-morrow, or maybe has already started to-day, down
into the valley to give his evidence. Of course, that is deeply
confidential between you and me. If the gang knew about it, he'd never
get through the thickets alive."

But Dan was hardly listening. His attention was caught by the hushed,
intermittent sounds that are always to be heard, if one listens keenly
enough, in the wilderness at night. "I wish the pack would sound again,"
he said. "I suppose it was hunting."

"Of course. And there is no living thing in these woods that can stand
against a wolf pack in its full strength."

"Except man, of course."

"A strong man, with an accurate rifle, of course, and except possibly in
the starving times in winter he'd never have to fight them. All the
beasts of prey are out to-night. You see, Dan, when the moon shines, the
deer feed at night instead of in the twilights and the dawn. And of
course the wolves and the cougars hunt the deer. It may be that they are
running cattle, or even sheep."

But Dan's imagination was afire. He wasn't content yet. "They couldn't
be--hunting man?" he asked.

"No. If it was midwinter and the pack was starving, we'd have to listen
better. It always looked to me as if the wild creatures had a law
against killing men, just as humans have. They've learned it doesn't
pay--something the wolves and bear of Europe and Asia haven't found out.
The naturalists say that the reason is rather simple--that the European
peasant, his soul scared out of him by the government he lived under,
has always fled from wild beasts. They were tillers of the soil, and
they carried hoes instead of guns. They never put the fear of God into
the animals and as a result there are quite a number of true stories
about tigers and wolves that aren't pleasant to listen to. But our own
frontiersmen were not men to stand any nonsense from wolves or cougars.
They had guns, and they knew how to use them. And they were preceded by
as brave and as warlike a race as ever lived on the earth--armed with
bows and arrows. Any animal that hunted men was immediately killed, and
the rest found out it didn't pay."

"Just as human beings have found out the same thing--that it doesn't pay
to hunt their fellow men. The laws of life as well as the laws of
nations are against it."

But the words sounded weak and dim under the weight of the throbbing
darkness; and Dan couldn't get away from the idea that the codes of life
by which most men lived were forgotten quickly in the shadows of the
pines. Even as he spoke, man was hunting man on the distant ridge where
Whisperfoot had howled.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bert Cranston, head of the arson ring that operated on the Umpqua
Divide, was not only beyond the pale in regard to the laws of the
valleys, but he could have learned valuable lessons from the beasts in
regard to keeping the laws of the hills. The forest creatures do not
hunt their own species, nor do they normally hunt men. The moon looked
down to find Bert Cranston waiting on a certain trail that wound down to
the settlements, his rifle loaded and ready for another kind of game
than deer or wolf. He was waiting for Landy Hildreth; and the greeting
he had for him was to destroy all chances of the prosecuting attorney in
the valley below learning certain names that he particularly wanted to
know.

There is always a quality of unreality about a moonlit scene. Just what
causes it isn't easy to explain, unless the soft blend of light and
shadow entirely destroys the perspective. Old ruins will sometimes seem
like great, misty ghosts of long-dead cities; trees will turn to silver;
phantoms will gather in family groups under the cliffs; plain hills and
valleys will become, in an instant, the misty vales of Fairyland. The
scene on that distant ridge of the Divide partook of this quality to an
astounding degree; and it would have made a picture no mortal memory
could have possibly forgotten.

There was no breath of wind. The great pines, tall and dark past belief,
stood absolutely motionless, like strange pillars of ebony. The whole
ridge was splotched with patches of moonlight, and the trail, dimming as
the eyes followed it, wound away into the utter darkness. Bert Cranston
knelt in a brush covert, his rifle loaded and ready in his lean, dark
hands.

No wolf that ran the ridges, no cougar that waited on the deer trails
knew a wilder passion, a more terrible blood-lust than he. It showed in
his eyes, narrow and never resting from their watch of the trail; it was
in his posture; and it revealed itself unmistakably in the curl of his
lips. Something like hot steam was in his brain, blurring his sight and
heating his blood.

The pine needles hung wholly motionless above his head; but yet the dead
leaves on which he knelt crinkled and rustled under him. Only the
keenest ear could have heard the sound; and possibly in his madness,
Cranston himself was not aware of it. And one would have wondered a long
time as to what caused it. It was simply that he was shivering all over
with hate and fury.

A twig cracked, far on the ridge above him. He leaned forward, peering,
and the moonlight showed his face in unsparing detail. It revealed the
deep lines, the terrible, drawn lips, the ugly hair long over the dark
ears. His strong hands tightened upon the breech of the rifle. His wiry
figure grew tense.

Of course it wouldn't do to let his prey come too close. Landy Hildreth
was a good shot too, young as Cranston, and of equal strength; and no
sporting chance could be taken in this hunting. Cranston had no
intention of giving his enemy even the slightest chance to defend
himself. If Hildreth got down into the valley, his testimony would make
short work of the arson ring. He had the goods; he had been a member of
the disreputable crowd himself.

The man's steps were quite distinct by now. Cranston heard him fighting
his way through the brush thickets, and once a flock of grouse,
frightened from their perches by the approaching figure, flew down the
trail in front. Cranston pressed back the hammer of his rifle. The click
sounded loud in the silence. He had grown tense and still, and the
leaves no longer rustled.

His eyes were intent on a little clearing, possibly one hundred yards up
the trail. The trail itself went straight through it. And in an instant
more, Hildreth pushed through the buckbrush and stood revealed in the
moonlight.

If there is one quality that means success in the mountains it is
constant, unceasing self-control. Cranston thought that he had it. He
had known the hard schools of the hills; and he thought no circumstance
could break the rigid discipline in which his mind and nerves held his
muscles. But perhaps he had waited too long for Hildreth to come; and
the strain had told on him. He had sworn to take no false steps; that
every motion he made should be cool and sure. He didn't want to attract
Hildreth's attention by any sudden movement. All must be cautious and
stealthy. But in spite of all these good resolutions, Cranston's gun
simply leaped to his shoulder in one convulsive motion at the first
glimpse of his enemy as he emerged into the moonlight.

The end of the barrel struck a branch of the shrubbery as it went up. It
was only a soft sound; but in the utter silence it traveled far. But a
noise in the brush might not have been enough in itself to alarm
Hildreth. A deer springing up in the trail, or even a lesser creature,
might make as pronounced a sound. It was true that even unaccompanied by
any other suspicious circumstances, the man would have become instantly
alert and watchful; but it was extremely doubtful that his muscular
reaction would have been the same. But the gun barrel caught the
moonlight as it leaped, and Hildreth saw its glint in the darkness.

It was only a flash. But yet there is no other object in the material
world that glints exactly like a gun barrel in the light. It has a look
all its own. It is even more distinctive in the sunlight, and now and
again men have owed their lives to a momentary glitter across a
half-mile of forest. Of course the ordinary, peaceful, God-fearing man,
walking down a trail at night, likely would not have given the gleam
more than an instant's thought, a momentary breathlessness in which the
throat closes and the muscles set; and it is more than probable that the
sleeping senses would not have interpreted it at all. But Hildreth was
looking for trouble. He had dreaded this long walk to the settlements
more than any experience of his life. He didn't know why the letter he
had written, asking for an armed escort down to the courts, had not
brought results. But it was wholly possible that Cranston would have
answered this question for him. This same letter had fallen into a
certain soiled, deadly pair of hands which was the last place in the
world that Hildreth would have chosen, and it had been all the evidence
that was needed, at the meeting of the ring the night before, to adjudge
Hildreth a merciless and immediate end. Hildreth would have preferred to
wait in the hills and possibly to write another letter, but a chill that
kept growing at his finger tips forbade it. And all these things
combined to stretch his nerves almost to the breaking point as he stole
along the moonlit trail under the pines.

A moment before the rush and whir of the grouse flock had dried the
roof of his mouth with terror. The tall trees appalled him, the shadows
fell upon his spirit. And when he heard this final sound, when he saw
the glint that might so easily have been a gun-barrel, his nerves and
muscles reacted at once. Not even a fraction of a second intervened. His
gun flashed up, just as a small-game shooter hurls his weapon when a
mallard glints above the decoys, and a little, angry cylinder of flame
darted, as a snake's head darts, from the muzzle.

Hildreth didn't take aim. There wasn't time. The report roared in the
darkness; the bullet sang harmlessly and thudded into the earth; and
both of them were the last things in the world that Cranston had
expected. And they were not a moment too soon. Even at that instant, his
finger was closing down upon the trigger, Hildreth standing clear and
revealed through the sights. The nervous response that few men in the
world would be self-disciplined enough to prevent occurred at the same
instant that he pressed the trigger. His own fire answered, so near to
the other that both of them sounded as one report.

Most hunters can usually tell, even if they cannot see their game fall,
whether they have hit or missed. This was one of the few times in his
life that Cranston could not have told. He knew that as his finger
pressed he had held as accurate a "bead" as at any time in his life. He
did not know still another circumstance,--that in the moonlight he had
overestimated the distance to the clearing, and instead of one hundreds
yards it was scarcely fifty. He had held rather high. And he looked up,
unknowing whether he had succeeded or whether he was face to face with
the prospect of a duel to the death in the darkness.

And all he saw was Hildreth, rocking back and forth in the moonlight,--a
strange picture that he was never entirely to forget. It was a motion
that no man could pretend. And he knew he had not missed.

He waited till he saw the form of his enemy rock down, face half-buried
in the pine needles. It never even occurred to him to approach to see if
he had made a clean kill. He had held on the breast and he had a world
of confidence in his great, shocking, big-game rifle. Besides, the rifle
fire might attract some hunter in the hills; and there would be time in
the morning to return to the body and make certain little investigations
that he had in mind. And running back down the trail, he missed the
sight of Hildreth dragging his wounded body, like an injured hare, into
the shelter of the thickets.




III


Whisperfoot, that great coward, came out of his brush-covert when the
moon rose. It was not his usual rising time. Ordinarily he found his
best hunting in the eerie light of the twilight hour; but for certain
reasons, his knowledge of which would be extremely difficult to explain,
he let this time go by in slumber. The general verdict of mankind has
decreed that animals cannot reason. Therefore it is somewhat awkward to
explain how Whisperfoot knew that he needn't be in a hurry, that the
moon would soon be up, and the deer would be feeding in their light. But
know all these things he did, act upon them he also did, and it all came
to the same in the end. Whether or not he could reason didn't affect the
fact that a certain chipmunk, standing at the threshold of his house to
glimpse the moonlit forest, saw him come slipping like a cloud of brown
smoke from his lair a full hour after the little creature had every
right to think that he had gone to his hunting,--and straightway tumbled
back into his house with a near attack of heart failure.

But the truth was that the chipmunk was presuming upon his own
desirability as food. His fear really wasn't justified. It would not be
altogether true to say that Whisperfoot never ate chipmunks. Sometimes
in winter, and sometimes in the dawns after an unsuccessful hunt, he ate
things a great deal smaller and many times more disagreeable than
chipmunks. But the great cat is always very proud when he first leaves
his lair. He won't look at anything smaller than a horned buck. He is a
great deal like a human hunter who will pass up a lone teal on the way
out and slay a pair of his own live-duck decoys on the way back.

Whisperfoot had slept almost since dawn. It is a significant quality in
the felines that they simply cannot keep in condition without hours and
hours of sleep. It is true that they are highly nervous creatures,
sensualists of the worst, and living intensely from twilight to dawn;
and they burn up more nervous energy in a night than Urson, the
porcupine, does in a year. In this matter of sleeping, they are in a
direct contrast to the wolves, who seemingly never sleep at all, unless
it is with one eye open, and in still greater contrast to the king of
all beasts, the elephant, who is said to slumber less per night than
that great electrical wizard whom all men know and praise.

The great cat came out yawning, as graceful a thing as treads upon the
earth. He was almost nine feet long from the tip of his nose to the end
of his tail, and he weighed as much as many a full-grown man. And he
fairly rippled when he walked, seemingly without effort, almost without
resting his cushions on the ground. He stood and yawned insolently, for
all the forest world to see. He rather hoped that the chipmunk, staring
with beady eyes from his doorway, did see him. He would just as soon
that Woof's little son, the bear cub, should see him too. But he wasn't
so particular about Woof himself, or the wolf pack whose song had just
wakened him. And above all things, he wanted to keep out of the sight of
men.

For when all things are said and done, there were few bigger cowards in
the whole wilderness world than Whisperfoot. A good many people think
that Graycoat the coyote could take lessons from him in this respect.
But others, knowing how a hunter is brought in occasionally with almost
all human resemblance gone from him because a cougar charged in his
death agony, think this is unfair to the larger animal. And it is true
that a full-grown cougar will sometimes attack horned cattle, something
that no American animal cares to do unless he wants a good fight on his
paws and of which the very thought would throw Graycoat into a spasm;
and there have been even stranger stories, if one could quite believe
them. A certain measure of respect must be extended to any animal that
will hunt the great bull elk, for to miss the stroke and get caught
beneath the churning, lashing, slashing, razor-edged front hoofs is
simply death, painful and without delay. But the difficulty lies in the
fact that these things are not done in the ordinary, rational blood of
hunting. What an animal does in its death agony, or to protect its
young, what great game it follows in the starving times of winter, can
be put to neither its debit nor its credit. A coyote will charge when
mad. A raccoon will put up a wicked fight when cornered. A hen will peck
at the hand that robs her nest. When hunting was fairly good,
Whisperfoot avoided the elk and steer almost as punctiliously as he
avoided men, which is saying very much indeed; and any kind of terrier
could usually drive him straight up a tree.

But he did like to pretend to be very great and terrible among the
smaller forest creatures. And he was Fear itself to the deer. A human
hunter who would kill two deer a week for fifty-two weeks would be
called a much uglier name than poacher; but yet this had been
Whisperfoot's record, on and off, ever since his second year. Many a
great buck wore the scar of the full stroke,--after which Whisperfoot
had lost his hold. Many a fawn had crouched panting with terror in the
thickets at just a tawny light on the gnarled limb of a pine. Many a doe
would grow great-eyed and terrified at just his strange, pungent smell
on the wind.

He yawned again, and his fangs looked white and abnormally large in the
moonlight. His great, green eyes were still clouded and languorous from
sleep. Then he began to steal up the ridge toward his hunting grounds.
Dry as the thickets were, still he seemed to traverse them with almost
absolute silence. It was a curious thing that he walked straight in the
face of the soft wind that came down from the snow fields, and yet there
wasn't a weathercock to be seen anywhere. And neither had the chipmunk
seen him wet a paw and hold it up, after the approved fashion of holding
up a finger. He had a better way of knowing,--a chill at the end of his
whiskers.

In fact, the other forest creatures did not see him at all. He took very
great precautions that they shouldn't. Whisperfoot was not a
long-distance runner, and his whole success depended on a surprise
attack, either by stalking or from ambush. In this he is different from
his fellow cowards, the wolves. Whisperfoot catches his meat fresh,
before terror has time to steal out of the heart and poison it; and
thus, he tells his cubs, he is a higher creature than the wolves. He
kept to the deepest shadow, sometimes the long, strange profile of a
pine, sometimes just the thickets of buckbrush.

And by now, he no longer cared to yawn. He was wide awake. The sleep had
gone out of his eyes and left them swimming in a curious, blue-green
fire. And the hunting madness was getting to him: that wild, exultant
fever that comes fresh to all the hunting creatures as soon as the night
comes down.

The little, breathless night sounds in the brush around him seemed to
madden him. They made a song to him, a strange, wild melody that even
such frontiersmen as Dan and Lennox could not experience. A thousand
smells brushed down to him on the wind, more potent than any wine or
lust. He began to tremble all over with rapture and excitement. But
unlike Cranston's trembling, no wilderness ear was keen enough to hear
the leaves rustling beneath him.

His excitement did not affect his hunting skill at all. In fact, he
couldn't succeed without it. A human hunter, with the same excitement
and fever, would have been rendered impotent long since. His aim would
be shattered, he would make false steps to frighten the game, and not
even Urson, the porcupine, would really have cause to fear him. The
reason is rather simple. Man has lived a civilized existence for so long
that many of the traits that make him a successful hunter have to be
laboriously re-learned. As soon as he becomes excited, he forgets his
training. The hunting cunning of a cougar, however, is inborn, and like
a great pianist, he can usually do better when he is warmed up to his
work.

Men would cross many seas for a few minutes of such wild, nerve-tingling
rapture as Whisperfoot knew as he crept into his hunting grounds. Ever
he went more cautiously, his tawny body lowering. And just as he reached
the ridge top he heard his first game.

It was just a rustle in the thickets at one side. Whisperfoot stopped
dead still, then slowly lowered his body. The only motion left was the
sinuous whipping of his tail. But he couldn't identify his game yet. He
peered with fiery eyes into the darkness. He was almost in leaping range
already.

But at once he knew that the creature that grunted and stirred in the
brush was not a deer. A deer would have detected his presence long
since, as the animal was at one side of him, instead of in front, and
would have caught his scent. Then, the wind blowing straighter, he
recognized the creature. It was just old Urson, the porcupine.

For very good reasons, Whisperfoot never attacked Urson except in
moments of utmost need. It was extremely doubtful that he spared him for
the same reason that he was spared by the wisest of the
mountaineers,--that he was game to be taken when starving and when no
other could be procured. It was rather that he was very awkward to kill
and considerably worse to eat.

It is better to dine on nightshade, says a forest law, than to eat a
porcupine; for the former innocent-looking little berry is almost as
fast a death as a rifle bullet, and the flesh of the latter animal will
torture with a hundred red-hot fires in the vitals before its eater is
driven to its eternal lair. But it isn't that the porcupine's flesh is
poison. It is just that an incautious bite on its armored body will fill
the throat and mouth with spines, needle points that work ever deeper
until they result in death. And so it is quite a tribute to
Whisperfoot's intelligence that he had killed and devoured no less than
a dozen porcupines and still lived to tell the tale.

He simply knew how to handle them. He knew an upward scoop with the end
of his claws that would tip the creature over; and then he would pounce
on the unprotected abdomen. But it was considerable trouble, and he had
to be careful of the spines all the time he was eating,--a particular
annoyance to one who habitually and savagely bolts his food. So he made
a careful detour about Urson and continued on his way. He heard the
latter squealing and rattling his quills behind him.




IV


Shortly after nine o'clock, Whisperfoot encountered his first herd of
deer. But they caught his scent and scattered before he could get up to
them. He met Woof, grunting through the underbrush, and again he
punctiliously, but with wretched spirit, left the trail. A fight with
Woof the bear was one of the most unpleasant experiences that could be
imagined. He had a pair of strong arms of which one embrace of a
cougar's body meant death in one long shriek of pain. Of course they
didn't fight often. They had entirely opposite interests. The bear was a
berry-eater and a honey-grubber, and the cougar cared too much for his
own life and beauty to tackle Woof in a hunting way.

A fawn leaped from the thicket in front of him, startled by his sound in
the thicket. The truth was, Whisperfoot had made a wholly unjustified
misstep on a dry twig, just at the crucial moment. Perhaps it was the
fault of Woof, whose presence had driven Whisperfoot from the trail,
and perhaps because old age and stiffness was coming upon him. But
neither of these facts appeased his anger. He could scarcely suppress a
snarl of fury and disappointment.

He continued along the ridge, still stealing, still alert, but his anger
increasing with every moment. The fact that he had to leave the trail
again to permit still another animal to pass, and a particularly
insignificant one too, didn't make him feel any better. This animal had
a number of curious stripes along his back, and usually did nothing more
desperate than steal eggs and eat bird fledglings. Whisperfoot could
have crushed him with one bite, but this was one thing that the great
cat, as long as he lived, would never try to do. He got out of the way
politely when Stripe-back was still a quarter of a mile away; which was
quite a compliment to the little animal's ability to introduce himself.
Stripe-back was familiarly known as a skunk.

Shortly after ten, the mountain lion had a remarkably fine chance at a
buck. The direction of the wind, the trees, the thickets and the light
were all in his favor. It was old Blacktail, wallowing in the salt lick;
and Whisperfoot's heart bounded when he detected him. No human hunter
could have laid his plans with greater care. He had to cut up the side
of the ridge, mindful of the wind. Then there was a long dense thicket
in which he might approach within fifty feet of the lick, still with the
wind in his face. Just beside the lick was another deep thicket, from
which he could make his leap.

Blacktail was wholly unsuspecting. No creature in the Oregon woods was
more beautiful than he. He had a noble spread of antlers, limbs that
were wings, and a body that was grace itself. He was a timid creature,
but he did not even dream of the tawny Danger that this instant was
creeping through the thickets upon him.

Whisperfoot drew near, with infinite caution. He made a perfect stalk
clear to the end of the buckbrush. Thirty feet more--thirty feet of
particularly difficult stalking--and he would be in leaping range. If he
could only cross this last distance in silence, the game was his.

His body lowered. The tail lashed back and forth, and now it had begun
to have a slight vertical motion that frontiersmen have learned to watch
for. He placed every paw with consummate grace, and few sets of human
nerves have sufficient control over leg muscles to move with such
astounding, exacting patience. He scarcely seemed to move at all.

The distance slowly shortened. He was almost to the last thicket, from
which he might spring. His wild blood was leaping in his veins.

But when scarcely ten feet remained to stalk, a sudden sound pricked
through the darkness. It came from afar, but it was no less terrible. It
was really two sounds, so close together that they sounded as one.
Neither Blacktail nor Whisperfoot had any delusions about them. They
recognized them at once, in strange ways under the skin that no man may
describe, as the far-off reports of a rifle. Just to-day Blacktail had
seen his doe fall bleeding when this same sound, only louder, spoke from
a covert from which Bert Cranston had poached her,--and he left the lick
in one bound.

Terrified though he was by the rifle shot, still Whisperfoot sprang. But
the distance was too far. His outstretched paw hummed down four feet
behind Blacktail's flank. Then forgetting everything but his anger and
disappointment, the great cougar opened his mouth and howled.

Howling, the forest people know, never helped one living thing. Of
course this means such howls as Whisperfoot uttered now, not that
deliberate long singsong by which certain of the beasts of prey will
sometimes throw a herd of game into a panic and cause them to run into
an ambush. All Whisperfoot's howl of anger achieved was to frighten all
the deer out of his territory and render it extremely unlikely that he
would have another chance at them that night. Even Dan and Lennox, too
far distant to hear the shots, heard the howl very plainly, and both of
them rejoiced that he had missed.

The long night was almost done when Whisperfoot even got sight of
further game. Once a flock of grouse exploded with a roar of wings from
a thicket; but they had been wakened by the first whisper of dawn in the
wind, and he really had no chance at them. Soon after this, the moon
set.

The larger creatures of the forest are almost as helpless in absolute
darkness as human beings. It is very well to talk of seeing in the dark,
but from the nature of things, even vertical pupils may only respond to
light. No owl or bat can see in absolute darkness. Although the stars
still burned, and possibly a fine filament of light had spread out from
the East, the descending moon left the forest much too dark for
Whisperfoot to hunt with any advantage. It became increasingly likely
that he would have to retire to his lair without any meal whatever.

But still he remained, hoping against hope. After a futile fifteen
minutes of watching a trail, he heard a doe feeding on a hillside. Its
footfall was not so heavy as the sturdy tramp of a buck, and besides,
the bucks would be higher on the ridges this time of morning. He began a
cautious advance toward it.

For the first fifty yards the hunt was in his favor. He came up wind,
and the brush made a perfect cover. But the doe unfortunately was
standing a full twenty yards farther, in an open glade. For a long
moment the tawny creature stood motionless, hoping that the prey would
wander toward him. But even in this darkness, he could tell that she was
making a half-circle that would miss him by forty yards, a course that
would eventually take her down wind in almost the direction that
Whisperfoot had come.

Under ordinary circumstances, Whisperfoot would not have made an attack.
A cougar can run swiftly, but a deer is light itself. The big cat would
have preferred to linger, a motionless thing in the thickets, hoping
some other member of the deer herd to which the doe must have belonged
would come into his ambush. But the hunt was late, and Whisperfoot was
very, very angry. Too many times this night he had missed his kill.
Besides, the herd was certainly somewhere down wind, and for certain
very important reasons a cougar might as well hunt elephants as try to
stalk down wind. The breeze carries his scent more surely than a servant
carries a visiting card. In desperation, he leaped from the thicket and
charged the deer.

In spite of the preponderant odds against him, the charge was almost a
success. He went fully half the distance between them before the deer
perceived him. Then she leaped. There seemed to be no interlude of time
between the instant that she beheld the dim, tawny figure in the air and
that in which her long legs pushed out in a spring. But she didn't leap
straight ahead. She knew enough of the cougars to know that the great
cat would certainly aim for her head and neck in the same way that a
duck-hunter leads a fast-flying duck,--hoping to intercept her leap.
Even as her feet left the ground she seemed to whirl in the air, and the
deadly talons whipped down in vain. Then, cutting back in front, she
raced down wind.

It is usually the most unmitigated folly for a cougar to chase a deer
against which he has missed his stroke; and it is also quite fatal to
his dignity. And whoever doubts for a minute that the larger creatures
have no dignity, and that it is not very dear to them, simply knows
nothing about the ways of animals. They cling to it to the death. And
nothing is quite so amusing to old Woof, the bear--who, after all, has
the best sense of humor in the forest--as the sight of a tawny, majestic
mountain lion, rabid and foaming at the mouth, in an effort to chase a
deer that he can't possibly catch. But to-night it was too dark for Woof
to see. Besides, one disappointment after another had crumbled, as the
rains crumble leaves, the last vestige of Whisperfoot's self-control.
Snarling in fury, he bounded after the doe.

She was lost to sight at once in the darkness, but for fully thirty
yards he raced in her pursuit. And it is true that deep down in his own
well of instincts--those mysterious waters that the events of life can
hardly trouble--he really didn't expect to overtake her. If he had
stopped to think, it would have been one of the really great surprises
of his life to hear the sudden, unmistakable stir and movement of a
large, living creature not fifteen feet distant in the thicket.

He didn't stop to think at all. He didn't puzzle on the extreme
unlikelihood of a doe halting in her flight from a cougar. It is
doubtful whether, in the thickets, he had any perceptions of the
creature other than its movements. He was running down wind, so it is
certain that he didn't smell it. If he saw it at all, it was just as a
shadow, sufficiently large to be that of a deer. It was moving, crawling
as Woof sometimes crawled, seemingly to get out of his path. And
Whisperfoot leaped straight at it.

It was a perfect shot. He landed high on its shoulders. His head lashed
down, and the white teeth closed. All the long life of his race he had
known that pungent essence that flowed forth. His senses perceived it, a
message shot along his nerves to his brain. And then he opened his mouth
in a high, far-carrying squeal of utter, abject terror.

He sprang a full fifteen feet back into the thickets; then crouched. The
hair stood still at his shoulders, his claws were bared; he was prepared
to fight to the death. He didn't understand. He only knew the worst
single terror of his life. It was not a doe that he had attacked in the
darkness. It was not Urson, the porcupine, or even Woof. It was that
imperial master of all things, man himself. Unknowing, he had attacked
Landy Hildreth, lying wounded from Cranston's bullet beside the trail.
Word of the arson ring would never reach the settlements, after all.

And as for Whisperfoot,--the terror that choked his heart with blood
began to wear off in a little while. The man lay so still in the
thickets. Besides, there was a strange, wild smell in the air.
Whisperfoot's stroke had gone home so true there had not even been a
fight. The darkness began to lift around him, and a strange exultation,
a rapture unknown before in all his hunting, began to creep into his
wild blood. Then, as a shadow steals, he went creeping back to his
dead.




V


Dan Failing had been studying nature on the high ridges; and he went
home by a back trail that led to old Bald Mountain. Many a man of longer
residence in the mountains wouldn't have cared to strike off through the
thickets with no guide except his own sense of direction. The ridges are
too many, and they look too much alike. It is very easy to walk in a
great circle--because one leg tires before the other--with no hope
whatever of anything except the spirit ever rising above the barrier of
the pines. But Dan always knew exactly where he was. It was part of his
inheritance from his frontiersmen ancestors, and it freed his wings in
the hills.

The trail was just a narrow serpent in the brush; and it had not been
made by gangs of laborers, working with shovels and picks. Possibly half
a dozen white men, in all, had ever walked along it. It was just the
path of the wild creatures, worn down by hoof and paw and cushion since
the young days of the world.

It was covered, like a sheep lane, with little slit triangles in the
yellow dirt. Some of them were hardly larger than the print of a man's
thumb, and they went all the way up to a great imprint that Dan could
scarcely cover with his open hand. All manner of deer, from seasonal
fawns with spotted coats and wide, startled eyes to the great bull elk,
monarch of the forest, had passed that way before him. Once he found the
traces of an old kill, where a cougar had dined and from which the
buzzards had but newly departed. And once he saw where Woof had left his
challenge in the bark of a great pine.

This is a very common thing for Woof to do,--to go about leaving
challenges as if he were the most warlike creature in the world. In
reality, he never fights until he is driven to it, and then his big,
furry arms turn out to be steel compressors of the first order; he is
patient and good-natured and ordinarily all he wants to do is sleep in
the leaves and grunt and soliloquize and hunt berries. But woe to the
man or beast who meets him in a rough-and-tumble fight. Unlike his great
cousin the Grizzly, that American Adamzad that not only walks like a man
but kills cattle like a butcher, he almost never eats meat. No one ever
pays any attention to his challenges either, and likely he never
thought any one would. They seemed to be the result of an inherited
tendency with him, just as much as to grow drowsy in winter, or to
scratch fleas from his furry hide.

He sees a tree that suits his fancy and immediately stands on his hind
legs beside it. Then he scratches the bark, just as high up as he can
reach. The idea seemed to be that if any other bear should journey along
that way, should find that he couldn't reach as high, he would
immediately quit the territory. But it doesn't work out in practice.
Nine times out of ten there will be a dozen Woofs in the same
neighborhood, no two of equal size, yet they hunt their berries and rob
their bee trees in perfect peace. Perhaps the impulse still remains, a
dim, remembered instinct, long after it has outlived its
usefulness,--just as man, ten thousand years after his arboreal
existence, will often throw his arms into the air as if to seize a tree
branch when he is badly frightened.

It was a roundabout trail home, but yet it had its advantages. It took
him within two miles of Snowbird's lookout station, and at this hour of
day he had been particularly fortunate in finding her at a certain
spring on the mountain side. It was a rather singular coincidence. Along
about four he would usually find himself wandering up that way.
Strangely enough, at the same time, it was true that she had an
irresistible impulse to go down and sit in the green ferns beside the
same spring. They always seemed to be surprised to see one another. In
reality, either of them would have been considerably more surprised had
the other failed to put in an appearance. And always they had long
talks, as the afternoon drew to twilight.

"But I don't think you ought to wait so late before starting home," the
girl would always say. "You're not a human hawk, and it is easier to get
lost than you think."

And this solicitude, Dan rightly figured, was a good sign. There was
only one objection to it. It resulted in an unmistakable inference that
she considered him unable to take care of himself,--and that was the
last thing on earth that he wanted her to think. He understood her well
enough to know that her standards were the standards of the mountains,
valuing strength and self-reliance above all things. He didn't stop to
question why, every day, he trod so many weary miles to be with her.

She was as natural as a fawn; and many times she had quite taken away
his breath. And once she did it literally. He didn't think that so long
as death spared him he would ever be able to forget that experience. It
was her birthday, and knowing of it in time he had arranged for the
delivery of a certain package, dear to a girlish heart, at her father's
house. In the trysting hour he had come trudging over the hills with it,
and few experiences in his life had ever yielded such unmitigated
pleasure as the sight of her, glowing white and red, as she took off its
wrapping paper. It was a jolly old gift, he recollected.--And when she
had seen it, she fairly leaped at him. Her warm, round arms around his
neck, and the softest, loveliest lips in the world pressed his. But in
those days he didn't have the strength that he had now. He felt he could
endure the same experience again with no embarrassment whatever. His
first impression then, besides abounding, incredible astonishment, was
that she had quite knocked out his breath. But let it be said for him
that he recovered with notable promptness. His own arms had gone up and
closed around,--and the girl had wriggled free.

"But you mustn't do that!" she told him.

"But, good Lord, girl! You did it to me! Is there no justice in women?"

"But I did it to thank you for this lovely gift. For remembering me--for
being so good--and considerate. You haven't any cause to thank me."

He had many very serious difficulties in thinking it out. And only one
conclusion was obtainable,--that Snowbird kissed as naturally as she did
anything else, and the kiss meant exactly what she said it did and no
more. But the fact remained that he would have walked a good many miles
farther if he thought there was any possibility of a repeat.

But all at once his fantasies were suddenly and rudely dispelled by the
intrusion of realities. Even a man in the depths of concentration cannot
be inattentive to the wild sounds of the mountains. They have a
commanding, a penetrating quality all their own. A mathematician cannot
walk over a mountain trail pondering on the fourth dimension when some
living creature is consistently cracking brush in the thickets beside
him. Human nature is directly opposed to such a thing, and it is too
much to expect of any man. He has too many race memories of saber-tooth
tigers, springing from their lairs, and likely he has heard too many
bear stories in his youth.

Dan had been walking silently himself in the pine needles. As Lennox had
wondered at long ago, he knew how by instinct; and instinctively he
practiced this attainment as soon as he got out into the wild. The
creature was fully one hundred yards distant, yet Dan could hear him
with entire plainness. And for a while he couldn't even guess what
manner of thing it might be.

A cougar that made so much noise would be immediately expelled from the
union. A wolf pack, running by sight, might crack brush as freely; but a
wolf pack would also bay to wake the dead. Of course it might be an elk
or a steer, and still more likely, a bear. He stood still and listened.
The sound grew nearer.

Soon it became evident that the creature was either walking with two
legs, or else was a four-footed animal putting two feet down at the same
instant. Dan had learned to wait. He stood perfectly still. And
gradually he came to the conclusion that he was listening to the
footfall of another man.

But it was rather hard to imagine what a man might be doing on this
lonely hill. Of course it might be a deer hunter; but few were the
valley sportsmen who had penetrated to this far land. The footfall was
much too heavy for Snowbird. The steps were evidently on another trail
that intersected his own trail one hundred yards farther up the hill. He
had only to stand still, and in an instant the man would come in sight.

He took one step into the thickets, prepared to conceal himself if it
became necessary. Then he waited. Soon the man stepped out on the
trail.

Even at the distance of one hundred yards, Dan had no difficulty
whatever in recognizing him. He could not mistake this tall, dark form,
the soiled, slouchy clothes, the rough hair, the intent, dark features.
It was a man about his own age, his own height, but weighing fully
twenty pounds more, and the dark, narrow eyes could belong to no one but
Bert Cranston. He carried his rifle loosely in his arms.

He stopped at the forks in the trail and looked carefully in all
directions. Dan had every reason to think that Cranston would see him at
first glance. Only one clump of thicket sheltered him. But because Dan
had learned the lesson of standing still, because his olive-drab
sporting clothes blended softly with the colored leaves, Cranston did
not detect him. He turned and strode on down the trail.

He didn't move quite like a man with innocent purposes. There was
something stealthy, something sinister in his stride, and the way he
kept such a sharp lookout in all directions. Yet he never glanced to the
trail for deer tracks, as he would have done had he been hunting.
Without even waiting to meditate on the matter, Dan started to shadow
him.

Before one hundred yards had been traversed, he could better understand
the joy the cougar takes in his hunting. It was the same process,--a
cautious, silent advance in the trail of prey. He had to walk with the
same caution, he had to take advantage of the thickets. He began to feel
a curious excitement.

Cranston seemed to be moving more carefully now, examining the brush
along the trail. Now and then he glanced up at the tree tops. And all at
once he stopped and knelt in the dry shrubbery.

At first all that Dan could see was the glitter of a knife blade.
Cranston seemed to be whittling a piece of dead pine into fine shavings.
Now he was gathering pine needles and small twigs, making a little pile
of them. And then, just as Cranston drew his match, Dan saw his purpose.

Cranston was at his old trade,--setting a forest fire.




VI


For two very good reasons, Dan didn't call to Cranston at once. The two
reasons were that Cranston had a rifle and that Dan was unarmed. It
might be extremely likely that Cranston would choose the most plausible
and effective means of preventing an interruption of his crime, and by
the same token, prevent word of the crime ever reaching the authorities.
The rifle contained five cartridges, and only one was needed.

But the idea of backing out, unseen, never even occurred to Dan. The
fire would have a tremendous headway before he could summon help.
Although it was near the lookout station, every condition pointed to a
disastrous fire. The brush was dry as tinder, not so heavy as to choke
the wind, but yet tall enough to carry the flame into the tree tops. The
stiff breeze up the ridge would certainly carry the flame for miles
through the parched Divide before help could come. In the meantime stock
and lives and homes would be endangered, besides the irreparable loss of
timber. There were many things that Dan might do, but giving up was not
one of them.

After all, he did the wisest thing of all. He simply came out in plain
sight and unconcernedly walked down the trail toward Cranston. At the
same instant, the latter struck his match.

As Dan was no longer stalking, Cranston immediately heard his step. He
whirled, recognized Dan, and for one long instant in which the world
seemed to have time in plenty to make a complete revolution, he stood
perfectly motionless. The match flared in his dark fingers, his
eyes--full of singular conjecturing--rested on Dan's face. No instant of
the latter's life had ever been fraught with greater peril. He
understood perfectly what was going on in Cranston's mind. The
fire-fiend was calmly deciding whether to shoot or whether to bluff it
out. One required no more moral courage than the other. It really didn't
make a great deal of difference to Cranston.

He had been born in the hills, and his spirit was the spirit of the
wolf,--to kill when necessary, without mercy or remorse. Besides, Dan
represented, in his mind, all that Cranston hated,--the law, gentleness,
the great civilized world that spread below. But in spite of it, he
decided that the killing was not worth the cartridge. The other course
was too easy. He did not even dream that Dan had been shadowing him and
had seen his intention. He would have laughed at the idea that a
"tenderfoot" could thus walk behind him, unheard. Without concern, he
scattered with his foot the little heap of kindling, and slipping his
pipe into his mouth, he touched the flaring match to it. It was a wholly
admirable little piece of acting, and would have deceived any one who
had not seen his previous preparations. The fact that the pipe was empty
mattered not one way or another. Then he walked on down the trail toward
Dan.

Dan stopped and lighted his own pipe. It was a curious little truce. And
then he leaned back against the great, gray trunk of a fallen tree.

"Well, Cranston," he said civilly. The men had met on previous
occasions, and always there had been the same invisible war between
them.

"How do you do, Failing," Cranston replied. No perceptions could be so
blunt as to miss the premeditated insult in the tone. He didn't speak in
his own tongue at all, the short, guttural "Howdy" that is the greeting
of the mountain men. He pronounced all the words with an exaggerated
precision, an unmistakable mockery of Dan's own tone. In his accent he
threw a tone of sickly sweetness, and his inference was all too plain.
He was simply calling Failing a milksop and a white-liver; just as
plainly as if he had used the words.

The eyes of the two men met. Cranston's lips were slightly curled in an
unmistakable leer. Dan's were very straight. And in one thing at least,
their eyes looked just the same. The pupils of both pairs had contracted
to steel points, bright in the dark gray of the irises. Cranston's
looked somewhat red; and Dan's were only hard and bright.

Dan felt himself straighten; and the color mounted somewhat higher in
his brown cheeks. But he did not try to avenge the insult--yet. Cranston
was still fifteen feet distant, and that was too far. A man may swing a
rifle within fifteen feet. The fact that they were in no way physical
equals did not even occur to him. When the insult is great enough, such
considerations cannot possibly matter. Cranston was hard as steel, one
hundred and seventy pounds in weight. Dan did not touch one hundred and
fifty, and a deadly disease had not yet entirely relinquished its hold
upon him.

"I do very well, Cranston," Dan answered in the same tone. "Wouldn't you
like another match? I believe your pipe has gone out."

Very little can be said for the wisdom of this remark. It was simply
human,--that age-old creed to answer blow for blow and insult for
insult. Of course the inference was obvious,--that Dan was accusing him,
by innuendo, of his late attempt at arson. Cranston glanced up quickly,
and it might be true that his fingers itched and tingled about the
barrel of his rifle. He knew what Dan meant. He understood perfectly
that Dan had guessed his purpose on the mountain side. And the curl at
his lips became more pronounced.

"What a smart little boy," he scorned. "Going to be a Sherlock Holmes
when he grows up." Then he half turned and the light in his eyes blazed
up. He was not leering now. The mountain men are too intense to play at
insult very long. Their inherent savagery comes to the surface, and they
want the warmth of blood upon their fingers. The voice became guttural.
"Maybe you're a spy?" he asked. "Maybe you're one of those city rats--to
come up and watch us, and then run and tell the forest service. There's
two things, Failing, that I want you to know."

Dan puffed at his pipe, and his eyes looked curiously bright through the
film of smoke. "I'm not interested in hearing them," he said.

"It might pay you," Cranston went on. "One of 'em is that one man's word
is good as another's in a court--and it wouldn't do you any good to run
down and tell tales. A man can light his pipe on the mountain side
without the courts being interested. The second thing is--just that I
don't think you'd find it a healthy thing to do."

"I suppose, then, that is a threat?"

"It ain't just a threat." Cranston laughed harshly,--a single, grim
syllable that was the most terrible sound he had yet uttered. "It's a
fact. Just try it, Failing. Just make one little step in that direction.
You couldn't hide behind a girl's skirts then. Why, you city sissy, I'd
break you to pieces in my hands!"

Few men can make a threat without a muscular accompaniment. Its very
utterance releases pent-up emotions, part of which can only pour forth
in muscular expression. And anger is a primitive thing, going down to
the most mysterious depths of a man's nature. As Cranston spoke, his lip
curled, his dark fingers clenched on his thick palm, and he half leaned
forward.

Dan knocked out his pipe on the log. It was the only sound in that whole
mountain realm; all the lesser sounds were stilled. The two men stood
face to face, Dan tranquil, Cranston shaken by passion.

"I give you," said Dan with entire coldness, "an opportunity to take
that back. Just about four seconds."

He stood very straight as he spoke, and his eyes did not waver in the
least. It would not be the truth to say that his heart was not leaping
like a wild thing in his breast. A dark mist was spreading like madness
over his brain; but yet he was striving to keep his thoughts clear. It
was hard to do, under insult. But he knew that only by craft, by cool
thinking and planning, could he even hope to stand against the brawny
Cranston. He kept a remorseless control over his voice and face.
Stealthily, without seeming to do so, he was setting his muscles for a
spring.

The only answer to his words was a laugh,--a roaring laugh of scorn from
Cranston's dark lips. In his laughter, his intent, catlike vigilance
relaxed. Dan saw a chance; feeble though it was, it was the only chance
he had. And his long body leaped like a serpent through the air.

Physical superior though he was, Cranston would have repelled the attack
with his rifle if he had had a chance. His blood was already at the
murder heat--a point always quickly reached in Cranston--and the dark,
hot fumes in his brain were simply nothing more nor less than the most
poisonous, bitter hatred. No other word exists. If his class of
degenerate mountain men had no other accomplishment, they could hate.
All their lives they practiced the emotion: hatred of their neighbors,
hatred of law, hatred of civilization in all its forms. Besides, this
kind of hillman habitually fought his duels with rifles. Hands were not
deadly enough.

But Dan was past his guard before he had time to raise his gun. The
whole attack was one of the most astounding surprises of Cranston's
life. Dan's body struck his, his fists flailed, and to protect himself,
Cranston was obliged to drop the rifle. They staggered, as if in some
weird dance, on the trail; and their arms clasped in a clinch.

For a long instant they stood straining, seemingly motionless.
Cranston's powerful body had stood up well under the shock of Dan's
leap. It was a hand-to-hand battle now. The rifle had slid on down the
hillside, to be caught in a clump of brush twenty feet below. Dan called
on every ounce of his strength, because he knew what mercy he might
expect if Cranston mastered him. The battles of the mountains were
battles to the death.

They flung back and forth, wrenching shoulders, lashing fists, teeth and
feet and fingers. There were no Marquis of Queensbury rules in this
battle. Again and again Dan sent home his blows; but they all seemed
ineffective. By now, Cranston had completely overcome the moment's
advantage the other had obtained by the power of his leap. He hurled Dan
from the clinch and lashed at him with hard fists.

It is a very common thing to hear of a silent fight. But it is really a
more rare occurrence than most people believe. It is true that serpents
will often fight in the strangest, most eerie silence; but human beings
are not serpents. They partake more of the qualities of the
meat-eaters,--the wolves and the felines. After the first instant, the
noise of the fight aroused the whole hillside. The sound of blows was in
itself notable, and besides, both of the men were howling the primordial
battle cries of hatred and vengeance.

For two long minutes Dan fought with the strength of desperation,
summoning at last all that mysterious reserve force with which all men
are born. But he was playing a losing game. The malady with which he had
suffered had taken too much of his vigor. Even as he struggled, it
seemed to him that the vista about him, the dark pines, the colored
leaves of the perennial shrubbery, the yellow path were all obscured in
a strange, white mist. A great wind roared in his ears,--and his heart
was evidently about to shiver to pieces.

But still he fought on, not daring to yield. He could no longer parry
Cranston's blows. The latter's arms went around him in one of those
deadly holds that wrestlers know; and Dan struggled in vain to free
himself. Cranston's face itself seemed hideous and unreal in the mist
that was creeping over him. He did not recognize the curious thumping
sound as Cranston's fists on his flesh. And now Cranston had hurled him
off his feet.

Nothing mattered further. He had fought the best he could. This cruel
beast could pounce on him at will and hammer away his life. But still he
struggled. Except for the constant play of his muscles, his almost
unconscious effort to free himself that kept one of Cranston's arms busy
holding him down, that fight on the mountain path might have come to a
sudden end. Human bodies can stand a terrific punishment; but Dan's was
weakened from the ravages of his disease. Besides, Cranston would soon
have both hands and both feet free for the work, and when these four
terrible weapons are used at once, the issue--soon or late--can never be
in doubt.

But even now, consciousness still lingered. Dan could hear his enemy's
curses,--and far up the trail, he heard another, stranger sound. It was
that second of acute sensibilities that usually immediately precedes
unconsciousness, and he heard it very plainly. It sounded like some one
running.

And then he dimly knew that Cranston was climbing from his body. Voices
were speaking,--quick, commanding voices just over him. Above Cranston's
savage curses another voice rang clear, and to Dan's ears, glorious
beyond all human utterance.

He opened his tortured eyes. The mists lifted from in front of them, and
the whole drama was revealed. It had not been sudden mercy that had
driven Cranston from his body, just when his victim's falling
unconsciousness would have put him completely in his power. Rather it
was something black and ominous that even now was pointed squarely at
Cranston's breast.

None too soon, a ranger of the hill had heard the sounds of the
struggle, and had left the trysting place at the spring to come to Dan's
aid. It was Snowbird, very pale but wholly self-sufficient and
determined and intent. Her pistol was quite cocked and ready.




VII


Dan Failing was really not badly hurt. The quick, lashing blows had not
done more than severely bruise the flesh of his face; and the mists of
unconsciousness that had been falling over him were more nearly the
result of his own tremendous physical exertion. Now these mists were
rising.

"Go--go away," the girl was commanding. "I think you've killed him."

Dan opened his eyes to find her kneeling close beside him, but still
covering Cranston with her pistol. Her hand was resting on his bruised
cheek. He couldn't have believed that a human face could be as white,
while life still remained, as hers was then. All the lovely tints that
had been such a delight to him, the play of soft reds and browns, had
faded as an after-glow fades on the snow.

Dan's glance moved with hers to Cranston. He was standing easily at a
distance of a dozen feet; and except for the faintest tremble all over
his body, a muscular reaction from the violence of his passion, he had
entirely regained his self-composure. This was quite characteristic of
the mountain men. They share with the beasts a passion of living that is
wholly unknown on the plains; but yet they have a certain quality of
imperturbability known nowhere else. Nor is it limited to the
native-born mountaineers. No man who intimately knows a member of that
curious, keen-eyed little army of naturalists and big-game hunters who
go to the north woods every fall, as regularly and seemingly as
inexorably as the waterfowl go in spring, can doubt this fact. They seem
to have acquired from the silence and the snows an impregnation of that
eternal calm and imperturbability that is the wilderness itself.
Cranston wasn't in the least afraid. Fear is usually a matter of
uncertainty, and he knew exactly where he stood.

It is extremely doubtful if a plainsman would have possessed this
knowledge. But a plainsman has not the knowledge of life itself that the
mountaineer has, simply because he does not see it in the raw. And he
has not half the intimate knowledge of death, an absolute requisite of
self-composure. The mountaineer knows life in its simple phases with
little tradition or convention to blur the vision. Death is a very
intimate acquaintance that may be met in any snowdrift, on any rocky
trail; and these conditions are very deadly to any delusions that he has
in regard to himself. He acquires an ability to see just where he
stands, and of course that means self-possession. This quality had
something to do with the remarkable record that the mountain men, such
as that magnificent warrior from Tennessee, made in the late war.

Cranston knew exactly what Snowbird would do. Although of a higher
order, she was a mountain creature, even as himself. She meant exactly
what she said. If he hadn't climbed from Dan's prone body, she would
have shot quickly and very straight. If he tried to attack either of
them now, her finger would press back before he could blink an eye, and
she wouldn't weep any hysterical tears over his dead body. If he kept
his distance, she wouldn't shoot at all. He meant to keep his distance.
But he did know that he could insult her without danger to himself. And
by now his lips had acquired their old curl of scorn.

"I'll go, Snowbird," he said. "I'll leave you with your sissy. But I
guess you saw what I did to him--in two minutes."

"I saw. But you must remember he's sick. Now go."

"If he's sick, let him stay in bed--and have a wet nurse. Maybe you can
be that."

The lids drooped halfway over her gray eyes, and the slim finger curled
more tightly about the trigger. "Oh, I wish I could shoot you, Bert!"
she said. She didn't whisper it, or hiss it, or hurl it, or do any of
the things most people are supposed to do in moments of violent emotion.
She simply said it, and her meaning was all the clearer.

"But you can't. And I'll pound that milksop of yours to a jelly every
time I see him. I'd think, Snowbird, that you'd want a _man_."

He started up the trail; and then she did a strange thing. "He's more of
a man than you are, right now, Bert," she told him. "He'll prove it some
day." Then her arm went about Dan's neck and lifted his head upon her
breast; and in Cranston's plain sight, she bent and kissed him, softly,
on the lips.

Cranston's answer was an oath. It dripped from his lips, more poisonous,
more malicious than the venom of a snake. His late calm, treasured so
much, dropped from him in an instant. His features seemed to tighten,
the dark lips drew away from his teeth. No words could have made him
such an effective answer as this little action of hers. And as he turned
up the trail, he called down to her a name,--that most dreadful epithet
that foul tongues have always used to women held in greatest scorn.

Dan struggled in her arms. The kiss on his lips, the instant before, had
not called him out of his half-consciousness. It had scarcely seemed
real, rather just an incident in a blissful dream. But the word called
down the trail shot out clear and vivid from the silence, just as a
physician's face will often leap from the darkness after the anesthesia.
The whole scene in an instant became incredibly vivid,--the dark figure
on the trail, the girl's white face above him, narrow-eyed and
drawn-lipped, and the dark pines, silent and sad, overhead. Something
infinitely warm and tender was holding him, pressing him back against a
holy place that throbbed and gave him life and strength; but he knew
that this word had to be answered. And only actions, not other words,
could be its payment. All the voices of his body called to him to lie
still, but the voices of the spirit, those higher, nobler promptings
from which no man, to the glory of the breed from which he sprung, can
ever quite escape, were stronger yet. He tugged upward, straining. But
he didn't even have the strength to break the hold that the soft arm had
about his neck.

"Oh, if I could only pull the trigger!" she was crying. "If I could only
kill him--"

"Let me," he pleaded. "Give me the pistol. I'll kill him--"

And he would. There was no flinching in the gray eyes that looked up to
her. She leaned forward, as if to put the weapon in his hands, but at
once drew it back. And then a single sob caught at her throat. An
instant later, they heard Cranston's laughter as he vanished around the
turn of the trail.

For long minutes the two of them were still. The girl still held the
man's head upon her breast. The pistol had fallen in the pine needles,
and her nervous hand plucked strangely at the leaves of a mountain
flower. To Dan's eyes, there was something trancelike, a hint of
paralysis and insensibility about her posture. He had never seen her
eyes like this. The light that he had always beheld in them had
vanished. Their utter darkness startled him.

He sat up straight, and her arm that had been about his neck fell at her
side. He took her hand firmly in his, and their eyes met.

"We must go home, Snowbird," he told her simply. "I'm not so badly hurt
but that I can make it."

She nodded; but otherwise scarcely seemed to hear. Her eyes still
flowed with darkness. And then, before his own eyes, their dark pupils
began to contract. The hand he held filled and throbbed with life, and
the fingers closed around his. She leaned toward him.

"Listen, Dan," she said quickly. "You heard--didn't you--the last thing
that he said?"

"I couldn't help but hear, Snowbird."

Her other hand sought for his. "Then if you heard--payment must be made.
You see what I mean, Dan. Maybe you can't see, knowing the girls that
live on the plains. You were the cause of his saying it, and you must
answer--"

It seemed to Dan that some stern code of the hills, unwritten except in
the hearts of their children, inexorable as night, was speaking through
her lips. This was no personal thing. In some dim, half-understood way,
it went back to the basic code of life.

"People must fight their own fights, up here," she told him. "The laws
of the courts that the plains' people can appeal to are all too far
away. There's no one that can do it, except you. Not my father. My
father can't fight your battles here, if your honor is going to stand.
It's up to you, Dan. You can't pretend that you didn't hear him. Such as
you are, weak and sick to be beaten to a pulp in two minutes, you alone
will have to make him answer for it. I came to your aid--and now you
must come to mine."

Her fingers no longer clasped his. Strength had come back to him, and
his fingers closed down until the blood went out of hers, but she was
wholly unconscious of the pain. In reality, she was conscious of nothing
except the growing flame in his face. It held her eyes, in passionate
fascination. His pupils were contracting to little bright dots in the
gray irises. The jaw was setting, as she had never seen it before.

"Do you _think_, Snowbird, that you'd even have to ask me?" he demanded.
"Don't you think I understand? And it won't be in your defense--only my
own duty."

"But he is so strong--and you are so weak--"

"I won't be so weak forever. I never really cared much about living
before. I'll try now, and you'll see--oh, Snowbird, wait and trust me: I
understand everything. It's my own fight--when you kissed me, and he
cried down that word in anger and jealousy, it put the whole thing on
me. No one else can make him answer; no one else has the right. It's my
honor, no one else's, that stands or falls."

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it again and again.

And for the first time he saw the tears gathering in her dark eyes. "But
you _fought_ here, didn't you, Dan?" she asked with painful slowness.
"You didn't put up your arms--or try to run away? I didn't come till he
had you done, so I didn't see." She looked at him as if her whole joy of
life hung on his answer.

"Fought! I would have fought till I died! But that isn't enough,
Snowbird. It isn't enough just to fight, in a case like this. A man's
got to win! I would have died if you hadn't come. And that's another
debt that I have to pay--only that debt I owe to _you_."

She nodded slowly. The lives of the mountain men are not saved by their
women without incurring obligation. She attempted no barren denials. She
made no effort to pretend he had not incurred a tremendous debt when she
had come with her pistol. It was an unavoidable fact. A life for a life
is the code of the mountains.

"Two things I must do, before I can ever dare to die," he told her
soberly. "One of them is to pay you; the other is to pay Cranston for
the thing he said. Maybe the chance will never come for the first of the
two; only I'll pray that it will. Maybe it would be kinder to you to
pray that it wouldn't; yet I pray that it will! Maybe I can pay that
debt only by being always ready, always watching for a chance to save
you from any danger, always trying to protect you. You didn't come in
time to see the fight I made. Besides--I lost, and little else matters.
And that debt to you can't be paid until sometime I fight again--for
you--and win." He gasped from his weakness, but went on bravely. "I'll
never be able to feel at peace, Snowbird, until I'm tested in the fire
before your eyes! I want to show you the things Cranston said of me are
not true--that my courage can stand the test.

"It wouldn't be the same, perhaps, with an Eastern girl. Other things
matter in the valleys. But I see how it is here; that there is only one
standard for men and by that standard they rise or fall. Things in the
mountains are down to the essentials."

He paused and struggled for strength to continue. "And I know what you
said to him," he went on. "Half-unconscious as I was, I remember every
word. Each word just seems to burn into me, Snowbird, and I'll make
every one of them good. You said I am a better man than he, and sometime
it would be proved--and it's the truth! Maybe in a month, maybe in a
year. I'm not going to die from this malady of mine now, Snowbird. I've
got too much to live for--too many debts to pay. In the end, I'll prove
your words to him."

His eyes grew earnest, and the hard fire went out of them. "It's almost
as if you were a queen, a real queen of some great kingdom," he told
her, tremulous with a great awe that was stealing over him, as a mist
steals over water. "And because I had kissed your fingers, for ever and
ever I was your subject, living only to fight your fights--maybe with a
dream in the end to kiss your fingers again. When you bent and kissed me
on that hillside--for him to see--it was the same: that I was sworn to
you, and nothing mattered in my life except the service and love I could
give to you. And it's more than you ever dream, Snowbird. It's all
yours, for your battles and your happiness."

The great pines were silent above them, shadowed and dark. Perhaps they
were listening to an age-old story, those vows of service and
self-gained worth by which the race has struggled upward from the
darkness.

"But I kissed you--once before," she reminded him. The voice was just a
whisper, hardly louder than the stir of the leaves in the wind.

"But that kiss didn't count," he told her. "It wasn't at all the same. I
loved you then, I think, but it didn't mean what it did to-day."

"And what--" she leaned toward him, her eyes full on his, "does it mean
now?"

"All that's worth while in life, all that matters when everything is
said that can be said, and all is done that can be done. And it means,
please God, when the debts are paid, that I may have such a kiss again."

"Not until then," she told him, whispering.

"Until then, I make oath that I won't even ask it, or receive it if you
should give it. It goes too deep, dearest--and it means too much."

This was their pact. Not until the debts were paid and her word made
good would those lips be his again. There was no need for further words.
Both of them knew. The soldier of the queen must be tried with fire,
before he may return to kiss her fingers. The light burns clear in this.
No instances of degeneracy, no exceptions brought to pass by thwarted
nature, can affect the truth of this.

In the skies, the gray clouds were gathering swiftly, as always in the
mountains. The rain-drops were falling one and one, over the forest. The
summer was done, and fall had come in earnest.




VIII


The rains fell unceasingly for seven days: not a downpour but a constant
drizzle that made the distant ridges smoke. The parched earth seemed to
smack its lips, and little rivulets began to fall and tumble over the
beds of the dry streams. The Rogue and the Umpqua flooded and the great
steelhead began to ascend their smaller tributaries. Whisperfoot hunted
with ease, for the wet shrubbery did not crack and give him away. The
air was filled with the call of the birds of passage.

All danger of forest fire was at once removed, and Snowbird was no
longer needed as a lookout on old Bald Mountain. She went to her own
home, her companion back to the valley; and now that his sister had
taken his place as housekeeper, Bill had gone down to the lower
foothills with a great part of the live stock. Dan spent these rainy
days in toil on the hillsides, building himself physically so that he
might pay his debts.

It was no great pleasure, these rainy days. He would have greatly liked
to have lingered in the square mountain house, listening to the quiet
murmur of the rain on the roof and watching Snowbird at her household
tasks. She could, as her father had said, make a biscuit. She could also
roll up sleeves over trim, brown arms and with entire good humor do a
week's laundry for three hardworking men. He would have liked to sit
with her, through the long afternoons, as she knitted beside the
fireplace--to watch the play of her graceful fingers and perhaps, now
and then, to touch her hands when he held the skeins. But none of these
things transpired. He drove himself from daylight till dark, developing
his body for the tests that were sure to come.

The first few days nearly killed him. He over-exercised in the chill
rain, and one anxious night he developed all the symptoms of pneumonia.
Such a sickness would have been the one thing needed to make the
doctor's prophecy come true. But with Snowbird's aid, and numerous hot
drinks, he fought it off.

She had made him go to bed, and no human memory could be so dull as to
forget the little, whispered message that she gave him with his last
spoonful of medicine. She said she'd pray for him, and she meant it
too,--literal, entreating prayer that could not go unheard. She was a
mountain girl, and her beliefs were those of her ancestors,--simple and
true and wholly without affectation. But he hadn't relaxed thereafter.
He knew the time had come to make the test. Night after night he would
go to bed half-sick from fatigue, but the mornings would find him fresh.
And after two weeks, he knew he had passed the crisis and was on the
direct road to complete recovery.

Sometimes he cut wood in the forest: first the felling of some tall
pine, then the trimming and hewing into two-foot lengths. The blisters
came on his hands, broke and bled, but finally hardened into
callosities. He learned the most effective stroke to hurl a shower of
chips from beneath the blade. His back and limbs hardened from the
handling of heavy wood--and the cough was practically gone.

Sometimes he mended fences and did other manual labor about the ranch;
but not all his exercise was taken out in work. He didn't forget his
friends in the forest, creatures of talon and paw and wing. He spent
long days roaming the ridges and fighting through the buckbrush, and the
forest yielded up its secrets, one by one. But he knew that no mortal
span of years was long enough to absorb them all. Sometimes he shot
ducks over the marshes; and there was no greater sport for him in the
wilds than the first sight of a fine, black-pencil line upon the
distant sky, the leap through the air that it made until, in an
instant's flash, it evolved into a flock of mallard passing with the
wind; and then the test of eye and nerve as he saw them over the sights.

His frame filled out. His face became swarthy from constant exposure. He
gained in weight. A month glided by, and he began to see the first
movement of the largest forest creatures down to the foothills. For not
even the animals, with the exception of the hardy wolf pack, can survive
if unprotected from the winter snow and cold of the high levels. The
first snow sifted from the gray sky and quickly melted on the wet pine
needles. And then the migration of the deer began in earnest. Before
another week was done, Whisperfoot had cause to marvel where they had
all gone.

One cloudy afternoon in early November found Silas Lennox cutting wood
on the ridge behind his house. It was still an open question with him
whether he and his daughter would attempt to winter on the Divide. Dan
of course wanted to remain, yet there were certain reasons, some very
definite and others extremely vague, why the prospect of the winter in
the snow fields did not appeal to the mountaineer. In the first place,
all signs pointed to a hard season. Although the fall had come late,
the snows were exceptionally early. The duck flight was completed two
weeks before its usual time, and the rodents had dug their burrows
unusually deep. Besides, too many months of snow weigh heavily upon the
spirit. The wolf packs sing endlessly on the ridges, and many unpleasant
things may happen. On previous years, some of the cabins on the ridges
below had human occupants; this winter the whole region, for nearly
seventy miles across the mountains to the foothills, would be wholly
deserted by human beings. Even the ranger station, twelve miles across a
steep ridge, would soon be empty. Of course a few ranchers had homes a
few miles beyond the river, but the wild cataracts did not freeze in the
coldest of seasons, and there were no bridges. Besides, most of the more
prosperous farmers wintered in the valleys. Only a few more days would
the road be passable for his car; and no time must be lost in making his
decision.

Once the snows came in reality, there was nothing to do but stay.
Seventy miles across the uncharted ridges on snowshoes is an undertaking
for which even a mountaineer has no fondness. It might be the wisest
thing, after all, to load Snowbird and Dan into his car and drive down
to the valleys. The fall round-up would soon be completed, Bill would
return for a few days from the valleys with new equipment to replace the
broken lighting system on the car, and they could avoid the bitter cold
and snow that Lennox had known so long. Of course he would miss it
somewhat. He had a strong man's love for the endless drifts, the
crackling dawns and the hushed, winter forest wherein not even Woof or
Whisperfoot dares to go abroad. He chopped at a great log and wondered
what would suit him better,--the comfort and safety of the valleys or
the rugged glory of the ridges.

But at that instant, the question of whether or not he would winter on
the Divide was decided for him. And an instant was all that was needed.
For the period of one breath he forgot to be watchful,--and a certain
dread Spirit that abides much in the forest saw its chance. Perhaps he
had lived too long in the mountains and grown careless of them: an
attitude that is usually punished with death. He had just felled a tree,
and the trunk was still attached to the stump by a stripe of bark to
which a little of the wood adhered. He struck a furious blow at it with
his ax.

He hadn't considered that the tree lay on a steep slope. As the blade
fell, the great trunk simply seemed to leap. Lennox leaped too, in a
frenzied effort to save his life; but already the leafy bows, like the
tendrils of some great amphibian, had whipped around his legs. He fell,
struggling; and then a curious darkness, streaked with flame, dropped
down upon him.

An hour later he found himself lying on the still hillside, knowing only
a great wonderment. At first his only impulse was to go back to sleep.
He didn't understand the grayness that had come upon the mountain world,
his own strange feeling of numbness, of endless soaring through infinite
spaces. But he was a mountain man, and that meant he was schooled,
beyond all things, to keep his self-control. He made himself remember.
It was the cruelest work he had ever done, and it seemed to him that his
brain would shiver to pieces from the effort. Yes--he had been cutting
wood on the hillside, and the shadows had been long. He had been
wondering whether or not they should go down to the valleys.

He remembered now: the last blow and the rolling log. He tried to turn
his head to look up to the hill.

He found himself wholly unable to do it. Something wracked him in his
neck when he tried to move. But he did glance down. And yes, he could
turn in this direction. And he saw the great tree trunk lying twenty
feet below him, wedged in between the young pines.

He was surrounded by broken fragments of limbs, and it was evident that
the tree had not struck him a full blow. The limbs had protected him to
some extent. No man is of such mold as to be crushed under the solid
weight of the trunk and live to remember it. He wondered if this were
the frontier of death,--the grayness that lingered over him. He seemed
to be soaring.

He brought himself back to earth and tried again to remember. Of course,
the twilight had fallen. It had been late afternoon when he had cut the
tree. His hand stole along his body; and then, for the first time, a
hideous sickness came upon him. His hand was warm and wet when he
brought it up. The other hand he couldn't stretch at all.

The forest was silent around him, except a bird calling somewhere near
the house--a full voice, rich and clear, and it seemed to him that it
had a quality of distress. Then he recognized it. It was the voice of
his own daughter, Snowbird, calling for him. He tried to answer her.

It was only a whisper, at first. Yet she was coming nearer; and her own
voice sounded louder. "Here, Snowbird," he called again. She heard him
then: he could tell by the startled tone of her reply. The next instant
she was at his side, her tears dropping on his face.

With a tremendous effort of will, he recalled his speeding faculties. "I
don't think I'm badly hurt," he told her very quietly. "A few ribs
broken--and a leg. But we'll have to winter here on the Divide, Snowbird
mine."

"What does it matter, if you live," she cried. She crawled along the
pine needles beside him, and tore his shirt from his breast. He was
rapidly sinking into unconsciousness. The thing she dreaded most--that
his back might be broken--was evidently not true. There were, as he
said, broken ribs and evidently one severe fracture of the leg bone.
Whether he had sustained internal injuries that would end his life
before the morning, she had no way of knowing.

At that point, the problem of saving her father's life fell wholly into
her hands. It was perfectly plain that he could not aid himself in the
slightest way. It was evident, also, he could not be moved, except
possibly for the distance to the house. She banished all impulse toward
hysteria and at once began to consider all phases of the case.

His broken body could not be carried over the mountain road to
physicians in the valleys. They must be transported to the ranch. It
would take them a full day to make the trip, even if she could get word
to them at once; and twenty-four hours without medical atten

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