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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voice of the Pack
+
+Author: Edison Marshall
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2010 [EBook #33877]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 aëroplanes 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 attention would
+probably cost her father his life. The nearest telephone was at the
+ranger station, twelve miles distant over a mountain trail. The
+telephone line to Bald Mountain, four miles off, had been disconnected
+when the rains had ended the peril of the forest fire.
+
+It all depended upon her. Bill was driving cattle into the valleys, and
+he and his men had in use all the horses on the ranch with one
+exception. The remaining horse had been ridden by Dan to some distant
+marshes, and as Dan would shoot until sunset, that meant he would not
+return until ten o'clock. There was no road for a car to the ranger
+station, only a rough steep trail, and she remembered, with a sinking
+heart, that one of Bill's missions in the valley was to procure a new
+lighting system. By no conceivable possibility could she drive down that
+mountain road in the darkness. But she was somewhat relieved by the
+thought that in all probability she could walk twelve miles across the
+mountains to the ranger station in much less time than she could drive,
+by automobile, seventy miles down to the ranches at the foothills about
+the valley.
+
+Besides, she remembered with a gladdening heart that Richards, one of
+the rangers, had been a student at a medical college and had taken a
+position with the Forest Service to regain his health. She would cross
+the ridge to the station, 'phone for a doctor in the valleys, and would
+return on horseback with Richards for such first aid as he could give.
+The only problem that remained was that of getting her father into the
+house.
+
+He was stirring a little now. Evidently consciousness was returning to
+him. And then she thanked Heaven for the few simple lessons in first aid
+that her father had taught her in the days before his carelessness had
+come upon him. He had been wise enough to know that rare would be her
+fortune if sometime she did not have need of such knowledge.
+
+One of his lessons had been that of carrying an unconscious human
+form,--a method by which even a woman may carry, for a short distance, a
+heavy man. It was approximately the method used in carrying wounded in
+No Man's Land: the body thrown over the shoulders, one arm through the
+fork of the legs to the wounded man's hand. Her father was not a
+particularly heavy man, and she was an exceptionally strong young woman.
+She knew at once that this problem was solved.
+
+The hardest part was lifting him to her shoulders. Only by calling upon
+her last ounce of strength, and tugging upward with her arms, was she
+able to do it. But it was fairly easy, in her desperation, to carry him
+down the hill. What rest she got she took by leaning against a tree, the
+limp body still across her shoulders.
+
+It was a distance of one hundred yards in all. No muscles but those
+trained by the outdoors, no lungs except those made strong by the
+mountain air, could have stood that test. She laid him on his own bed,
+on the lower floor, and set his broken limbs the best she could. She
+covered him up with thick, fleecy blankets, and set a bottle of whisky
+beside the bed. Then she wrote a note to Dan and fastened it upon one of
+the interior doors.
+
+She had learned, long ago, the value of frequent rests. She did not fly
+at once to her long tramp. For three minutes she lay perfectly limp on
+the fireplace divan, resting from the exertion of carrying her father
+down the hill. Then she drew on her hob-nailed boots--needed sorely for
+the steep climb--and pocketed her pistol. She thrust a handful of jerked
+venison into the pocket of her coat and lighted the lantern. The forest
+night had fallen, soft and vibrant and tremulous, over the heads of the
+dark trees when she started out.
+
+Far away on a distant hillside, Whisperfoot the cougar howled and
+complained because he could find no deer.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Snowbird felt very glad of her intimate, accurate knowledge of the whole
+region of the Divide. In her infancy the winding trails had been her
+playground, and long ago she had acquired the mountaineer's sixth sense
+for traversing them at night. She had need of that knowledge now. The
+moon was dim beneath thin clouds, and the lantern she carried did not
+promise much aid. The glass was rather smoked from previous burnings,
+and its flame glowed dully and threatened to go out altogether. It cast
+a few lame beams on the trail beneath her feet; but they perished
+quickly in the expanse of darkness.
+
+She slipped into her free, swinging stride; and the last beams from the
+windows of the house were soon lost in the pines behind her. It was one
+of those silent, breathless nights with which no mountaineer is entirely
+unacquainted, and for a long tune the only sound she could hear was her
+own soft tramp in the pine needles. The trees themselves were
+motionless. That peculiar sound, not greatly different from that of
+running water which the wind often makes in the pine tops, was entirely
+lacking. Not that she could be deceived by it,--as stories tell that
+certain tenderfeet, dying of thirst in the barren hills, have been. But
+she always liked the sound; and she missed it especially to-night.
+
+She felt that if she would stop to listen, there would be many faint
+sounds in the thickets,--those little hushed noises that the wild things
+make to remind night-wanderers of their presence. But she did not in the
+least care to hear these sounds. They do not tend toward peace of mind
+on a long walk over the ridges.
+
+The wilderness began at once. Whatever influence toward civilization her
+father's house had brought to the wilds chopped off as beneath a blade
+in the first fringe of pines. This is altogether characteristic of the
+Oregon forests. They are much too big and too old to be tamed in any
+large degree by the presence of one house. No one knew this fact better
+than Lennox himself who, in a hard winter of four years before, had
+looked out of his window to find the wolf pack ranged in a hungry circle
+about his house. Within two hundred yards after she had passed through
+her father's door, she was perfectly aware that the wild was stirring
+and throbbing with life about her. At first she tried very hard to think
+of other things. But the attempt wasn't entirely a success. And before
+she had covered the first of the twelve miles, the sounds that from the
+first had been knocking at the door of her consciousness began to make
+an entrance.
+
+If a person lies still long enough, he can usually hear his heart
+beating and the flow of his blood in his arteries. Any sound, no matter
+how faint, will make itself heard at last. It was this way with a very
+peculiar noise that crept up through the silence from the trail behind
+her. She wouldn't give it any heed at first. But in a very little while
+indeed, it grew so insistent that she could no longer disregard it.
+
+Some living creature was trotting along on the trail behind, keeping
+approximately the same distance between them.
+
+Foregoing any attempt to ignore it, she set her cool young mind to
+thinking what manner of beast it might be. Its step was not greatly
+different from that of a large dog,--except possibly a dog would have
+made slightly more noise. Yet she couldn't even be sure of this basic
+premise, because this animal, whatever it might be, had at first
+seemingly moved with utmost caution, but now took less care with its
+step than is customary with the wild denizens of the woods. A wolf, for
+instance, can simply drift when it wishes, and the silence of a cougar
+is a name. Yet unless her pursuer were a dog, which seemed entirely
+unlikely, it was certainly one of these two. She would have liked very
+much to believe the step was that of Old Woof, the bear, suddenly
+curious as to what this dim light of hers might be; but she couldn't
+bring herself to accept the lie. Woof, except when wounded or cornered,
+is the most amiable creature in the Oregon woods, and it would give her
+almost a sense of security to have him waddling along behind her. The
+wolves and cougar, remembering the arms of Woof, would not be nearly so
+curious. But unfortunately, the black bear had never done such a thing
+in the memory of man, and if he had, he would have made six times as
+much noise. He can go fairly softly when he is stalking, but when he is
+obliged to trot--as he would be obliged to do to keep up with a
+swift-walking human figure--he cracks twigs like a rolling log. She had
+the impression that the animal behind had been passing like smoke at
+first, but wasn't taking the trouble to do it now.
+
+The sound was a soft _pat-pat_ on the trail,--sometimes entirely
+obliterated but always recurring when she began to believe that she had
+only fancied its presence. Sometimes a twig, rain-soaked though it was,
+cracked beneath a heavy foot, and again and again she heard the brush
+crushing and rustling as something passed through. Behind it all, a
+weird _motif_, remained the _pat-pat_ of cushioned feet. Sometimes, when
+the trail was covered with soft pine needles, it was practically
+indistinguishable. She had to strain to hear it,--and it is not pleasing
+to the spirit to have to strain to hear any sound. On the bare,
+rain-packed earth, even untrained plainsmen's ears could not possibly
+doubt the reality of the sound.
+
+The animal was approximately one hundred feet behind. It wasn't a wolf,
+she thought. The wolves ran in packs this season, and except in winter
+were more afraid of human beings than any other living creature. It
+wasn't a lynx--one of those curiosity-devoured little felines that will
+mew all day on a trail and never dare come near. It was much too large
+for a lynx. The feet fell too solidly. She had already given up the idea
+that it could be Woof. There were no dogs in the mountains to follow at
+heel; and she had no desire whatever to meet Shag, the faithful hybrid
+that used to be her guardian in the hills. For Shag had gone to his
+well-deserved rest several seasons before. Two other possibilities
+remained. One was that this follower was a human being, the other that
+it was a cougar.
+
+Ordinarily a human being is much more potentially dangerous to a woman
+in the hills at night than a cougar. A cougar is an abject coward and
+some men are not. But Snowbird felt herself entirely capable of handling
+any human foes. They would have no advantage over her; they would have
+no purpose in killing from ambush; and she trusted to her own
+marksmanship implicitly. While it is an extremely difficult thing to
+shoot at a cougar leaping from the thicket, a tall man standing on a
+trail presents an easy target. Besides, she had a vague sense of
+discomfort that if this animal were a cougar, he wasn't acting true to
+form. He was altogether too bold.
+
+She knew perfectly that many times since men came to live in the
+pine-clad mountains they have been followed by the great, tawny cats.
+Curiosity had something to do with it, and perhaps less pleasing
+reasons. But any dreadful instincts that such a cat may have, he utterly
+lacks courage to obey. He has an inborn fear of men, a fear that goes
+down to the roots of the world, and he simply doesn't dare make an
+attack. It was always a rather distressing experience, but nothing ever
+came of it except a good tale around a fireside. But most of these
+episodes, Snowbird remembered, occurred either in daylight or in the dry
+season. The reason was obviously that in the damp woods or at night a
+stalking cougar cannot be perceived by human senses. Her own senses
+could perceive this animal all too plainly,--and the fact suggested
+unpleasant possibilities.
+
+The animal on the trail behind her was taking no care at all to go
+silently. He was simply pat-patting along, wholly at his ease. He acted
+as if the fear that men have instilled in his breed was somehow missing.
+And that is why she instinctively tried to hurry on the trail.
+
+The step kept pace. For a long mile, up a barren ridge, she heard every
+step it made. Then, as the brush closed deeper around her, she couldn't
+hear it at all.
+
+She hurried on, straining to the silence. No, the sound was stopped.
+Could it be that the animal, fearful at last, had turned from her trail?
+And then for the first time a gasp that was not greatly different from a
+despairing sob caught at her throat. She heard the steps again, and they
+were in the thickets just beside her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two hours before Snowbird had left the house, on her long tramp to the
+ranger station, Dan had started home. He hadn't shot until sunset, as he
+had planned. The rear guard of the waterfowl--hardy birds who spent most
+of the winter in the Lake region and which had come south in the great
+flight that had been completed some weeks before--had passed in hundreds
+over his blind, and he had obtained the limit he had set upon
+himself--ten drake mallards--by four o'clock in the afternoon. If he had
+stayed to shoot longer, his birds would have been wasted. So he started
+back along a certain winding trail that led through the thickets and
+which would, if followed long enough, carry him to the road that led to
+the valleys.
+
+He rode one of Lennox's cattle ponies, the only piece of horse-flesh
+that Bill had not taken to the valleys when he had driven down the
+livestock. She was a pretty bay, a spirited, high-bred mare that could
+whip about on her hind legs at the touch of the rein on her neck. She
+made good time along the trail. And an hour before sunset he passed the
+only human habitation between the marsh and Lennox's house,--the cabin
+that had been recently occupied by Landy Hildreth.
+
+He glanced at the place as he passed and saw that it was deserted. No
+smell of wood smoke remained in the air. Evidently Landy had gone down
+to the settlements with his precious testimony in regard to the arson
+ring. Yet it was curious that no word had been heard of him. As far as
+Dan knew, neither the courts nor the Forest Service had taken action.
+
+He hurried on, four miles farther. The trail entered the heavy thickets,
+and he had to ride slowly. It was as wild a section as could be found on
+the whole Divide. Once a deer leaped from the trail, and once he heard
+Woof grunting in the thickets. And just as he came to a little cleared
+space, three strange, dark birds flung up on wide-spreading wings.
+
+He knew them at once. All mountaineers come to know them before their
+days are done. They were the buzzards, the followers of the dead. And
+what they were doing in the thicket just beside the trail, Dan did not
+dare to think.
+
+Of course they might be feeding on the body of a deer, mortally wounded
+by some hunter. He resolved to ride by without investigating. He glanced
+up. The buzzards were hovering in the sky, evidently waiting for him to
+pass. Then, mostly to relieve a curious sense of discomfort in his own
+mind, he stopped his horse and dismounted.
+
+The twilight had started to fall, and already its first grayness had
+begun to soften the harder lines of forest and hill. And after his
+first glance at the curious white heap beside the trail, he was
+extremely glad that it had. But there was no chance to mistake the
+thing. The elements and much more terrible agents had each wrought their
+change, yet there was grisly evidence in plenty to show what had
+occurred. Dan didn't doubt for an instant but that it was the skeleton
+of Landy Hildreth.
+
+He forced himself to go nearer. The buzzards were almost done, and one
+white bone from the shoulder gave unmistakable evidence of the passage
+of a bullet. What had happened thereafter, he could only guess.
+
+He got back quickly on his horse. He understood, now, why nothing had
+been heard of the evidence that Landy Hildreth was to turn over to the
+courts as to the activities of the arson ring. Some one--probably Bert
+Cranston himself--had been waiting on the trail. Others had come
+thereafter. And his lips set in his resolve to let this murder measure
+in the debt he had to pay Cranston.
+
+The Lennox house seemed very silent when, almost an hour later, he
+turned his horse into the corral. He had rather hoped that Snowbird
+would be at the door to meet him. The darkness had just fallen, and all
+the lamps were lighted. He strode into the living room, warming his
+hands an instant beside the fireplace. The fire needed fuel. It had
+evidently been neglected for nearly an hour.
+
+Then he called Snowbird. His voice echoed in the silent room,
+unanswered. He called again, then went to look for her. At the door of
+the dining room he found the note that she had left for him.
+
+It told, very simply and plainly, that her father lay injured in his
+bed, and he was to remain and do what he could for him. She had gone for
+help to the ranger station.
+
+He leaped through the rooms to Lennox's door, then went in on tiptoe.
+And the first thing he saw when he opened the door was the grizzled
+man's gray face on the pillow.
+
+"You're home early, Dan," he said. "How many did you get?"
+
+It was entirely characteristic. Shaggy old Woof is too proud to howl
+over the wounds that lay him low, and this gray old bear on the bed had
+partaken of his spirit.
+
+"Good Lord," Dan answered. "How badly are you hurt?"
+
+"Not so bad but that I'm sorry that Snowbird has gone drifting twelve
+miles over the hills for help. It's dark as pitch."
+
+And it was. Dan could scarcely make out the outline of the somber ridges
+against the sky.
+
+They talked on, and their subject was whether Dan should remain to take
+care of Lennox, or whether he should attempt to overtake Snowbird with
+the horse. Of course the girl had ordered him to stay. Lennox, on the
+other hand, said that Dan could not help him in the least, and desired
+him to follow the girl.
+
+"I'm not often anxious about her," he said slowly. "But it is a long
+walk through the wildest part of the Divide. She's got nothing but a
+pistol and a lantern that won't shine. Besides--I've had bad dreams."
+
+"You don't mean--" Dan's words came hard--"that she's in any danger from
+the animals--the cougars--or the wolves?"
+
+"Barring accidents, no. But, Dan--I want you to go. I'm resting fairly
+easily, and there's whisky on the table in case of a pinch. Someway--I
+can't bar accidents to-night. I don't like to think of her on those
+mountains alone."
+
+And remembering what had lain beside the trail, Dan felt the same. He
+had heard, long ago, that any animal that has once tasted human flesh
+loses its fear of men and is never to be trusted again. Some wild animal
+that still hunted the ridges had, in the last month, done just that
+thing. He left the room and walked softly to the door.
+
+The night lay silent and mysterious over the Divide. He stood listening.
+The girl had started only an hour before, and it was unlikely that she
+could have traversed more than two miles of the steep trail in that
+time. He could fancy her toiling ever upward, somewhere on the dark
+ridge that lay beyond. Although the horse ordinarily did not climb a
+hill more swiftly than a human being, he didn't doubt but that he could
+overtake her before she went three miles farther. But where lay his
+duty,--with the injured man in the house or with the daughter on her
+errand of mercy in the darkness?
+
+Then the matter was decided for him. So faint that it only whispered at
+the dim, outer frontiers of hearing, a sound came pricking through the
+darkness. Only his months of listening to the faint sounds of the
+forest, and the incredible silence of the night enabled him to hear it
+at all. But he knew what it was, the report of a pistol. Snowbird had
+met an enemy in the darkness.
+
+He called once to Lennox, snatched the shotgun that still stood where he
+had placed it in the corner of the room, and hastened to the corral. The
+mare whickered plaintively when he took her from her food.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Even in the darkest night, there is one light that never brings hope or
+cannot lead. It is not a twinkling, joyous light like that mysterious
+will-o'-the-wisp that now and again has lured travelers into the marshes
+to their death. Nor can any one ever mistake it, or be soothed and
+cheered by it. It always appears the same way,--two green circles, close
+together, in the darkness.
+
+When Snowbird first heard the step in the thickets beside her, she
+halted bravely and held her lantern high. She understood at last. The
+very extremity of the beams found a reflection in two very curious
+circles of greenish fire: a fire that was old upon the world before man
+ever rubbed two sticks together to strike a flame. Of course the dim
+rays had simply been reflected on the eyes of some great beast of prey.
+
+She identified it at once. Only the eyes of the felines, with vertical
+pupils, have this identical greenish glare. The eyes of the wolves glow
+in the darkness, but the circles are usually just bright points. Of
+course it was a cougar.
+
+She didn't cry out again. Realizing at last the reality of her peril,
+her long training in the mountains came to her aid. That did not mean
+she was not truly and terribly afraid. The sight of the eyes of a
+hunting animal in the darkness calls up memories from the
+germ-plasm,--deep-buried horrors of thousands of generations past, when
+such lights glowed all about the mouth of the cave. Besides, the beast
+was hunting _her_. She couldn't doubt this fact. Curiosity might make a
+lion follow her, but it would never beget such a wild light of madness
+in his eyes as this she had just seen. Only the frenzied pulse of wild
+blood through the fine vessels of the corneas could occasion such a glow
+as this. She simply clamped down all her moral strength on her rising
+hysteria and looked her situation in the face. Her hand flew
+instinctively to her side, and the pistol leaped in the lantern light.
+
+But the eyes had already blinked out before she could raise the weapon.
+She shot twice. The echoes roared back, unbelievably loud in the
+silence, and then abruptly died; and the only sound was a rustling of
+leaves as the cougar crouched. She sobbed once, then hurried on.
+
+She was afraid to listen at first. She wanted to believe that her pistol
+fire would frighten the animal from her trail. She knew, under ordinary
+conditions, that it would. If he still followed, it could mean but one
+thing,--that some unheard-of incident had occurred to destroy his fear
+of men. It would mean that he had knowingly set upon her trail and was
+hunting her with all the age-old remorselessness that is the code of the
+mountains.
+
+For a little while all was silence. Then out of the hush the thickets
+suddenly crashed and shook on the opposite side of the trail. She fired
+blindly into the thicket. Then she caught herself with a sob. But two
+shells remained in her pistol, and they must be saved for the test.
+
+Whisperfoot the cougar, remembering the lessons of his youth, turned
+from the trail when he had first heard Snowbird's step. He had crouched
+and let her pass. She was walking into the wind; and as she was at the
+closest point a message had blown back to him.
+
+The hair went straight on his shoulders and along his spine. His blood,
+running cold an instant before from fear, made a great leap in his
+veins. A picture came in his dark mind: the chase for a deer when the
+moon had set, the stir of a living thing that broke twigs in the
+thickets, and the leap he had made. There had been blood, that
+night,--the wildness and the madness and the exultation of the kill. Of
+course there had been terror first, but the terror had soon departed and
+left something lying warm and still in the thickets. It was the same
+game that walked his trail in front--game that died easily and yet, in a
+vague way he did not understand, the noblest game of all. It was living
+flesh, to tear with talon and fang.
+
+All his training, all the instincts imbued in him by a thousand
+generations of cougars who knew this greatest fear, were simply
+obliterated by the sudden violence of his hunting-madness. He had tasted
+this blood once, and it could never be forgotten. The flame leaped in
+his eyes. And then he began the stalk.
+
+A cougar, trying to creep silently on its game, does not move quickly.
+It simply steals, as a serpent steals through the grass. Whisperfoot
+stalked for a period of five minutes, to learn that the prey was farther
+away from him at every step.
+
+He trotted forward until he came close, and again he stalked. Again he
+found, after a few minutes of silent creeping through the thickets, that
+he had lost distance. Evidently this game did not feed slowly, like the
+deer. It was to be a chase then. Again he trotted within one hundred
+feet of the girl.
+
+Three times more he tried to stalk before he finally gave it up
+altogether. This game was like the porcupine,--simply to be chased down
+and taken. As in the case of all animals that hunt their game by
+overtaking it, there was no longer any occasion for going silently. The
+thing to do was to come close and spring from the trail behind.
+
+Though the fear was mostly gone, the cougar retained enough of that
+caution that most wild animals exhibit when hunting a new game so that
+he didn't attempt to strike Snowbird down at once. But as the chase went
+on, his passion grew upon him. Ever he crept nearer. And at last he
+sprang full into the thickets beside her.
+
+At that instant she had shot for the first time. Because the light had
+left his eyes before she could find aim, both shots had been clean
+misses. And terrible as the reports were, he was too engrossed in the
+chase to be frightened away by mere sound. This was the cry the man-pack
+always made,--these sudden, startling sounds in the silence. But he felt
+no pain. He crouched a moment, shivering. Then he bounded on again.
+
+The third shot was a miss too: in fact, there had been no chance for a
+hit. A sound in the darkness is as unreliable a target as can possibly
+be imagined. And it didn't frighten him as much as the others.
+
+Three times he crouched, preparing for a spring, and three times his
+tawny tail began that little up-and-down motion that is always the
+warning before his leap. But each time, as he waited to find his
+courage, the game had hurried on.
+
+Now she had her back to a tree and was holding the lantern high. It
+glinted on his eyes. And the fourth time she shot, and something hot and
+strange singed by close to his head. But it wasn't the pain of one quill
+from a porcupine, and it only increased his anger. He waited, crouching,
+and the girl started on.
+
+She was making other sounds now--queer, whimpering sounds not greatly
+different from the bleat that the fawn utters when it dies. It was a
+fear-sound, and if there is one emotion with which the wild beasts are
+acquainted, in all its phases, it is fear. She was afraid of him then,
+and that meant he need no longer be in the least afraid of her. His skin
+began to twitch all over with that terrible madness and passion of the
+flesh-hunters.
+
+This game was like the deer, and the thing to do was lie in wait. There
+was only one trail. He was simply following his instincts, no conscious
+intelligence, when he made a long circle about her and turned back to
+the trail two hundred yards in front. He wasn't afraid of losing her in
+the darkness. She was neither fleet like the deer nor courageous like
+Woof, the bear. He had only to wait and leap from the darkness when she
+passed.
+
+And because this was his own way of hunting, because the experiences of
+a thousand generations of cougars had taught him that it was the safest
+way, that even an elk may be downed by a surprise leap from ambush, the
+last of his fear went out of him. The step drew nearer, and he knew he
+would not again be afraid to give his stroke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Dan Failing, riding like mad over the mountain trail, heard the
+third shot from Snowbird's pistol, he felt that one of the debts he owed
+had come due at last. He seemed to know, as the darkness pressed around
+him, that he was to be tried in the fire. And the horse staggered
+beneath him as he tried to hasten.
+
+He showed no mercy to his mount. Horseflesh isn't made for carrying a
+heavy man over such a trail as this, and she was red-nostriled and
+lathered before half a mile had been covered. He made her leap up the
+rocks, and on the fairly level stretches he loosed the reins and lashed
+her into a gallop. Only a mountain horse could have stood that test. To
+Dan's eyes, the darkness was absolute; yet she kept straight to the
+trail. He made no attempt to guide her. She bounded over logs that he
+couldn't see, and followed turn after turn in the trail without ever a
+misstep.
+
+He gave no thought to his own safety. His courage was at the test, and
+no risk of his own life must interfere with his attempt to save Snowbird
+from the danger that threatened her. He didn't know when the horse would
+fall with him and precipitate him down a precipice, and he was perfectly
+aware that to crash into a low-hanging limb of one of the great trees
+beside the trail would probably crush his skull. But he took the chance.
+And before the ride was done he found himself pleading with the horse,
+even as he lashed her sides with his whip.
+
+The lesser forest creatures sprang from his trail; and once the mare
+leaped high to miss a dark shadow that crossed in front. As she caught
+her stride, Dan heard a squeal and a rattle of quills that identified
+the creature as a porcupine.
+
+By now he had passed the first of the worst grades, coming out upon a
+long, easy slope of open forest. Again he urged his horse, leaving to
+her keen senses alone the choosing of the path between the great tree
+trunks. He rode almost in silence. The deep carpet of pine needles, wet
+from the recent rains, dulled the sound of the horse's hoofs.
+
+Then he heard Snowbird fire for the fourth time; and he knew that he had
+almost overtaken her. The report seemed to smash the air. And he lashed
+his horse into the fastest run she knew,--a wild, sobbing figure in the
+darkness.
+
+"She's only got one shot more," he said. He knew how many bullets her
+pistol carried; and the danger--whatever it was--must be just at hand.
+Underbrush cracked beneath him. And then the horse drew up with a jerk
+that almost hurled him from the saddle.
+
+He lashed at her in vain. She was not afraid of the darkness and the
+rocks of the trail, but some Terror in the woods in front had in an
+instant broken his control over her. She reared, snorting; then danced
+in an impotent circle. Meanwhile, precious seconds were fleeing.
+
+He understood now. The horse stood still, shivering beneath him, but
+would not advance a step. The silence deepened. Somewhere in the
+darkness before him a great cougar was waiting by the trail, and
+Snowbird, hoping for the moment that it had given up the chase, was
+hastening through the shadows squarely into its ambush.
+
+Whisperfoot crouched lower: and again his long serpent of a tail began
+the little vertical motion that always precedes his leap. He had not
+forgotten the wild rapture of that moment he had inadvertently sprung on
+Landy Hildreth,--or how, after his terror had died, he had come creeping
+back. He hunted his own way, waiting on the trail; and his madness was
+at its height. He was not just Whisperfoot; the coward, that runs at the
+shadow of a tall form in the thickets. The consummation was complete,
+and that single experience of a month before had made of him a hunter of
+men. His muscles set for the leap.
+
+So intent was he that his keen senses didn't detect the fact that there
+was a curious echo to the girl's footsteps. Dan Failing had slipped down
+from his terrified horse and was running up the trail behind her,
+praying that he could be in time.
+
+Snowbird heard the pat, pat of his feet; but at first she did not dare
+to hope that aid had come to her. She had thought of Dan as on the
+far-away marshes; and her father, the only other living occupant of this
+part of the Divide, might even now be lying dead in his house. In her
+terror, she had lost all power of interpretation of events. The sound
+might be the cougar's mate, or even the wolf pack, jealous of his game.
+Sobbing, she hurried on into Whisperfoot's ambush.
+
+Then she heard a voice, and it seemed to be calling to her.
+"Snowbird--I'm coming, Snowbird," a man's strong voice was shouting. She
+whirled with a sob of thankfulness.
+
+At that instant the cougar sprang.
+
+Terrified though she was, Snowbird's reflexes had kept sure and true.
+Even as the great cat leaped, a long, lithe shadow out of the shadow,
+her finger pressed back against the trigger of her pistol. She had been
+carrying her gun in front of her, and she fired it, this last time, with
+no conscious effort. It was just a last instinctive effort to defend
+herself.
+
+One other element affected the issue. She had whirled to answer Dan's
+cry just as the cougar left the ground. But she had still been in range.
+The only effect was to lessen, in some degree, the accuracy of the
+spring. The bullet caught the beast in mid-air; but even if it had
+reached its heart, the momentum of the attack was too great to be
+completely overcome. Snowbird only knew that some vast, resistless power
+had struck her, and that the darkness seemed to roar and explode about
+her.
+
+Hurled to her face in the trail, she did not see the cougar sprawl on
+the earth beside her. The flame in the lantern almost flicked out as it
+fell from her hand, then flashed up and down, from the deepest gloom to
+a vivid glare with something of the effect of lightning flickering in
+the sky. Nor did she hear the first frenzied thrashing of the wounded
+animal. Kindly unconsciousness had fallen, obscuring this and also the
+sight of the great cat, in the agony of its wound, creeping with broken
+shoulder and bared claws across the pine needles toward her defenseless
+body.
+
+But the terrible fangs were never to know her white flesh. Some one had
+come between. There was no chance to shoot: Whisperfoot and the girl
+were too near together for that. But one course remained; and there was
+not even time to count the cost. In this most terrible moment of Dan
+Failing's life, there was not even an instant's hesitation. He did not
+know that Whisperfoot was wounded. He saw the beast creeping forward in
+the weird dancing light of the fallen lantern, and he only knew that his
+flesh, not hers, must resist its rending talons. Nothing else mattered.
+No other considerations could come between.
+
+It was the test; and Dan's instincts prompted coolly and well. He
+leaped with all his strength. The cougar bounded into his arms, not upon
+the prone body of the girl. And she opened her eyes to hear a curious
+thrashing in the pine needles, a strange grim battle that, as the
+lantern flashed out, was hidden in the darkness.
+
+And that battle, in the far reaches of the Divide, passed into a legend.
+It was the tale of how Dan Failing, his gun knocked from his hands as he
+met the cougar's leap, with his own unaided arms kept the life-giving
+breath from the animal's lungs and killed him in the pine needles. Claw
+and fang and the frenzy of death could not matter at all.
+
+Thus Failing established before all men his right to the name he bore.
+And thus he paid one of his debts--life for a life, as the code of the
+forest has always decreed--and in the fire of danger and pain his metal
+was tried and proven.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THREE
+
+THE PAYMENT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Lennox home, in the far wilderness of the Umpqua Divide, looked
+rather like an emergency hospital for the first few days after Dan's
+fight with Whisperfoot. Its old sounds of laughter and talk were almost
+entirely lacking. Two injured men and a girl recovering from a nervous
+collapse do not tend toward cheer.
+
+But the natural sturdiness of all three quickly came to their aid. Of
+course Lennox had been severely injured by the falling log, and many
+weeks would pass before he would be able to walk again. He could sit up
+for short periods, however; had the partial use of one arm; and could
+propel himself--after the first few weeks--at a snail's pace through the
+rooms in a rude wheel chair that Bill's ingenuity had contrived. The
+great livid scratches that Dan bore on his body quickly began to heal;
+and before a week was done, he began to venture forth on the hills
+again. Snowbird had remained in bed for three days: then she had hopped
+out, one bright afternoon, swearing never to go back into it again.
+Evidently the crisp, fall air of the mountains had been a nerve tonic
+for them all.
+
+Of course there had been medical attention. A doctor and a nurse had
+motored up the day after the accident; the physician had set the bones
+and departed, and the nurse remained for a week, to see the grizzled
+mountaineer well on the way of convalescence. But it was an anxious
+wait, and Lennox's car was kept constantly in readiness to speed her
+away in case the snows should start. At last she had left him in
+Snowbird's hands, and Bill had driven her back to the settlements in his
+father's car. The die was now cast as to whether or not Dan and the
+remainder of the family should winter in the mountains. The snow clouds
+deepened every day, the frost was ever heavier in the dawns, and the
+road would surely remain open only a few days more.
+
+Once more the three seemingly had the Divide all to themselves. Bert
+Cranston had evidently deserted his cabin and was working a trap-line on
+the Umpqua side. The rangers left the little station, all danger of fire
+past, and went down to their offices in the Federal building of one of
+the little cities below. Because he was worse than useless in the deep
+snows that were sure to come, one of the ranch hands that had driven up
+with Bill rode away to the valleys the last of the live stock,--the
+horse that Dan had ridden to Snowbird's defense.
+
+Nothing had been heard of Landy Hildreth, who used to live on the trail
+to the marsh, and both Lennox and his daughter wondered why. There were
+also certain officials who had begun to be curious. As yet, Dan had told
+no one of the grim find he had made on his return from hunting. And he
+would have found it an extremely difficult fact to explain.
+
+It all went back to those inner springs of motive that few men can see
+clearly enough within themselves to recognize. Even the first day, when
+he lay burning from his wounds, he worked out his own explanation in
+regard to the murder mystery. He hadn't the slightest doubt but that
+Cranston had killed Hildreth to prevent his testimony from reaching the
+courts below. Of course any other member of the arson ring of hillmen
+might have been the murderer; yet Dan was inclined to believe that
+Cranston, the leader of the gang, usually preferred to do such dangerous
+work as this himself. If it were true, somewhere on that tree-clad ridge
+clues would be left. By a law that went down to the roots of life, he
+knew, no action is so small but that it leaves its mark. Moreover, it
+was wholly possible that the written testimony Hildreth must have
+gathered had never been found or destroyed. Dan didn't want the aid of
+the courts to find these clues. He wanted to work out the case himself.
+It resolved itself into a simple matter of vengeance: Dan had his debt
+to pay, and he wanted to bring Cranston to ruin by his own hand alone.
+
+While it was true that he took rather more than the casual interest that
+most citizens feel in the destruction of the forest by wanton fire, and
+had an actual sense of duty to do all that he could to stop the
+activities of the arson ring, his motives, stripped and bare, were
+really not utilitarian. He had no particular interest in Hildreth's
+case. He remembered him simply as one of Cranston's disreputable gang, a
+poacher and a fire bug himself. When all is said and done, it remained
+really a personal issue between Dan and Cranston. And personal issues
+are frowned upon by law and society. Civilization has toiled up from the
+darkness in a great measure to get away from them. But human nature
+remains distressingly the same, and Dan's desire to pay his debt was a
+distinctly human emotion. Sometime a breed will live upon the earth that
+can get clear away from personal vengeance--from that age-old code of
+the hills that demands a blow for a blow and a life for a life--but the
+time is not yet. And after all, by all the standards of men as men, not
+as read in idealistic philosophies, Dan's debt was entirely real. By the
+light held high by his ancestors, he could not turn his other cheek.
+
+Just as soon as he was able, he went back to the scene of the murder. He
+didn't know when the snow would come to cover what evidence there was.
+It threatened every hour. Every wind promised it. The air was sharp and
+cold, and no drop of rain could fall through it without crystallizing
+into snow. The deer had all gone, and the burrowing people had sought
+their holes. The bees worked no more in the winter flowers. Of all the
+greater forest creatures, only the wolves and the bear remained,--the
+former because their fear of men would not permit them to go down to the
+lower hills, and the latter because of his knowledge that when food
+became scarce, he could always burrow in the snow. No bear goes into
+hibernation from choice. Wise old bachelor, he much prefers to keep just
+as late hours as he can--as long as the eating places in the berry
+thickets remain open. The cougars had all gone down with the deer, the
+migratory birds had departed, and even the squirrels were in hiding.
+
+The scene didn't offer much in the way of clues. Of the body itself,
+only a white heap of bones remained; for many and terrible had been the
+agents at work upon them. The clothes, however, particularly the coat,
+were practically intact. Gripping himself, Dan thrust his fingers into
+its pockets, then into the pockets of the shirt and trousers. All papers
+that would in any way serve to identify the murdered man, or tell what
+his purpose had been in journeying down the trail the night of the
+murder had been removed. Only one explanation presented itself. Cranston
+had come before him, and searched the body himself.
+
+Dan looked about for tracks, and he was considerably surprised to find
+the blurred, indistinct imprint of a shoe other than his own. He hadn't
+the least hope that the tracks themselves would offer a clue to a
+detective. They were too dim for that. The surprising fact was that
+since the murder had been committed immediately before the fall rains,
+the water had not completely washed them out. The only possibility
+remaining was that Cranston had returned to the body after the week's
+rain-fall. The track had been dimmed by the lighter rains that had
+fallen since.
+
+But yet it was entirely to be expected that the examination of the body
+would be an after-thought on Cranston's part. Possibly at first his
+only thought was to kill and, following the prompting that has sent so
+many murderers to the gallows, he had afterwards returned to the scene
+of the crime to destroy any clues he might have left and to search the
+body for any evidence against the arson ring.
+
+Dan's next thought was to follow along the trail and find Cranston's
+ambush. Of course it would be in the direction of the settlement from
+the body, as the bullet had entered from the front. He found it hard to
+believe that Hildreth had fallen in the exact spot where the body lay.
+Men journeying at night keep to the trail, and the white heap itself was
+fully forty feet back from the trail in the thickets. Perhaps Cranston
+had dragged it there to hide it from the sight of any one who might pass
+along the lonely trail again; and it was a remote possibility that
+Whisperfoot, coming in the night, had tugged it into the thickets for
+dreadful purposes of his own. Likely the shot was fired when Hildreth
+was in an open place on the trail; and Dan searched for the ambush with
+this conclusion in mind. He walked back, looking for a thicket from
+which such a spot would be visible. Something over fifty yards down he
+found it; and he knew it by the empty brass rifle cartridge that lay
+half buried in the wet leaves.
+
+The shell was of the same caliber as Cranston's hunting rifle. Dan's
+hand shook as he put it in his pocket.
+
+Encouraged by this amazing find, he turned up the trail toward
+Hildreth's cabin. It might be possible, he thought, that Hildreth had
+left some of his testimony--perhaps such rudely scrawled letters as
+Cranston had written him--in some forgotten drawer in his hut. It was
+but a short walk for Dan's hardened legs, and he made it before
+mid-afternoon.
+
+The search itself was wholly without result. But because he had time to
+think as he climbed the ridge, because as he strode along beneath that
+wintry sky he had a chance to consider every detail of the case, he was
+able to start out on a new tack when, just before sunset, he returned to
+the body. This new train of thought had as its basis that Cranston's
+shot had not been deadly at once; that wounded, Hildreth had himself
+crawled into the thickets where Whisperfoot had found him. And that
+meant that he had to enlarge his search for such documents as Hildreth
+had carried to include all the territory between the trail and the
+location of the body.
+
+It was possibly a distance of forty feet, and getting down on his hands
+and knees, Dan looked for any break in the shrubbery that would
+indicate the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. And it was ten
+minutes well rewarded, as far as clearing up certain details of the
+crime. His senses had been trained and sharpened by his months in the
+wilderness, and he was able to back-track the wounded man from the
+skeleton clear to the clearing on the trail where he had first fallen.
+But as no clues presented themselves, he started to turn home.
+
+He walked twelve feet, then turned back. Out of the corner of his eye it
+seemed to him that he had caught a flash of white, near the end of a
+great, dead log beside the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. It
+was to the credit of his mountain training alone that his eye had been
+keen enough to detect it; that it had been so faithfully recorded on his
+consciousness; and that, knowing at last the importance of details, he
+had turned back. For a moment he searched in vain. Evidently a yellow
+leaf had deceived him. Once more he retraced his steps, trying to find
+the position from which his eye had caught the glimpse of white. Then he
+dived straight for the rotten end of the log.
+
+Into a little hollow in the bark, on the underside of the log, some hand
+had thrust a small roll of papers. They were rain soaked now, and the
+ink had dimmed and blotted; but Dan realized their significance. They
+were the complete evidence that Hildreth had accumulated against the
+arson ring,--letters that had passed back and forth between himself and
+Cranston, a threat of murder from the former if Hildreth turned State's
+evidence, and a signed statement of the arson activities of the ring by
+Hildreth himself. They were not only enough to break up the ring and
+send its members to prison; with the aid of the empty shell and other
+circumstantial evidence, they could in all probability convict Bert
+Cranston of murder.
+
+For a long time he stood with the shadows of the pines lengthening about
+him, his gray eyes in curious shadow. For the moment a glimpse was given
+him into the deep wells of the human soul; and understanding came to
+him. Was there no balm for hatred even in the moment of death? Were men
+unable to forget the themes and motives of their lives, even when the
+shadows closed down upon them? Hildreth had known what hand had struck
+him down. And even on the frontier of death, his first thought was to
+hide his evidence where Cranston could not find it when he searched the
+body, but where later it might be found by the detectives that were sure
+to come. It was the old creed of a life for a life. He wanted his
+evidence to be preserved,--not that right should be wronged, but so that
+Cranston would be prosecuted and convicted and made to suffer. His
+hatred of Cranston that had made him turn State's evidence in the first
+place had been carried with him down into death.
+
+As Dan stood wondering, he thought he heard a twig crack on the trail
+behind him, and he wondered what forest creature was still lingering on
+the ridges at the eve of the snows.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The snow began to fall in earnest at midnight,--great, white flakes that
+almost in an instant covered the leaves. It was the real beginning of
+winter, and all living creatures knew it. The wolf pack sang to it from
+the ridge,--a wild and plaintive song that made Bert Cranston, sleeping
+in a lean-to on the Umpqua side of the Divide, swear and mutter in his
+sleep. But he didn't really waken until Jim Gibbs, one of his gang,
+returned from his secret mission.
+
+They wasted no words. Bert flung aside the blankets, lighted a candle,
+and placed it out of the reach of the night wind. It cast queer shadows
+in the lean-to and found a curious reflection in the steel points of his
+eyes. His face looked swarthy and deep-lined in its light.
+
+"Well?" he demanded. "What did you find?"
+
+"Nothin'," Jim Gibbs answered gutturally. "If you ask me what I found
+_out_, I might have somethin' to answer."
+
+"Then--" and Bert, after the manner of his kind, breathed an oath--"what
+did you find out?"
+
+His tone, except for an added note of savagery, remained the same. Yet
+his heart was thumping a great deal louder than he liked to have it. He
+wasn't amused by his associate's play on words. Nor did he like the
+man's knowing tone and his air of importance. Realizing that the snows
+were at hand, he had sent Gibbs for a last search of the body, to find
+and recover the evidence that Hildreth had against him and which had not
+been revealed either on Hildreth's person or in his cabin. He had become
+increasingly apprehensive about those letters he had written Hildreth,
+and certain other documents that had been in his possession. He didn't
+understand why they hadn't turned up. And now the snows had started, and
+Jim Gibbs had returned empty-handed, but evidently not empty-minded.
+
+"I've found out that the body's been uncovered--and men are already
+searchin' for clues. And moreover--I think they've found them." He
+paused, weighing the effect of his words. His eyes glittered with
+cunning. Rat that he was, he was wondering whether the time had arrived
+to leave the ship. He had no intention of continuing to give his
+services to a man with a rope-noose closing about him. And Cranston,
+knowing this fact, hated him as he hated the buzzard that would claim
+him in the end and tried to hide his apprehension.
+
+"Go on. Blat it out," Cranston ordered. "Or else go away and let me
+sleep."
+
+It was a bluff; but it worked. If Gibbs had gone without speaking,
+Cranston would have known no sleep that night. But the man became more
+fawning.
+
+"I'm tellin' you, fast as I can," he went on, almost whining. "I went to
+the cabin, just as you said. But I didn't get a chance to search it--"
+
+"Why not?" Cranston thundered. His voice reëchoed among the snow-wet
+pines.
+
+"I'll tell you why! Because some one else--evidently a cop--was already
+searchin' it. Both of us know there's nothin' there anyway. We've gone
+over it too many times. After a while he went away--but I didn't turn
+back yet. That wouldn't be Jim Gibbs. I shadowed him, just as you'd want
+me to. And he went straight back to the body."
+
+"Yes?" Cranston had hard work curbing his impatience. Again Gibbs' eyes
+were full of ominous speculations.
+
+"He stopped at the body, and it was plain he'd been there before. He
+went crawling through the thickets, lookin' for clues. He done what you
+and me never thought to do--lookin' all the way between the trail and
+the body. He'd already found the brass shell you told me to get. At
+least, it wasn't there when I looked, after he'd gone. You should've
+thought of it before. But he found somethin' else a whole lot more
+important--a roll of papers that Hildreth had chucked into an old pine
+stump when he was dyin'. It was your fault, Cranston, for not gettin'
+them that night. You needn't 've been afraid of any one hearin' the shot
+and catching you red-handed. This detective stood and read 'em on the
+trail. And you know--just as well as I do--what they were."
+
+"Damn you, I went back the next morning, as soon as I could see. And the
+mountain lion had already been there. I went back lots of times since.
+And that shell ain't nothing--but all the time I supposed I put it in my
+pocket. You know how it is--a fellow throws his empty shell out by
+habit."
+
+Gibbs' eyes grew more intent. What was this thing? Cranston's tone,
+instead of commanding, was almost pleading. But the leader caught
+himself at once.
+
+"I don't see why I need to explain any of that to you. What I want to
+know is this: why you didn't shoot and get those papers away from him?"
+
+For an instant their eyes battled. But Gibbs had never the strength of
+his leader. If he had, it would have been asserted long since. He sucked
+in his breath, and his gaze fell away. It rested on Cranston's rifle,
+that in some manner had been pulled up across his knees. And at once he
+was cowed. He was never so fast with a gun as Cranston.
+
+"Blood on my hands, eh--same as on yours?" he mumbled, looking down.
+"What do you think I want, a rope around my neck? These hills are big,
+but the arm of the law has reached up before, and it might again. You
+might as well know first as last I'm not goin' to do any killin's to
+cover up your murders."
+
+"That comes of not going myself. You fool--if he gets that evidence down
+to the courts, you're broken the same as me."
+
+"But I wouldn't get more'n a year or so, at most--and that's a heap
+different from the gallows. I did aim at him--"
+
+"But you just lacked the guts to pull the trigger!"
+
+"I did, and I ain't ashamed of it. But besides--the snows are here now,
+and he won't be able to even get word down to the valleys in six
+months. If you want him killed so bad, do it yourself."
+
+This was a thought indeed. On the other hand, another murder might not
+be necessary. Months would pass before the road would be opened, and in
+the meantime Cranston could have a thousand chances to steal back the
+accusing letters. Perhaps they would be guarded closely at first, but by
+the late winter months they would be an old story, and a single raid on
+the house might turn the trick. He didn't believe for an instant that
+the man Gibbs had seen a detective. He had kept too close watch over the
+roads for that.
+
+"A tall chap, in outing clothes--dark-haired and clean-shaven?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Wears a tan hat?"
+
+"That's the man."
+
+"I know him--and I wish you'd punctured him. Why, you could've taken
+those papers away from him and slapped his face, and he wouldn't have
+put up his arms. And now he'll hide 'em somewhere--afraid to carry 'em
+for fear he meets me. That's Failing--the tenderfoot that's been staying
+at Lennox's. He's a lunger."
+
+"He didn't look like no lunger to me."
+
+"But no matter about that--it's just as I thought. And I'll get 'em
+back--mark my little words."
+
+In the meantime the best thing to do was to move at once to his winter
+trapping grounds,--a certain neglected region on the lower levels of the
+North Fork. If at any time within the next few weeks, Dan should attempt
+to carry word down to the settlements, he would be certain to pass
+within view of this camp. But he knew that the chance of Dan starting
+upon any such journey before the snow had melted was not one in a
+thousand. To be caught in the Divide in the winter means to be snowed in
+as completely as the Innuits of upper Greenland. No word could pass
+except by a man on snowshoes. Really there was no urgency about this
+matter of the evidence.
+
+Yet if the chance did come, if the house should be left unguarded, it
+might play Cranston to make an immediate search. Dan would have no
+reason for supposing that Cranston suspected his possession of the
+letters; he would not be particularly watchful, and would probably
+pigeonhole them until spring in Lennox's desk.
+
+And the truth was that Cranston had reasoned out the situation almost
+perfectly. When Dan wakened in the morning, and the snow lay already a
+foot deep over the wilderness world, he knew that he would have no
+chance to act upon the Cranston case until the snows melted in the
+spring. So he pushed all thought of it out of his mind and turned his
+attention to more pleasant subjects. It was true that he read the
+documents over twice as he lay in bed. Then he tied them into a neat
+packet and put them away where they would be quickly available. Then he
+thrust his head out of the window and let the great snowflakes sift down
+upon his face. It was winter at last, the season that he loved.
+
+He didn't stir from the house, that first day of the storm. Snowbird and
+he found plenty of pleasant things to do and talk about before the
+roaring fire that he built in the grate. He was glad of the great pile
+of wood that lay outside the door. It meant life itself, in this season.
+Then Snowbird led him to the windows, and they watched the white drifts
+pile up over the low underbrush.
+
+When finally the snowstorm ceased, five days later, the whole face of
+the wilderness was changed. The buckbrush was mostly covered, the fences
+were out of sight; the forest seemed a clear, clean sweep of white,
+broken only by an occasional tall thicket and by the great, snow-covered
+trees.
+
+When the clouds blew away, and the air grew clear, the temperature
+began to fall. Dan had no way of knowing how low it went. Thermometers
+were not considered essential at the Lennox home. But when his eyelids
+congealed with the frost, and his mittens froze to the logs of firewood
+that he carried through the door, and the pine trees exploded and
+cracked in the darkness, he was correct in his belief that it was very,
+very cold.
+
+But he loved the cold, and the silence and austerity that went with it.
+The wilderness claimed him as never before. The rugged breed that were
+his ancestors had struggled through such seasons as this and passed a
+love of them down through the years to him.
+
+When the ice made a crust over the snow, he learned to walk on
+snowshoes. At first there were pained ankles and endless floundering in
+the drifts. But between the fall of fresh snow and the thaws that
+softened the crust, he slowly mastered the art. Snowbird--and Dan never
+realized the full significance of her name until he saw her flying with
+incredible grace over the snow--laughed at him at first and ran him
+races that would usually end in his falling head-first into a ten-foot
+snowbank. She taught him how to ski and more than once she would stop in
+the middle of an earnest bit of pedagogy to find that he wasn't
+listening at all. He would seem to be fairly devouring her with his
+eyes, delighting in the play of soft pinks and reds in her cheeks, and
+drinking, as a man drinks wine, the amazing change of light and shadow
+in her eyes.
+
+She seemed to blossom under his gaze. Not one of those short winter days
+went by without the discovery of some new trait or little vanity to
+astonish or delight him,--sometimes an unlooked-for tenderness toward
+the weak, often a sweet, untainted philosophy of life, or perhaps just a
+lowering of her eyelids in which her eyes would show lustrous through
+the lashes, or some sweeping, exuberant gesture startlingly graceful.
+
+Lennox wakened one morning with the realization that this was one of the
+hardest winters of his experience. More snow had fallen in the night and
+had banked halfway up his windows. The last of the shrubbery--except for
+the ends of a few tall bushes that would not hold the snow--was covered,
+and the roofs of some of the lower outbuildings had somewhat the
+impression of drowning things, striving desperately to keep their heads
+above water. He began to be very glad of the abundant stores of
+provisions that overcrowded his pantry--savory hams and bacons, dried
+venison, sacks of potatoes and evaporated vegetables, and, of course,
+canned goods past counting. With the high fire roaring in the grate, the
+season held no ills for them. But sometimes, when the bitter cold came
+down at twilight, and the moon looked like a thing of ice itself over
+the snow, he began to wonder how the wild creatures who wintered on the
+Divide were faring. Of course most of them were gone. Woof, long since,
+had grunted and mumbled his way into a winter lair. But the wolves
+remained, strange gray shadows on the snow, and possibly a few of the
+hardier smaller creatures.
+
+More than once in those long winter nights their talk was chopped off
+short by the song of the pack on some distant ridge. Sometime, when the
+world is old, possibly a man will be born that can continue to talk and
+keep his mind on his words while the wolf pack sings. But he is
+certainly an unknown quantity to-day. The cry sets in vibration curious
+memory chords, and for a moment the listener sees in his mind's eye his
+ancient home in an ancient world,--Darkness and Fear and Eyes shining
+about the cave. It carries him back, and he knows the wilderness as it
+really is; and to have such knowledge dries up all inclination to talk,
+as a sponge dries water. Of course the picture isn't entirely plain. It
+is more a thing guessed at, a photograph in some dark part of an
+under-consciousness that has constantly grown more dim as the centuries
+have passed. Possibly sometime it will fade out altogether; and then a
+man may continue to discuss the weather while the Song from the ridge
+shudders in at the windows. But the world will be quite cold by then,
+and no longer particularly interesting. And possibly even the wolves
+themselves will then be tamed to play dead and speak pieces,--which
+means the wilderness itself will be tamed. For as long as the wild
+lasts, the pack will run through it in the winter. They were here in the
+beginning, and in spite of constant war and constant hatred on the part
+of men, they will be here in the end. The reason is just that they are
+the symbol of the wilderness itself, and the idea of it continuing to
+exist without them is stranger than that of a nation without a flag.
+
+It wasn't quite the same song that Dan had listened to in the first days
+of fall. It had been triumphant then, and proud with the wilderness
+pride. Of course it had been sad then, too, but it was more sad now. And
+it was stranger, too, and crept farther into the souls of its listeners.
+It was the song of strength that couldn't avail against the snow,
+possibly of cold and the despair and courage of starvation. These three
+that heard it were inured to the wilderness; but a moment was always
+needed after its last note had died to regain their gayety.
+
+"They're getting lean and they're getting savage," Lennox said one
+night, stretched on his divan before the fireplace. He was still unable
+to walk; but the fractures were knitting slowly and the doctor had
+promised that the summer would find him well. "If we had a dog, I
+wouldn't offer much for his life. One of these days we'll find 'em in a
+big circle around the house--and then we'll have to open up with the
+rifles."
+
+But this picture appalled neither of his two young listeners. No wolf
+pack can stand against three marksmen, armed with rifles and behind
+oaken walls.
+
+Christmas came and passed, and January brought clear days and an
+ineffective sun shining on the snow. These were the best days of all.
+Every afternoon Dan and Snowbird would go out on their skis or on
+snowshoes, unarmed except for the pistol that Snowbird carried in the
+deep pocket of her mackinaw. "But why not?" Dan replied to Lennox's
+objection. "She could kill five wolves with five shots, or pretty near
+it, and you know well enough that that would hold 'em off till we got
+home. They'd stop to eat the five. I have hard enough time keeping up
+with her as it is, without carrying a rifle." And Lennox was content.
+In the first place, the wolf pack has to be desperate indeed before it
+will even threaten human beings; and knowing the coward that the wolf is
+in the other three seasons, he couldn't bring himself to believe that
+this point was reached. In the second, Dan had told the truth when he
+said that five deaths, or even fewer, would repel the attack of any wolf
+pack he had ever seen. There was just one troubling thought. He had
+heard, long ago, and he had forgotten who had told him, that in the most
+severe winters the wolves gather in particularly large packs; and a
+quality in the song that they had heard at night seemed to bear it out.
+The chorus had been exceptionally loud and strong, and he had been
+unable to pick out individual voices.
+
+The snow was perfect for skiing. Previously their sport had been many
+times interrupted either by the fall of fresh snow or a thaw that had
+softened the snow crust; but now every afternoon was too perfect to
+remain indoors. They shouted and romped in the silences, and they did
+not dream but that they had the wilderness all to themselves. The fact
+that one night Lennox's keen eyes had seen what looked like the glow of
+a camp fire in the distance didn't affect this belief of theirs at all.
+It was evidently just the phosphorus glowing in a rotten log from which
+the winds had blown the snow.
+
+Once or twice they caught glimpses of wild life: once a grouse that had
+buried in the snow flushed from their path and blew the snow-dust from
+its wings; and once or twice they saw snowshoe rabbits bounding away on
+flat feet over the drifts. But just one day they caught sight of a wolf.
+They were on snowshoes on a particularly brilliant afternoon late in
+January.
+
+He was a lone male, evidently a straggler from the pack, and he leaped
+from the top of a tall thicket that had remained above the snow. The man
+and the girl had entirely different reactions. Dan's first impression
+was amazement at the animal's condition. It seemed to be in the last
+stages of starvation: unbelievably gaunt, with rib bones showing plainly
+even through the furry hide. Ordinarily the heavily furred animals do
+not show signs of famine; but even an inexperienced eye could not make a
+mistake in this case. The eyes were red, and they carried Dan back to
+his first adventure in the Oregon forest--the day he had shot the mad
+coyote. Snowbird thought of the beast only as an enemy. The wolves
+killed her father's stock; they were brigands of the worst order; and
+she shared the hatred of them that is a common trait of all primitive
+peoples. Her hand whipped back, seized her pistol, and she fired twice
+at the fleeing figure.
+
+The second shot was a hit: both of them saw the wolf go to its side,
+then spring up and race on. Shouting, both of them sped after him.
+
+In a few moments he was out of sight among the distant trees, but they
+found the blood-trail and mushed over the ridge. They expected at any
+moment to find him lying dead; but the track led them on clear down the
+next canyon. And now they cared not at all whether they found him: it
+was simply a tramp in the out-of-doors; and both of them were young with
+red blood in their veins.
+
+But all at once Dan stopped in his tracks. The girl sped on for six
+paces before she missed the sound of his snowshoes; then she turned to
+find him standing, wholly motionless, with eyes fixed upon her.
+
+It startled her, and she didn't know why. A companion abruptly freezing
+in his path, his muscles inert, and his eyes filling with speculations
+is always startling. When this occurs, it means simply that a thought so
+compelling and engrossing that even the half-unconscious physical
+functions, such as walking, cannot continue, has come into his mind. And
+it is part of the old creed of self-preservation to dislike greatly to
+be left out on any such thought as this. If danger is present, the
+sooner it is identified the better.
+
+"What is it?" she demanded.
+
+He turned to her, curiously intent. "How many shells have you in that
+pistol?"
+
+She took one breath and answered him. "It holds five, and I shot twice.
+I haven't any others."
+
+"And I don't suppose it ever occurred to you to carry extra ones in your
+pocket?"
+
+"Father is always telling me to--and several times I have. But I'd shoot
+them away at target practice and forget to take any more. There was
+never any danger--except that night with a cougar. I did intend to--but
+what does it matter now?"
+
+"We're a couple of wise ones, going after that wolf with only three
+shots to our name. Of course by himself he's harmless--but he's likely
+enough to lead us straight toward the pack. And Snowbird--I didn't like
+his looks. He's too gaunt, and he's too hungry--and I haven't a bit of
+doubt he waited in that brush for us to come, intending to attack
+us--and lost his nerve the last thing. That shows he's desperate. I
+don't like him, and I wouldn't like his pack. And a whole pack might not
+lose _its_ nerve."
+
+"Then you think we'd better turn back?"
+
+"Yes, I do, and not come out any more without a whole pocket of shells.
+I'm going to carry my rifle, too, just as Lennox has always advised.
+He's only got a flesh-wound. You saw what you did with two
+cartridges--got in one flesh-wound. Three of 'em against a pack wouldn't
+be a great deal of aid. I don't mean to say you can't shoot, but a
+jumping, lively wolf is worse than a bird in the air. We've gone over
+three miles; and he'd lead us ten miles farther--even if he didn't go to
+the pack. Let's go back."
+
+"If you say so. But I don't think there's the least bit of danger. We
+can always climb a tree."
+
+"And have 'em make a beautiful circle under it! They've got more
+patience than we have--and we'd have to come down sometime. Your father
+can't come to our help, you know. It's the sign of the tenderfoot not to
+think there's any danger--and I'm not going to think that way any more."
+
+They turned back and mushed in silence a long time.
+
+"I suppose you'll think I'm a coward," Dan asked her humbly.
+
+"Only prudent, Dan," she answered, smiling. Whether she meant it, he did
+not know. "I'm just beginning to understand that you--living here only a
+few months--really know and understand all this better than I do." She
+stretched her arms wide to the wilderness. "I guess it's your
+instincts."
+
+"And I do understand," he told her earnestly. "I sensed danger back
+there just as sure as I can see your face. That pack--and it's a big
+one--is close; and it's terribly hungry. And you know--you can't help
+but know--that the wolves are not to be trusted in famine times."
+
+"I know it only too well," she said.
+
+Then she paused and asked him about a strange grayness, like snow blown
+by the wind, on the sky over the ridge.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Bert Cranston waited in a clump of exposed thicket on the hillside until
+he saw two black dots, that he knew were Dan and Snowbird, leave the
+Lennox home. He lay very still as they circled up the ridge, noticing
+that except for the pistol that he knew Snowbird always carried, they
+were unarmed. There was no particular reason why he should be interested
+in that point. It was just the mountain way always to look for weapons,
+and it is rather difficult to trace the mental processes behind this
+impulse. Perhaps it can be laid to the fact that many mountain families
+are often at feud with one another, and anything in the way of violence
+may happen before the morning.
+
+The two passed out of his sight, and after a long time he heard the
+crack of Snowbird's pistol. He guessed that she had either shot at some
+wild creature, or else was merely at target practice,--rather a common
+proceeding for the two when they were on the hills together. Thus it is
+to be seen that Cranston knew their habits fairly well. And since he had
+kept a close watch upon them for several days, this was to be expected.
+
+He had no intention of being interrupted in this work he was about to
+do. He had planned it all very well. At first the intermittent
+snow-storms and the thaws between had delayed him. He needed a perfect
+snow crust for the long tramp over the ridge; and at last the bright
+days and the icy dawns had made it. The elder Lennox was still helpless.
+He had noticed that when Dan and Snowbird went out, they were usually
+gone from two to four hours; and that gave him plenty of time for his
+undertaking. The moment had come at last to make a thorough search of
+Lennox's house for those incriminating documents that Dan had found near
+the body of Landy Hildreth.
+
+The only really dangerous part of his undertaking was his approach. If
+by any chance Lennox were looking out of the window, he might be found
+waiting with a rifle across his arms. It would be quite like the old
+mountaineer to have his gun beside him, and to shoot it quick and
+exceptionally straight, without asking questions, at any stealing figure
+in the snow. Yet Cranston felt fairly sure that Lennox was still too
+helpless to raise a gun to a shooting position.
+
+He had observed that the mountaineer spent his time either on the
+fireplace divan or on his own bed. Neither of these places was available
+to the rear windows of the house. So, very wisely, he made his attack
+from the rear.
+
+He came stealing across the snow,--a musher of the first degree. Very
+silently and swiftly he slipped off his snowshoes at the door. The door
+itself was unlocked, just as he had supposed. In an instant more he was
+tiptoeing, a dark, silent figure, through the corridors of the house. He
+held his rifle ready in his hands.
+
+He peered into Lennox's bedroom first. The room was unoccupied. Then the
+floor of the corridor creaked beneath his step; and he knew nothing
+further was to be gained by waiting. If Lennox suspected his presence,
+he might be waiting with aimed rifle as he opened the door of the living
+room.
+
+He glided faster. He halted once more,--a moment at the living-room door
+to see if Lennox had been disturbed. He was lying still, however, so
+Cranston pushed through.
+
+Lennox glanced up from his magazine to find that unmistakable thing, the
+barrel of a rifle, pointed at his breast. Cranston was one of those
+rare marksmen who shoots with both eyes open,--and that meant that he
+kept his full visual powers to the last instant before the hammer fell.
+
+"I can't raise my arms," Lennox said simply. "One of 'em won't work at
+all--besides, against the doctor's orders."
+
+Cranston stole over toward him, looking closely for weapons. He pulled
+aside the woolen blanket that Lennox had drawn up over his body, and he
+pushed his hand into the cushions of the couch. A few deft pats, holding
+his rifle through the fork of his arm, finger coiled into the trigger
+guard, assured him that Lennox was not "heeled" at all. Then he laughed
+and went to work.
+
+"I thought I told you once," Lennox began with perfect coldness, "that
+the doors of my house were no longer open to you."
+
+"You did say that," was Cranston's guttural reply. "But you see I'm here
+just the same, don't you? And what are you going to do about it?"
+
+"I probably felt that sooner or later you would come to steal--just as
+you and your crowd stole the supplies from the forest station last
+winter--and that probably influenced me to give the orders. I didn't
+want thieves around my house, and I don't want them now. I don't want
+coyotes, either."
+
+"And I don't want any such remarks out of you, either," Cranston
+answered him. "You lie still and shut up, and I suspect that sissy
+boarder of yours will come back, after he's through embracing your
+daughter in the snow, and find you in one piece. Otherwise not."
+
+"If I were in one piece," Lennox answered him very quietly, "instead of
+a bundle of broken bones that can't lift its arms, I'd get up off this
+couch, unarmed as I am, and stamp on your lying lips."
+
+But Cranston only laughed and tied Lennox's feet with a cord from the
+window shade.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went to work very systematically. First he rifled Lennox's desk in
+the living room. Then he looked on all the mantels and ransacked the
+cupboards and the drawers. He was taunting and calm at first. But as the
+moments passed, his passion grew upon him. He no longer smiled. The
+rodent features became intent; the eyes narrowed to curious, bright
+slits under the dark lashes. He went to Dan's room, searched his bureau
+drawer and all the pockets of the clothes hanging in his closet. He
+upset his trunk and pawed among old letters in the suitcase. Then,
+stealing like some creature of the wilderness, he came back to the
+living room.
+
+Lennox was not on the divan where he had left him. He lay instead on the
+floor near the fireplace; and he met the passion-drawn face with entire
+calmness. His motives were perfectly plain. He had just made a desperate
+effort to procure Dan's rifle that hung on two sets of deer horns over
+the fireplace, and was entirely exhausted from it. He had succeeded in
+getting down from the couch, though wracked by agony, but had been
+unable to lift himself up in reach of the gun.
+
+Cranston read his intention in one glance. Lennox knew it, but he simply
+didn't care. He had passed the point where anything seemed to matter.
+
+"Tell me where it is," Cranston ordered him. Again he pointed his rifle
+at Lennox's wasted breast.
+
+"Tell you where what is? My money?"
+
+"You know what I want--and it isn't money. I mean those letters that
+Failing found on the ridge. I'm through fooling, Lennox. Dan learned
+that long ago, and it's time you learned it now."
+
+"Dan learned it because he was sick. He isn't sick now. Don't presume
+too much on that."
+
+Cranston laughed with harsh scorn. "But that isn't the question. I said
+I've wasted all the time I'm going to. You are an old man and helpless;
+but I'm not going to let that stand in the way of getting what I came to
+get. They're hidden somewhere around this house. They wouldn't be out in
+the snow, because he'd want 'em where he could get them. By no means
+would he carry them on his person--fearing that some day he'd meet me on
+the ridge. He's a fool, but he ain't that much of a fool. I've watched,
+and he's had no chance to take them into town. I'll give you--just five
+seconds to tell me where they're hidden."
+
+"And I give you," Lennox replied, "one second less than that--to go to
+Hell!"
+
+Both of them breathed hard in the quiet room. Cranston was trembling
+now, shivering just a little in his arms and shoulders. "Don't get me
+wrong, Lennox," he warned.
+
+"And don't have any delusions in regard to me, either," Lennox replied.
+"I've stood worse pain, from this accident, than any man can give me
+while I yet live, no matter what he does. If you want to get on me and
+hammer me in the approved Cranston way, I can't defend myself--but you
+won't get a civil answer out of me. I'm used to pain, and I can stand
+it. I'm not used to fawning to a coyote like you, and I can't stand it."
+
+But Cranston hardly heard. An idea had flamed in his mind and cast a red
+glamour over all the scene about him. It was instilling a poison in his
+nerves and a madness in his blood, and it was searing him, like fire, in
+his dark brain. Nothing seemed real. He suddenly bent forward, tense.
+
+"That's all right about you," he said. "But you'd be a little more
+polite if it was Snowbird--and Dan--that would have to pay."
+
+Perhaps the color faded slightly in Lennox's face; but his voice did not
+change.
+
+"They'll see your footprints before they come in and be ready," Lennox
+replied evenly. "They always come by the back way. And even with a
+pistol, Snowbird's a match for you."
+
+"Did you think that was what I meant?" Cranston scorned. "I know a way
+to destroy those letters, and I'll do it--in the four seconds that I
+said, unless you tell. I'm not even sure I'm goin' to give you a chance
+to tell now; it's too good a scheme. There won't be any witnesses then
+to yell around in the courts. What if I choose to set fire to this
+house?"
+
+"It wouldn't surprise me a great deal. It's your own trade." Lennox
+shuddered once on his place on the floor.
+
+"I wouldn't have to worry about those letters then, would I? They are
+somewhere in the house, and they'd be burned to ashes. But that isn't
+all that would be burned. You could maybe crawl out, but you couldn't
+carry the guns, and you couldn't carry the pantry full of food. You're
+nearly eighty miles up here from the nearest occupied house, with two
+pair of snowshoes for the three of you and one dinky pistol. And you
+can't walk at all. It would be a nice pickle, wouldn't it? Wouldn't you
+have a fat chance of getting down to civilization?"
+
+The voice no longer held steady. It trembled with passion. This was no
+idle threat. The brain had already seized upon the scheme with every
+intention of carrying it out. Outside the snow glittered in the
+sunlight, and pine limbs bowed with their load; overhung with that
+curious winter silence that, once felt, returns often in dreams. The
+wilderness lay stark and bare, stripped of all delusion--not only in the
+snow world outside but in the hearts of these two men, its sons.
+
+"I have only one hope," Lennox replied. "I hope, unknown to me, that Dan
+has already dispatched those letters. The arm of the law is long,
+Cranston. It's easy to forget that fact up here. It will reach you in
+the end."
+
+Cranston turned through the door, into the kitchen. He was gone a long
+time. Lennox heard him at work: the crinkle of paper and then a pouring
+sound around the walls. Then he heard the sharp crack of a match. An
+instant later the first wisp of smoke came curling, pungent with burning
+oil, through the corridor.
+
+"You crawled from your couch to reach that gun," Cranston told him when
+he came in. "Let's see you crawl out now."
+
+Lennox's answer was a curse,--the last, dread outpouring of an unbroken
+will. He didn't look again at the glittering eyes. He scarcely watched
+Cranston's further preparations: the oil poured on the rugs and
+furnishings, the kindling placed at the base of the curtains. Cranston
+was trained in this work. He was taking no chances on the fire being
+extinguished. And Lennox began to crawl toward the door.
+
+He managed to grasp the corner of the blanket on the divan as he went,
+and he dragged it behind him. Pain wracked him, and smoke half-blinded
+him. But he made it at last. And by the time he had crawled one hundred
+feet over the snow crust, the whole structure was in flames. The red
+tongues spoke with a roar.
+
+Cranston, the fire-madness on his face, hurried to the outbuildings.
+There he repeated the work. He touched a match to the hay in the barn,
+and the wind flung the flame through it in an instant. The sheds and
+other outbuildings were treated with oil. And seeing that his work was
+done, he called once to the prone body of Lennox on the snow and mushed
+away into the silences.
+
+Lennox's answer was not a curse this time. Rather it was a prayer,
+unuttered, and in his long years Lennox had not prayed often. When he
+prayed at all, the words were burning fire. His prayer was that of
+Samson,--that for a moment his strength might come back to him.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Two miles across the ridges, Dan and Snowbird saw a faint mist blowing
+between the trees. They didn't recognize it at first. It might be fine
+snow, blown by the wind, or even one of those mysterious fogs that
+sometimes sweep over the snow.
+
+"But it looks like smoke," Snowbird said.
+
+"But it couldn't be. The trees are too wet to burn."
+
+But then a sound that at first was just the faintest whisper in which
+neither of them would let themselves believe, became distinct past all
+denying. It was that menacing crackle of a great fire, that in the whole
+world of sounds is perhaps the most terrible. They were trained by the
+hills, and neither of them tried to mince words. They had learned to
+face the truth, and they faced it now.
+
+"It's our house," Snowbird told him. "And father can't get out."
+
+She spoke very quietly. Perhaps the most terrible truths of life are
+always spoken in that same quiet voice. Then both of them started across
+the snow, fast as their unwieldy snowshoes would permit.
+
+"He can crawl a little," Dan called to her. "Don't give up, Snowbird
+mine. I think he'll be safe."
+
+They mounted to the top of the ridge; and the long sweep of the forest
+was revealed to them. The house was a singular tall pillar of flame,
+already glowing that dreadful red from which firemen, despairing, turn
+away. Then the girl seized his hands and danced about him in a mad
+circle.
+
+"He's alive," she cried. "You can see him--just a dot on the snow. He
+crawled out to safety."
+
+She turned and sped at a breakneck pace down the ridge. Dan had to race
+to keep up with her. But it wasn't entirely wise to try to mush so fast.
+A dead log lay beneath the snow with a broken limb stretched almost to
+its surface, and it caught her snowshoe. The wood cracked sharply, and
+she fell forward in the snow. But she wasn't hurt, and the snowshoe
+itself, in spite of a small crack in the wood, was still serviceable.
+
+"Haste makes waste," he told her. "Keep your feet on the ground,
+Snowbird; the house is gone already and your father is safe. Remember
+what lies before us."
+
+The thought sobered and halted her. She glanced once at the dark face of
+her companion. Dan couldn't understand the strange light that suddenly
+leaped to her eyes. Perhaps she herself couldn't have explained the wave
+of tenderness that swept over her,--with no cause except the look in
+Dan's earnest gray eyes and the lines that cut so deep. Since the world
+was new, it has been the boast of the boldest of men that they looked
+their Fate in the face. And this is no mean looking. For fate is a sword
+from the darkness, a power that reaches out of the mystery, and cannot
+be classed with sights of human origin. It burns out the eyes of all but
+the strongest men. Yet Dan was looking at his fate now, and his eyes
+held straight.
+
+They walked together down to the ruined house, and the three of them sat
+silent while the fire burned red. Then Lennox turned to them with a
+half-smile.
+
+"You're wasting time, you two," he said. "Remember all our food is gone.
+If you start now, and walk hard, maybe you can make it out."
+
+"There are several things to do first," Dan answered simply.
+
+"I don't know what they are. It isn't going to be any picnic, Dan. A man
+can travel only so far without food to keep up his strength,
+particularly over such ridges as you have to cross. It will be easy to
+give up and die. It's the test, man; it's the test."
+
+"And what about you?" his daughter asked.
+
+"Oh, I'll be all right. Besides--it's the only thing that can be done. I
+can't walk, and you can't carry me on your backs. What else remains?
+I'll stay here--and I'll scrape together enough wood to keep a fire.
+Then you can bring help."
+
+He kept his eyes averted when he talked. He was afraid for Dan to see
+them, knowing that he could read the lie in them.
+
+"How do you expect to find wood--in this snow?" Dan asked him. "It will
+take four days to get out; do you think you could lie here and battle
+with a fire for four days, and then four days more that it will take to
+come back? You'd have two choices: to burn green wood that I'd cut for
+you before I left, or the rain-soaked dead wood under the snow. You
+couldn't keep either one of them burning, and you'd die in a night.
+Besides--this is no time for an unarmed man to be alone in the hills."
+
+Lennox's voice grew pleading. "Be sensible, Dan!" he cried. "That
+Cranston's got us, and got us right. I've only one thing more I care
+about--and that is that you pay the debt! I can't hope to get out
+myself. I say that I can't even hope to. But if you bring my daughter
+through--and when the spring comes, pay what we owe to Cranston--I'll be
+content. Heavens, son--I've lived my life. The old pack leader dies when
+his time comes, and so does a man."
+
+His daughter crept to him and sheltered his gray head against her
+breast. "I'll stay with you then," she cried.
+
+"Don't be a little fool, Snowbird," he urged. "My clothes are wet
+already from the melted snow. It's too long a way--it will be too hard a
+fight, and children--I'm old and tired out. I don't want to make the
+try--hunger and cold; and even if you'd stay here and grub wood,
+Snowbird, they'd find us both dead when they came back in a week. We
+can't live without food, and work and keep warm--and there isn't a
+living creature in the hills."
+
+"Except the wolves," Dan reminded him.
+
+"Except the wolves," Lennox echoed. "Remember, we're unarmed--and they'd
+find it out. You're young, Snowbird, and so is Dan--and you two will be
+happy. I know how things are, you two--more than you know
+yourselves--and in the end you'll be happy. But me--I'm too tired to
+make the try. I don't care about it enough. I'm going to wave you
+good-by, and smile, and lie here and let the cold come down. You feel
+warm in a little while--"
+
+But she stopped his lips with her hand. And he bent and kissed it.
+
+"If anybody's going to stay with you," Dan told them in a clear, firm
+voice, "it's going to be me. But aren't any of the cabins occupied?"
+
+"You know they aren't," Lennox answered. "Not even the houses beyond the
+North Fork, even if we could get across. The nearest help is over
+seventy miles."
+
+"And Snowbird, think! Haven't any supplies been left in the ranger
+station?"
+
+"Not one thing," the girl told him. "You know Cranston and his crowd
+robbed the place last winter. And the telephone lines were disconnected
+when the rangers left."
+
+"Then the only way is for me to stay here. You can take the pistol, and
+you'll have a fair chance of getting through. I'll grub wood for our
+camp meanwhile, and you can bring help."
+
+"And if the wolves come, or if help didn't come in time," Lennox
+whispered, passion-drawn for the first time, "who would pay what we owe
+to Cranston?"
+
+"But her life counts--first of all."
+
+"I know it does--but mine doesn't count at all. Believe me, you two. I'm
+speaking from my own desires when I say I don't want to make the fight.
+Snowbird would never make it through alone. There are the wolves, and
+maybe Cranston too--the worst wolf of all. A woman can't mush across
+those ridges four days without food, without some one who loves her and
+forces her on! Neither can she stay here with me and try to make green
+branches burn in a fire. She's got three little pistol balls--and we'd
+all die for a whim. Oh, please, please--"
+
+But Dan leaped for his hand with glowing eyes. "Listen, man!" he cried.
+"I know another way yet. I know more than one way; but one, if we've got
+the strength, is almost sure. There is an ax in the kitchen, and the
+blade will still be good."
+
+"Likely dulled with the fire--"
+
+"I'll cut a limb with my jackknife for the handle. There will be nails
+in the ashes, plenty of them. We'll make a rude sledge, and we'll get
+you out too."
+
+Lennox seemed to be studying his wasted hands. "It's a chance, but it
+isn't worth it," he said at last. "You'll have fight enough, without
+tugging at a heavy sled. It will take all night to build it, and it
+would cut down your chances of getting out by pretty near half. Remember
+the ridges, Dan--"
+
+"But we'll climb every ridge--besides, its a slow, down grade most of
+the way. Snowbird--tell him he must do it."
+
+Snowbird told him, overpowering him with her enthusiasm. And Dan shook
+his shoulders with rough hands. "You're hurting, boy!" Lennox warned.
+"I'm a bag of broken bones."
+
+"I'll tote you down there if I have to tie you in," Dan Failing replied.
+"Before, I've bowed to your will; but this time you have to bow to mine.
+I'm not going to let you stay here and die, no matter if you beg on your
+knees! It's the test--and I'm going to bring you through."
+
+He meant what he said. If mortal strength and sinew could survive such a
+test, he would succeed. There was nothing in these words to suggest the
+physical weakling that both of them had known a few months before. The
+eyes were earnest, the dark face intent, the determined voice did not
+waver at all.
+
+"Dan Failing speaks!" Lennox replied with glowing eyes. He was recalling
+another Dan Failing of the dead years, a boyhood hero, and his
+remembered voice had never been more determined, more masterful than
+this he had just heard.
+
+"And Cranston didn't get his purpose, after all." To prove his words,
+Dan thrust his hand into his inner coat pocket. He drew forth a little,
+flat package, half as thick as a pack of cards. He held it up for them
+to see. "The thing Bert Cranston burned the house down to destroy," he
+explained. "I'm learning to know this mountain breed, Lennox. I kept it
+in my pocket where I could fight for it, at any minute."
+
+Cranston had been mistaken, after all, in thinking that in fear of
+himself Dan would be afraid to keep the packet on his person, and would
+cravenly conceal it in the house. He would have been even more surprised
+to know that Dan had lived in constant hope of meeting Cranston on the
+ridges, showing him what it contained, and fighting him for it, hands to
+hands. And even yet, perhaps the day would come when Cranston would know
+at last that Snowbird's words, after the fight of long ago, were true.
+
+The twilight was falling over the snow, so Snowbird and Dan turned to
+the toil of building a sled.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The snow was steel-gray in the moonlight when the little party made
+their start down the long trail. Their preparations, simple and crude as
+they were, had taken hours of ceaseless labor on the part of the three.
+The ax, its edge dulled by the flame and its handle burned away, had
+been cooled in the snow, and with his one sound arm, Lennox had driven
+the hot nails that Snowbird gathered from the ashes of one of the
+outbuildings. The embers of the house itself still glowed red in the
+darkness.
+
+Dan had cut the green limbs of the trees and planed them with his ax.
+The sled had been completed, handles attached for pushing it, and a
+piece of fence wire fastened with nails as a rope to pull it. The warm
+mackinaws of both of them as well as the one blanket that Lennox had
+saved from the fire were wrapped about the old frontiersman's wasted
+body,--Dan and Snowbird hoping to keep warm by the exercise of
+propelling the sled. Except for the dull ax and the half-empty pistol,
+their only equipment was a single charred pot for melting snow that Dan
+had recovered from the ashes of the kitchen.
+
+The three had worked almost in silence. Words didn't help now. They
+wasted no sorely-needed breath. But they did have one minute of talk
+when they got to the top of the little ridge that had overlooked the
+house.
+
+"We'll travel mostly at night," Dan told them. "We can see in the snow,
+and by taking our rest in the daytime, when the sun is bright and warm,
+we can save our strength. We won't have to keep such big fires then--and
+at night our exertion will keep us as warm as we can hope for. Getting
+up all night to cut green wood with this dull ax in the snow would break
+us to pieces very soon, for remember that we haven't any food. I know
+how to build a fire even in the snow--especially if I can find the dead,
+dry heart of a rotten log--but it isn't any fun to keep it going with
+green wood. We don't want to have to spend any more of our strength
+stripping off wet bark and hacking at saplings than we can help; and
+that means we'd better do our resting in the heat of the day. After all,
+it's a fight against starvation more than anything else."
+
+"Just think," the girl told them, reproaching herself, "if I'd just shot
+straight at that wolf to-day, we could have gone back and got his body.
+It might have carried us through."
+
+Neither of the others as much as looked surprised at these amazing
+regrets over the lost, unsavory flesh of a wolf. They were up against
+realities, and they didn't mince words. Dan smiled at her gently, and
+his great shoulder leaned against the traces.
+
+They moved through a dead world. The ever-present manifestations of wild
+life that had been such a delight to Dan in the summer and fall were
+quite lacking now. The snow was trackless. Once they thought they saw a
+snowshoe rabbit, a strange shadow on the snow, but he was too far away
+for Snowbird to risk a pistol shot. The pound or two of flesh would be
+sorely needed before the journey was over, but the pistol cartridges
+might be needed still more. She didn't let her mind rest on certain
+possibilities wherein they might be needed. Such thoughts stole the
+courage from the spirit, and courage was essential beyond all things
+else to bring them through.
+
+Once a flock of wild geese, stragglers from the main army of waterfowl,
+passed overhead on their southern migration. They were many months too
+late. They called down their eerie cries,--that song that they had
+learned from the noise the wind makes, blowing over the bleak marshes.
+It wailed down to them a long time after the flock was hidden by the
+distant tree tops, and seemed to shiver, with curious echoes, among the
+pines. Trudging on, they listened to its last note. And possibly they
+understood the cry as never before. It was one of the untamed, primitive
+voices of the wilderness, and they could realize something of its
+sadness, its infinite yearning and complaint. They knew the wilderness
+now, just as the geese themselves did. They knew its cold, its hunger,
+its remorselessness, and beyond all, the fear that was bright eyes in
+the darkness. No man could have crossed that first twenty miles with
+them and remained a tenderfoot. The wild was sending home its lessons,
+one after another, until the spirit broke beneath them. It was showing
+its teeth. It was reminding them, very clearly, that in spite of houses
+built on the ridges and cattle pens and rifles and all the tools and
+aids of civilization, it was still unconquered.
+
+Mostly the forest was heavily laden with silence. And silence, in this
+case, didn't seem to be merely an absence of sound. It seemed like a
+substance in itself, something that lay over the snow, in which all
+sound was immediately smothered and extinguished. They heard their own
+footfalls in the snow and the crunch of the sled. But the sound only
+went a little way. Once in a long time distant trees cracked in the
+frost; and they all stood still a moment, trying to fight down the vain
+hope that this might be some hunter from the valleys who would come to
+their aid. A few times they heard the snow sliding, with the dull sound
+of rolling window shade, down from the overburdened limbs. The trees
+were inert with their load of snow.
+
+As the dawn came out, they all stood still and listened to the wolf
+pack, singing on the ridge somewhere behind them. It was a large pack.
+They couldn't make out individual voices,--neither the more shrill cry
+of the females, the yapping of the cubs, or the low, clear
+G-below-middle-C note of the males.
+
+"If they should cross our tracks--" Lennox suggested.
+
+"No use worrying about that now--not until we come to it," Dan told him.
+
+The morning broke, the sun rose bright in a clear sky. But still they
+trudged on. In spite of the fact that the sled was heavy and broke
+through the snow crust as they tugged at it, they had made good time
+since their departure. But now every step was a pronounced effort. It
+was the dreadful beginning of fatigue that only food and warmth and rest
+could rectify.
+
+"We'll rest now," Dan told them at ten o'clock. "The sun is warm enough
+so that we won't need much of a fire. And we'll try to get five hours'
+sleep."
+
+"Too long, if we're going to make it out," Lennox objected.
+
+"That leaves a work-day of nineteen hours," Dan persisted. "Not any too
+little. Five hours it will be."
+
+He found where the snow had drifted against a great, dead log, leaving
+the white covering only a foot in depth on the lee side. He began to
+scrape the snow away, then hacked at the log with his ax until he had
+procured a piece of comparatively dry wood from its center. They all
+stood breathless while he lighted the little pile of kindling and heaped
+it with green wood,--the only wood procurable. But it didn't burn
+freely. It smoked fitfully, threatening to die out, and emitting very
+little heat.
+
+But they didn't particularly care. The sun was warm above, as always in
+the mountain winters of Southern Oregon. Snowbird and Dan cleared spaces
+beside the fire and slept. Lennox, who had rested on the journey, lay on
+his sled and with his uninjured arm tried to hack enough wood from the
+saplings that Dan had cut to keep the fire burning.
+
+At three they got up, still tired and aching in their bones from
+exposure. Twenty-four hours had passed since they had tasted food, and
+their unreplenished systems complained. There is no better engine in the
+wide world than the human body. It will stand more neglect and abuse
+than the finest steel motors ever made by the hands of European
+craftsmen. A man may fast many days if he lies quietly in one place and
+keeps warm. But fasting is a deadly proposition while pulling sledges
+over the snow.
+
+Dan was less hopeful now. His face told what his words did not. The
+lines cleft deeper about his lips and eyes; and Snowbird's heart ached
+when he tried to encourage her with a smile. It was a wan, strange smile
+that couldn't quite hide the first sickness of despair.
+
+The shadows quickly lengthened--simply leaping over the snow from the
+fast-falling sun. Soon it dropped down behind the ridge; and the gray of
+twilight began to deepen among the more distant trees. It blurred the
+outline and dulled the sight. With the twilight came the cold, first
+crisp, then bitter and penetrating to the vitals. The twilight deepened,
+the snow turned gray, and then, in a vague way, the journey began to
+partake of a quality of unreality. It was not that the cold and the
+snow and their hunger were not entirely real, or that the wilderness
+was no longer naked to their eyes. It was just that their whole effort
+seemed like some dreadful, emburdened journey in a dream,--a stumbling
+advance under difficulties too many and real to be true.
+
+The first sign was the far-off cry of the wolf pack. It was very faint,
+simply a stir in the ear drums, yet it was entirely clear. That clear,
+cold mountain air was a perfect telephone system, conveying a message
+distinctly, no matter how faintly. There were no tall buildings or
+cities to disturb the ether waves. And all three of them knew at the
+same instant it was not exactly the cry they had heard before.
+
+They couldn't have told just why, even if they had wished to talk about
+it. In some dim way, it had lost the strange quality of despair that it
+had held before. It was as if the pack were running with renewed life,
+that each wolf was calling to another with a dreadful sort of
+exultation. It was an excited cry too,--not the long, sad song they had
+learned to listen for. It sounded immediately behind them.
+
+They couldn't help but listen. No human ears could have shut out the
+sound. But none of them pretended that they had heard. And this was the
+worst sign of all. Each one of the three was hoping against hope in his
+very heart; and at the same time, hoping that the others did not
+understand.
+
+For a long time, as the darkness deepened about them, the forests were
+still. Perhaps, Dan thought, he had been mistaken after all. His
+shoulders straightened. Then the chorus blared again.
+
+The man looked back at the girl, smiling into her eyes. Lennox lay as if
+asleep, the lines of his dark face curiously pronounced. And the girl,
+because she was of the mountains, body and soul, answered Dan's smile.
+Then they knew that all of them knew the truth. Not even an
+inexperienced ear could have any delusions about the pack song now. It
+was that oldest of wilderness songs, the hunting-cry,--that frenzied
+song of blood-lust that the wolf pack utters when it is running on the
+trail of game. It had found the track of living flesh at last.
+
+"There's no use stopping, or trying to climb a tree," Dan told them
+simply. "In the first place, Lennox can't do it. In the second, we've
+got to take a chance--for cold and hunger can get up a tree where the
+wolf pack can't."
+
+He spoke wholly without emotion. Once more he tightened the traces of
+the sled.
+
+"I've heard that sometimes the pack will chase a man for days without
+attacking," Lennox told them. "It all depends on how long they've gone
+without food. Keep on and try to forget 'em. Maybe we can keep 'em
+bluffed."
+
+But as the hours passed, it became increasingly difficult to forget the
+wolf pack. It was only a matter of turning the head and peering for an
+instant into the shadows to catch a glimpse of one of the creatures.
+Their forms, when they emerged from the shadows of the tree trunks, were
+entirely visible against the snow. They no longer yapped and howled.
+They acted very intent and stealthy. They had spread out in a great
+wing, slipping from shadow and shadow, and what were their mental
+processes no human being may even guess. It was a new game; and they
+seemed to be seeking the best means of attack. Their usual fear of men,
+always their first emotion, had given way wholly to a hunting cunning:
+an effort to procure their game without too great risk of their own
+lives. In the desperation of their hunger they could not remember such
+things as the fear of men. They spread out farther, and at last Dan
+looked up to find one of the gray beasts waiting, like a shadow himself,
+in the shadow of a tree not one hundred feet from the sled. Snowbird
+whipped out her pistol.
+
+"Don't dare!" Dan's voice cracked out to her. He didn't speak loudly;
+yet the words came so sharp and commanding, so like pistol fire itself,
+that they penetrated into her consciousness and choked back the nervous
+reflexes that in an instant might have lost them one of their three
+precious shells. She caught herself with a sob. Dan shouted at the wolf,
+and it melted into the shadows.
+
+"You won't do it again, Snowbird?" he asked her very humbly. But his
+meaning was clear. He was not as skilled with a pistol as she; but if
+her nerves were breaking, the gun must be taken from her hands. The
+three shells must be saved to the moment of utmost need.
+
+"No," she told him, looking straight into his eyes. "I won't do it
+again."
+
+He believed her. He knew that she spoke the truth. He met her eyes with
+a half smile. Then, wholly without warning, Fate played its last trump.
+
+Again the wilderness reminded them of its might, and their brave spirits
+were almost broken by the utter remorselessness of the blow. The girl
+went on her face with a crack of wood. Her snowshoe had been cracked by
+her fall of the day before, when running to the fire, and whether she
+struck some other obstruction in the snow, or whether the cracked wood
+had simply given way under her weight, mattered not even enough for them
+to investigate. As in all great disasters, only the result remained. The
+result in this case was that her snowshoe, without which she could not
+walk at all in the snow, was irreparably broken.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Fate has stacked the cards against us," Lennox told them, after the
+first moment's horror from the broken snowshoe.
+
+But no one answered him. The girl, white-faced, kept her wide eyes on
+Dan. He seemed to be peering into the shadows beside the trail, as if he
+were watching for the gray forms that now and then glided from tree to
+tree. In reality, he was not looking for wolves. He was gazing down into
+his own soul, measuring his own spirit for the trial that lay before
+him.
+
+The girl, unable to step with the broken snowshoe, rested her weight on
+one foot and hobbled like a bird with broken wings across to him. No
+sight of all this terrible journey had been more dreadful in her
+father's eyes than this. It seemed to split open the strong heart of the
+man. She touched her hand to his arm.
+
+"I'm sorry, Dan," she told him. "You tried so hard--"
+
+Just one little sound broke from his throat--a strange, deep gasp that
+could not be suppressed. Then he caught her hand in his and kissed
+it,--again and again. "Do you think I care about that?" he asked her. "I
+only wish I could have done more--and what I have done doesn't count.
+Just as in my fight with Cranston, nothing counts because I didn't win.
+It's just fate, Snowbird. It's no one's fault, but maybe, in this world,
+nothing is ever any one's fault." For in the twilight of those winter
+woods, in the shadow of death itself, perhaps he was catching
+glimmerings of eternal truths that are hidden from all but the most
+far-seeing eyes.
+
+"And this is the end?" she asked him. She spoke very bravely.
+
+"No!" His hand tightened on hers. "No, so long as an ounce of strength
+remains. To fight--never to give up--may God give me spirit for it till
+I die."
+
+And this was no idle prayer. His eyes raised to the starry sky as he
+spoke.
+
+"But, son," Lennox asked him rather quietly, "what can you do? The
+wolves aren't going to wait a great deal longer, and we can't go on."
+
+"There's one thing more--one more trial to make," Dan answered. "I
+thought about it at first, but it was too long a chance to try if there
+was any other way. And I suppose you thought of it too."
+
+"Overtaking Cranston?"
+
+"Of course. And it sounds like a crazy dream. But listen, both of you.
+If we have got to die, up here in the snow--and it looks like we
+had--what is the thing you want done worst before we go?"
+
+Lennox's hands clasped, and he leaned forward on the sled. "Pay
+Cranston!" he said.
+
+"Yes!" Dan's voice rang. "Cranston's never going to be paid unless we do
+it. There will be no signs of incendiarism at the house, and no proofs.
+They'll find our bodies in the snow, and we'll just be a mystery, with
+no one made to pay. The evidence in my pocket will be taken by Cranston,
+sometime this winter. If I don't make him pay, he never will pay. And
+that's one reason why I'm going to try to carry out this plan I've got.
+
+"The second reason is that it's the one hope we have left. I take it
+that none of us are deceived on that point. And no man can die
+tamely--if he is a man--while there's a chance. I mean a young man, like
+me,--not one who is old and tired. It sounds perfectly silly to talk
+about finding Cranston's winter quarters, and then, with my bare hands,
+conquering him, taking his food and his blankets and his snowshoes and
+his rifle to fight away these wolves, and bringing 'em back here."
+
+"You wouldn't be barehanded," the girl reminded him. "You could have the
+pistol."
+
+He didn't even seem to hear her. "I've been thinking about it. It's a
+long, long chance--much worse than the chance we had of getting out by
+straight walking. I think we could have made it, if the wolves had kept
+off and the snowshoe hadn't broken. It would have nearly killed us, but
+I believe we could have got out. That's why I didn't try this other way
+first. A man with his bare hands hasn't much of a chance against another
+with a rifle, and I don't want you to be too hopeful. And of course, the
+hardest problem is finding his camp.
+
+"But I do feel sure of one thing: that he is back to his old trapping
+line on the North Fork--somewhere south of here--and his camp is
+somewhere on the river. I think he would have gone there so that he
+could cut off any attempt I might make to get through with those
+letters. My plan is to start back at an angle that will carry me between
+the North Fork and our old house. Somewhere in there I'll find his
+tracks, the tracks he made when he first came over to burn up the house.
+I suppose he was careful to mix 'em up after once he arrived there, but
+the first part of the way he likely walked straight toward the house
+from his camp. Somewhere, if I go that way, I'll cross his
+trail--within ten miles at least. Then I'll back-track him to his camp."
+
+"And never come back!" the girl cried.
+
+"Maybe not. But at least everything that can be done will be done.
+Nothing will be left. No regrets. We will have made the last trial. I'm
+not going to waste any time, Snowbird. The sooner we get your fire built
+the better."
+
+"Father and I are to stay here--?"
+
+"What else can you do?" He went back to his traces and drew the sled one
+hundred yards farther. He didn't seem to see the gaunt wolf that backed
+off into the shadows as he approached. He refused to notice that the
+pack seemed to be steadily growing bolder. Human hunters usually had
+guns that could blast and destroy from a distance; but even an animal
+intelligence could perceive that these three seemed to be without this
+means of inflicting death. A wolf is ever so much more intelligent than
+a crow,--yet a crow shows little fear of an unarmed man and is wholly
+unapproachable by a boy with a gun. The ugly truth was simply that in
+their increasing madness and excitement and hunger, they were becoming
+less and less fearful of these three strange humans with the sled.
+
+It was not a good place for a camp. They worked a long time before they
+cleared a little patch of ground of its snow mantle. Dan cut a number of
+saplings--laboriously with his ax--and built a fire with the
+comparatively dry core of a dead tree. True, it was feeble and
+flickering, but as good as could be hoped for, considering the
+difficulties under which he worked. The dead logs under the snow were
+soaked with water from the rains and the thaws. The green wood that he
+cut smoked without blazing.
+
+"No more time to be lost," Dan told Snowbird. "It lies in your hands to
+keep the fire burning. And don't leave the circle of the firelight
+without that pistol in your hand."
+
+"You don't mean," she asked, unbelieving, "that you are going to go out
+there to fight Cranston--unarmed?"
+
+"Of course, Snowbird. You must keep the pistol."
+
+"But it means death; that's all it means. What chance would you have
+against a man with a rifle? And as soon as you get away from this fire,
+the wolves will tear you to pieces."
+
+"And what would you and your father do, if I took it? You can't get him
+into a tree. You can't build a big enough fire to frighten them. Please
+don't even talk about this matter, Snowbird. My mind's made up. I think
+the pack will stay here. They usually--God knows how--know who is
+helpless and who isn't. Maybe with the gun, you will be able to save
+your lives."
+
+"What's the chance of that?"
+
+"You might--with one cartridge--kill one of the devils; and the
+others--but you know how they devour their own dead. That might break
+their famine enough so that they'd hold off until I can get back. That's
+the prize I'm playing for."
+
+"And what if you don't get back?"
+
+He took her hand in one of his, and with the other he caressed, for a
+single moment, the lovely flesh of her throat. The love he had for her
+spoke from his eyes,--such speech as no human vision could possibly
+mistake. Both of them were tingling and breathless with a great, sweet
+wonder.
+
+"Never let those fangs tear that softness, while you live," he told her
+gently. "Never let that brave old man on the sled go to his death with
+the pack tearing at him. Cheat 'em, Snowbird! Beat 'em the last minute,
+if no other way remains! Show 'em who's boss, after all--of all this
+forest."
+
+"You mean--?" Her eyes widened.
+
+"I mean that you must only spend one of those three shells in fighting
+off the wolves. Save that till the moment you need it most. The other
+two must be saved--for something else."
+
+She nodded, shuddering an instant at a menacing shadow that moved within
+sixty feet of the fire. The firelight half-blinded them, dim as it was,
+and they couldn't see into the darkness as well as they had before.
+Except for strange, blue-yellow lights, close together and two and two
+about the fire, they might have thought that the pack was gone.
+
+"Then good-by, Dan!" she told him. And she stretched up her arms. "The
+thing I said--that day on the hillside--doesn't hold any more."
+
+His own arms encircled her, but he made no effort to claim her lips.
+Lennox watched them quietly; in this moment of crisis not even
+pretending to look away. Dan shook his head to her entreating eyes. "It
+isn't just a kiss, darling," he told her soberly. "It goes deeper than
+that. It's a symbol. It was your word, too, and mine; and words can't be
+broken, things being as they are. Can't I make you understand?"
+
+She nodded. His eyes burned. Perhaps she didn't understand, as far as
+actual functioning of the brain was concerned. But she reached up to
+him, as women--knowing life in the concrete rather than the
+abstract--have always reached up to men; and she dimly caught the gleam
+of some eternal principle and right behind his words. This strong man of
+the mountains had given his word, had been witness to her own promise to
+him and to herself, and a law that goes down to the roots of life
+prevented him from claiming the kiss.
+
+Many times, since the world was new, comfort--happiness--life itself
+have been contingent on the breaking of a law. Yet in spite of what
+seemed common sense, even though no punishment would forthcome if it
+were broken, the law has been kept. It was this way now. It wouldn't
+have been just a kiss such as boys and girls have always had in the
+moonlight. It meant the symbolic renunciation of the debt that Dan owed
+Cranston,--a debt that in his mind might possibly go unpaid, but which
+no weight of circumstance could make him renounce.
+
+His longing for her lips pulled at the roots of him. But by the laws of
+his being he couldn't claim them until the debt incurred on the
+hillside, months ago, had been paid; to take them now meant to dull the
+fine edge of his resolve to carry the issue through to the end, to dim
+the star that led him, to weaken him, by bending now, for the test to
+come. He didn't know why. It had its font in the deep wells of the
+spirit. Common sense can't reveal how the holy man keeps strong the
+spirit by denying the flesh. It goes too deep for that. Dan kept to his
+consecration.
+
+He did, however, kiss her hands, and he kissed the tears out of her
+eyes. Then he turned into the darkness and broke through the ring of the
+wolves.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Dan Failing was never more thankful for his unerring sense of direction.
+He struck off at a forty-five-degree angle between their late course and
+a direct road to the river, and he kept it as if by a surveyor's line.
+All the old devices of the wilderness--the ridge on ridge that looked
+just alike, inclines that to the casual eye looked like downward slopes,
+streams that vanished beneath the snow, and the snow-mist blowing across
+the face of the landmarks--could not avail against him.
+
+A half dozen of the wolves followed him at first. But perhaps their
+fierce eyes marked his long stride and his powerful body, and decided
+that their better chance was with the helpless man and the girl beside
+the flickering fire. They turned back, one by one. Dan kept straight on
+and in two hours crossed Cranston's trail.
+
+It was perfectly plain in the moonlit snow. He began to back-track. He
+headed down a long slope and in an hour more struck the North Fork. He
+didn't doubt but that he would find Cranston in his camp, if he found
+the camp at all. The man had certainly returned to it immediately after
+setting fire to the buildings, if for no other reason than for food. It
+isn't well to be abroad on the wintry mountains without a supply of
+food; and Cranston would certainly know this fact.
+
+Dan didn't know when a rifle bullet from some camp in the thickets would
+put an abrupt end to his advance. The brush grew high by the river, the
+elevation was considerably lower, and there might be one hundred camps
+out of the sight of the casual wayfarer. If Cranston should see him,
+mushing across the moonlit snow, it would give him the most savage joy
+to open fire upon him with his rifle.
+
+Dan's advance became more cautious. He was in a notable trapping region,
+and he might encounter Cranston's camp at any moment. His keen eyes
+searched the thickets, and particularly they watched the sky line for a
+faint glare that might mean a camp fire. He tried to walk silently. It
+wasn't an easy thing to do with awkward snowshoes; but the river drowned
+the little noise that he made. He tried to take advantage of the shelter
+of the thickets and the trees. Then, at the base of a little ridge, he
+came to a sudden halt.
+
+He had estimated just right. Not two hundred yards distant, a camp fire
+flickered and glowed in the shelter of a great log. He saw it, by the
+most astounding good fortune, through a little rift in the trees. Ten
+feet on either side, and it was obscured.
+
+He lost no time. He did not know when the wolves about Snowbird's camp
+would lose the last of their cowardice. Yet he knew he must keep a tight
+grip on his self-control and not let the necessity of haste cost him his
+victory. He crept forward, step by step, placing his snowshoes with
+consummate care. When he was one hundred yards distant he saw that
+Cranston's camp was situated beside a little stream that flowed into the
+river and that--like the mountaineer he was--he had built a large
+lean-to reinforced with snowbanks. The fire burned at its opening.
+Cranston was not in sight; either he was absent from camp or asleep in
+his lean-to. The latter seemed the more likely.
+
+Dan made a wide detour, coming in about thirty yards behind the
+construction. Still he moved with incredible caution. Never in his life
+had he possessed a greater mastery over his own nerves. His heart leaped
+somewhat fast in his breast; but this was the only wasted motion. It
+isn't easy to advance through such thickets without ever a misstep,
+without the rustle of a branch or the crack of a twig. Certain of the
+wild creatures find it easy; but men have forgotten how in too many
+centuries of cities and farms. It is hardly a human quality; and a
+spectator would have found a rather ghastly fascination in watching the
+lithe motions, the passionless face, the hands that didn't shake at all.
+But there were no spectators--unless the little band of wolves,
+stragglers from the pack that had gathered on the hills behind--watched
+with lighted eyes.
+
+Dan went down at full length upon the snow and softly removed his
+snowshoes. They would be only an impediment in the close work that was
+sure to follow. He slid along the snow crust, clear to the mouth of the
+lean-to.
+
+The moonlight poured through and showed the interior with rather
+remarkable plainness. Cranston was sprawled, half-sitting, half-lying on
+a tree-bough pallet near the rear wall. There was not the slightest
+doubt of the man's wakefulness. Dan heard him stir, and once--as if at
+the memory of his deed of the day before--he cursed in a savage whisper.
+Although he was facing the opening of the lean-to, he was wholly unaware
+of Dan's presence. The latter had thrust his head at the side of the
+opening, and it was in shadow. Cranston seemed to be watching the
+great, white snow fields that lay in front, and for a moment Dan was at
+loss to explain this seeming vigil. Then he understood. The white field
+before him was part of the long ridge that the three of them would pass
+on their way to the valleys. Cranston had evidently anticipated that the
+girl and the man would attempt to march out--even if he hadn't guessed
+they would try to take the helpless Lennox with them--and he wished to
+be prepared for emergencies. There might be sport to have with Dan,
+unarmed as he was. And his eyes were full of strange conjectures in
+regard to Snowbird. Both would be exhausted now and helpless--
+
+Dan's eyes encompassed the room: the piles of provisions heaped against
+the wall, the snowshoes beside the pallet, but most of all he wished to
+locate Cranston's rifle. Success or failure hung on that. He couldn't
+find it at first. Then he saw the glitter of its barrel in the
+moonlight,--leaning against a grub-box possibly six feet from Cranston
+and ten from himself.
+
+His heart leaped. The best he had hoped for--for the sake of Snowbird,
+not himself--was that he would be nearer to the gun than Cranston and
+would be able to seize it first. But conditions could be greatly worse
+than they were. If Cranston had actually had the weapon in his hands,
+the odds of battle would have been frightfully against Dan. It takes a
+certain length of time to seize, swing, and aim a rifle; and Dan felt
+that while he would be unable to reach it himself, Cranston could not
+procure it either, without giving Dan an opportunity to leap upon him.
+In all his dreams, through the months of preparation, he had pictured it
+thus. It was the test at last.
+
+The gun might be loaded, and still--in these days of safety
+devices--unready to fire; and the loss of a fraction of a second might
+enable Cranston to reach his knife. Thus Dan felt justified in ignoring
+the gun altogether and trusting--as he had most desired--to a battle of
+hands. And he wanted both hands free when he made his attack.
+
+If Dan had been erect upon his feet, his course would have been an
+immediate leap on the shoulders of his adversary, running the risk of
+Cranston reaching his hunting knife in time. But the second that he
+would require to get to his feet would entirely offset this advantage.
+Cranston could spring up too. So he did the next most disarming thing.
+
+He sprang up and strode into the lean-to.
+
+"Good evening, Cranston," he said pleasantly.
+
+Cranston was also upon his feet the same instant. His instincts were
+entirely true. He knew if he leaped for his rifle, Dan would be upon his
+back in an instant, and he would have no chance to use it. His training,
+also, had been that of the hills, and his reflexes flung him erect upon
+his feet at the same instant that he saw the leap of his enemy's shadow.
+They brought up face to face. The rifle was now out of the running, as
+they were at about equal distances from it, and neither would have time
+to swing or aim it.
+
+Dan's sudden appearance had been so utterly unlooked-for, that for a
+moment Cranston could find no answer. His eyes moved to the rifle, then
+to his belt where hung his hunting knife, that still lay on the pallet.
+"Good evening, Failing," he replied, trying his hardest to fall into
+that strange spirit of nonchalance with which brave men have so often
+met their adversaries, and which Dan had now. "I'm surprised to see you
+here. What do you want?"
+
+Dan's voice when he replied was no more warm than the snow banks that
+reinforced the lean-to. "I want your rifle--also your snowshoes and your
+supplies of food. And I think I'll take your blankets, too."
+
+"And I suppose you mean to fight for them?" Cranston asked. His lips
+drew up in a smile, but there was no smile in the tone of his words.
+
+"You're right," Dan told him, and he stepped nearer. "Not only for that,
+Cranston. We're face to face at last--hands to hands. I've got a knife
+in my pocket, but I'm not even going to bring it out. It's hands to
+hands--you and I--until everything's square between us."
+
+"Perhaps you've forgotten that day on the ridge?" Cranston asked. "You
+haven't any woman to save you this time."
+
+"I remember the day, and that's part of the debt. The thing you did
+yesterday is part of it too. It's all to be settled at last, Cranston,
+and I don't believe I could spare you if you went to your knees before
+me. You've got a clearing out by the fire--big as a prize ring. We'll go
+out there--side by side. And hands to hands we'll settle all these debts
+we have between us--with no rules of fighting and no mercy in the end!"
+
+They measured each other with their eyes. Once more Cranston's gaze
+stole to his rifle, but lunging out, Dan kicked it three feet farther
+into the shadows of the lean-to. Dan saw the dark face drawn with
+passion, the hands clenching, the shoulder muscles growing into hard
+knots. And Cranston looked and knew that merciless vengeance--that
+age-old sin and Christless creed by which he lived--had followed him
+down and was clutching him at last.
+
+He saw it in the position of the stalwart form before him, the clear
+level eyes that the moonlight made bright as steel, the hard lines, the
+slim, powerful hands. He could read it in the tones of the voice,--tones
+that he himself could not imitate or pretend. The hour had come for the
+settling of old debts.
+
+He tried to curse his adversary as a weakling and a degenerate, but the
+obscene words he sought for would not come to his lips. Here was his
+fate, and because the darkness always fades before the light, and the
+courage of wickedness always breaks before the courage of righteousness,
+Cranston was afraid to look it in the face. The fear of defeat, of
+death, of Heaven knows what remorselessness with which this grave giant
+would administer justice was upon him, and his heart seemed to freeze in
+his breast. Cravenly he leaped for his knife on the blankets below him.
+
+Dan was upon him before he ever reached it. He sprang as a cougar
+springs, incredibly fast and with shattering power. Both went down, and
+for a long time they writhed and struggled in each other's arms. The
+pine boughs rustled strangely.
+
+The dark, gaunt hand reached in vain for the knife. Some resistless
+power seemed to be holding his wrist and was bending its bone as an
+Indian bends a bow. Pain lashed through him.--And then this dark-hearted
+man, who had never known the meaning of mercy, opened his lips to scream
+that this terrible enemy be merciful to him.
+
+But the words wouldn't come. A ghastly weight had come at his throat,
+and his tortured lungs sobbed for breath. Then, for a long time, there
+was a curious pounding, lashing sound in the evergreen boughs. It seemed
+merciless and endless.
+
+But Dan got up at last, in a strange, heavy silence, and swiftly went to
+work. He took the rifle and filled it with cartridges from Cranston's
+belt. Then he put the remaining two boxes of shells into his shirt
+pocket. The supplies of food--the sack of nutritious jerked venison like
+dried bark, the little package of cheese, the boxes of hardtack and one
+of the small sacks of prepared flour--he tied, with a single kettle,
+into his heavy blankets and flung them with the rifle upon his back.
+Finally he took the pair of snowshoes from the floor. He worked coldly,
+swiftly, all the time munching at a piece of jerked venison. When he
+had finished he walked to the door of the lean-to.
+
+It seemed to Dan that Cranston whispered faintly, from his
+unconsciousness, as he passed; but the victor did not turn to look. The
+snowshoes crunched away into the darkness. On the hill behind a
+half-dozen wolves--stragglers from the pack--frisked and leaped about in
+a curious way. A strange smell had reached them on the wind, and when
+the loud, fearful steps were out of hearing, it might pay them to creep
+down, one by one, and investigate its cause.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+The gray circle about the fire was growing impatient. Snowbird waited to
+the last instant before she admitted this fact. But it is possible only
+so long to deny the truth of a thing that all the senses verify, and
+that moment for her was past.
+
+At first the wolves had lingered in the deepest shadow and were only
+visible in profile against the gray snow. But as the night wore on, they
+became increasingly careless. They crept up to the very edge of the
+little circle of firelight; and when a high-leaping flame threw a gleam
+over them, they didn't shrink. She had only to look up to see that
+age-old circle of fire--bright dots, two and two--at every side.
+
+It is an instinct in the hunting creatures to remain silent before the
+attack. The triumph cries come afterward. But they seemed no longer
+anxious about this, either. Sometimes she would hear their footfall as
+they leaped in the snow, and what excitement stirred them she didn't
+dare to think. Quite often one of them would snarl softly,--a strange
+sound in the darkness.
+
+She noticed that when she went to her hands and knees, laboriously to
+cut a piece of the drier wood from the rain-soaked, rotted snag that was
+her principal supply of fuel, every wolf would leap forward, only to
+draw back when she stood straight again. At such times she saw them
+perfectly plainly,--their gaunt bodies, their eyes lighted with the
+insanity of famine, their ivory fangs that glistened in the firelight.
+She worked desperately to keep the fire burning bright. She dared not
+neglect it for a moment. Except for the single pistol ball that she
+could afford to expend on the wolves--of the three she had--the fire was
+her last defense.
+
+But it was a losing fight. The rain-soaked wood smoked without flame,
+the comparatively dry core with which Dan had started the fire had
+burned down, and the green wood, hacked with such heart-breaking
+difficulty from the saplings that Dan had cut, needed the most tireless
+attention to burn at all.
+
+When Dan had gone, these little trees were well within the circle of the
+wolves. Unfortunately, the circle had drawn in past them. Nevertheless,
+now that the last of the drier dead wood was consumed, she shouldered
+her ax and walked straight toward the gray, crouching bodies in the
+snow. For a tragic second she thought that the nearest of them was going
+to stand its ground. But almost when she was in striking range, and its
+body was sinking to the snow in preparation for a leap, it skulked back
+into the shadow. Exhausted as she was, it seemed to her that she chopped
+endlessly to cut away one little length. The ax blade was dull, the
+handle awkward in her hand, she could scarcely stand on her broken
+snowshoes, and worse, the ice crust broke beneath her blows, burying the
+sapling in the snow. She noticed that every time she bent to strike a
+blow, the circle would plunge a step nearer her, withdrawing as she
+straightened again.
+
+Books of woodcraft often describe with what ease a fire may be built and
+maintained in wet snow. It works fairly well in theory, but it is a
+heart-breaking task in practice. Under such difficulties as she worked,
+it became one of those dreadful undertakings that partake of a nightmare
+quality,--the walking of a treadmill or the sweeping of waves from the
+shore.
+
+When she secured the first length, her fire was almost extinguished. It
+threw a fault cloud of smoke into the air, but the flame was almost
+gone. The darkness dropped about her, and the wolves came stealing over
+the snow. She worked furiously, with the strength of desperation, and
+little by little she won back a tiny flame.
+
+Her nervous vitality was flowing from her in a frightful stream. Too
+long she had toiled without food in the constant presence of danger, and
+she was very near indeed to utter exhaustion. But at the same time she
+knew she must not faint. That was one thing she could not do,--to fall
+unconscious before the last of her three cartridges was expended in the
+right way.
+
+Again she went forth to the sapling, and this time it seemed to her that
+if she simply tossed the ax through the air, she could fell one of the
+gray crowd. But when she stooped to pick it up--She didn't finish the
+thought. She turned to coax the fire. And then she leaned sobbing over
+the sled.
+
+"What's the use?" she cried. "He won't come back. What's the use of
+fighting any more?"
+
+"There's always use of fighting," her father told her. He seemed to
+speak with difficulty, and his face looked strange and white. The cold
+and the exposure were having their effect on his weakened system, and
+unconsciousness was a near shadow indeed. "But, dearest,--if I could
+only make you do what I want you to--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You're able to climb a tree, and if you'd take these coats, you
+wouldn't freeze by morning. If you'd only have the strength--"
+
+"And see you torn to pieces!"
+
+"I'm old, dear--and very tired--and I'd crawl away into the shadows,
+where you couldn't see. There's no use mincing words, Snowbird. You're a
+brave girl--always have been since a little thing, as God is my
+Judge--and you know we must face the truth. Better one of us die than
+both. And I promise--I'll never feel their fangs. And I won't take your
+pistol with me either."
+
+Her thought flashed to the clasp hunting knife that he carried in his
+pocket. But her eyes lighted, and she bent and kissed him. And the
+wolves leaped forward even at this.
+
+"We'll stay it out," she told him. "We'll fight it to the last--just as
+Dan would want us to do. Besides--it would only mean the same fate for
+me, in a little while. I couldn't cling up there forever--and Dan won't
+come back."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was wholly unable to gain on the fire. Only by dint of the most
+heart-breaking toil was she able to secure any dry fuel for it at all.
+Every length of wood she cut had to be scraped of bark, and half the
+time the fire was only a sickly column of white smoke. It became
+increasingly difficult to swing the ax. The trail was almost at its end.
+
+The after-midnight hours drew one by one across the face of the
+wilderness, and she thought that the deepening cold presaged dawn. Her
+fingers were numb. Her nerve control was breaking; she could no longer
+drive a straight blow with the ax. The number of the wolves seemed to be
+increasing: every way she looked she could see them leaping. Or was this
+just hysteria? Surely the battle could go on but a few moments more. The
+wolves themselves, sensing dawn, were losing the last of their
+cowardice.
+
+Once more she went to one of the saplings, but she stumbled and almost
+went to her face at the first blow. It was the instant that her gray
+watchers had been waiting for. The wolf that stood nearest leaped--a
+gray streak out of the shadow--and every wolf in the pack shot forward
+with a yell. It was a short, expectant cry; but it chopped off short.
+For with a half-sob, and seemingly without mental process, she aimed her
+pistol and fired.
+
+A fast-leaping wolf is one of the most difficult pistol targets that can
+be imagined. It bordered on the miraculous that she did not miss him
+altogether. Her nerves were torn, their control over her muscles largely
+gone. Yet the bullet coursed down through the lungs, inflicting a mortal
+wound.
+
+The wolf had leaped for her throat; but he fell short. She staggered
+from a blow, and she heard a curious sound in the region of her hip. But
+she didn't know that the fangs had gone home in her soft flesh. The wolf
+rolled on the ground; and if her pistol had possessed the shocking power
+of a rifle, he would have never got up again. As it was, he shrieked
+once, then sped off in the darkness to die. Five or six of the nearest
+wolves, catching the smell of his blood, bayed and sped after him.
+
+But the remainder of the great pack--fully fifteen of the gray, gaunt
+creatures--came stealing across the snow toward her. White fangs had
+gone home; and a new madness was in the air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Straining into the silence, a perfectly straight line between Cranston's
+camp and Snowbird's, Dan Failing came mushing across the snow. His sense
+of direction had never been obliged to stand such a test as this before.
+Snowbird's fire was a single dot on a vast plateau; yet he had gone
+straight toward it.
+
+He was risking everything for the sake of speed. He gave no heed to the
+fallen timber that might have torn the web of his snowshoes to shreds.
+Because he shut out all thought of it, he had no feeling of fatigue. The
+fight with Cranston had been a frightful strain on muscle and nerve; but
+he scarcely remembered it now. His whole purpose was to return to
+Snowbird before the wolves lost the last of their cowardice.
+
+The jerked venison that he had munched had brought him back much of his
+strength. He was wholly unconscious of his heavy pack. Never did he
+glide so swiftly, so softly, with such unerring step; and it was nothing
+more or less than a perfect expression of the ironclad control that his
+steel nerves had over his muscles.
+
+Then, through the silence, he heard the shout of the pack as the wolf
+had leaped at Snowbird. He knew what it meant. The wolves were attacking
+then, and a great flood of black, hating bitterness poured over him at
+the thought he had been too late. It had all been in vain, and before
+the thought could fully go home, he heard the dim, far-off crack of a
+pistol.
+
+Was that the first of the three shots, the one she might expend on the
+wolves, or had the first two already been spent and was she taking the
+last gateway of escape? Perhaps even now Lennox was lying still on the
+sled, and she was standing before the ruin of her fire, praying that her
+soul might have wings. He shouted with all the power of his lungs across
+the snow.
+
+But Snowbird only heard the soft glide of the wolves in the snow. The
+wind was blowing toward Dan; and while he had heard the loud chorus of
+the pack, one of the most far-carrying cries, and the penetrating crack
+of a pistol, she couldn't hear his answering shout. In fact, the
+wilderness seemed preternaturally still. All was breathless, heavy with
+suspense, and she stood, just as Dan had thought, between the ruin of
+her fire and the sled, and she looked with straight eyes to the oncoming
+wolves.
+
+"Hurry, Snowbird," Lennox was whispering. "Give me the pistol--for that
+last work. We have only a moment more."
+
+He looked very calm and brave, half-raised as he was on the sled, and
+perhaps a half-smile lingered at his bearded lips. And the bravest thing
+of all was that to spare her, he was willing to take the little weapon
+from her hand to use it in its last service. She tried to smile at him,
+then crept over to his side.
+
+The strain was over. They knew what they had to face. She put the
+pistol in his steady hand.
+
+His hand lowered to his side and he sat waiting. The moments passed. The
+wolves seemed to be waiting too, for the last flickering tongue of the
+little fire to die away. The last of her fuel was ignited and burning
+out; they were crouched and ready to spring if she should venture forth
+after more. The darkness closed down deeper, and at last only a column
+of smoke remained.
+
+It was nothing to be afraid of. The great, gray leader of the pack, a
+wolf that weighed nearly one hundred pounds, began slowly and
+deliberately to set his muscles for the spring. It was the same as when
+the great bull elk comes to bay at the base of the cliffs: usually some
+one wolf, often the great pack leader, wishing to remind his followers
+of his might, or else some full-grown male proud in his strength, will
+attack alone. Because this was the noblest game that the pack had ever
+faced, the leader chose to make the first leap himself. It was true that
+these two had neither such horns nor razor-edged hoofs as the elk, yet
+they had eyes that chilled his heart when he tried to look at them. But
+one was lying almost prone, and the fire was out. Besides, the madness
+of starvation, intensified ten times by their terrible realization of
+the wound at her hip, was upon the pack as never before. The muscles
+bunched at his lean flanks.
+
+But as Snowbird and her father gazed at him in fascinated horror, the
+great wolf suddenly smashed down in the snow. She was aware of its
+curious, utter collapse actually before the sound of the rifle shot that
+occasioned it had penetrated her consciousness. It was a perfect shot at
+long range; and for a long instant her tortured faculties refused to
+accept the truth.
+
+Then the rifle spoke again, and a second wolf--a large male that
+crouched on the other side of the sled--fell kicking in the snow. The
+pack had leaped forward at the first death; but they halted at the
+second. And then terror came to them when the third wolf suddenly opened
+its savage lips and screamed in the death agony.
+
+Up to this time, except for the report of the rifle, the attack had been
+made in utter silence. The reason was just that both breath and nervous
+force are needed to shout; and Dan Failing could afford to waste neither
+of these vital forces. He had dropped to his knee, and was firing again
+and again, his gray eyes looking clear and straight along the barrel,
+his fingers without jerk or tremor pressing again and again at the
+trigger, his hands holding the rifle as in a vice. Every nerve and
+muscle were completely in his command. The distance was far, yet he shot
+with deadly, amazing accuracy. The wolves were within a few feet of the
+girl, and a fraction's waver in the gun barrel might have sped his
+bullet toward her.
+
+"It's Dan Failing," Lennox shouted as the fourth wolf died.
+
+Then Snowbird snatched her pistol from her father's hand and opened
+fire. The two shells were no longer needed to free herself and her
+father from the agony of fangs. She took careful aim, and although a
+pistol is never as accurate or as powerful as a rifle, she killed one
+wolf and wounded another.
+
+Frenzied in their savagery, three or four of the remaining wolves leaped
+at the body of one of the wounded; but the others scattered in all
+directions. Still Dan fired with the same unbelievable accuracy, and
+still the wolves died in the snow. The girl and the man were screaming
+now in the frenzied joy of deliverance. The wolves scurried frantically
+among the trees; and some of them unknowingly ran full in the face of
+their enemy, to be shot down without mercy. And few indeed were those
+that escaped,--to collect on a distant ridge, and, perhaps, to be
+haunted in dreams by a Death that came out of the shadows to blast the
+pack.
+
+Again the pack-song would be despairing and strange in the winter
+nights,--that age-old chant of Famine and Fear and the long war of
+existence with only Death and Darkness in the end. And because it is the
+voice of the wilderness itself, the tenderfoot that camps in the
+evergreen forest will listen, and his talk will die at his lips, and he
+will have the beginnings of knowledge. And perhaps he will wonder if God
+has given him the thews and fiber to meet the wilderness breast to
+breast as Dan had met it: to remain and to fight and to conquer. And
+thereby his metal will be tested in the eyes of the Red Gods.
+
+Snowbird stood waiting in the snow, arms stretched to her forester as
+Dan came running through the wood. But his arms were wider yet, and she
+went softly into them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We will take it easy from now on," Dan Failing told them, after the
+camp was cleared of its dead and the fire was built high. "We have
+plenty of food; and we will travel a little while each day and make warm
+camps at night. We'll have friendship fires, just as sometimes we used
+to build on the ridge."
+
+"But after you get down into the valleys?" Lennox asked anxiously. "Are
+you and Snowbird coming up here to live?"
+
+The silence fell over their camp; and a wounded wolf whined in the
+darkness. "Do you think I could leave it now?" Dan asked. By no gift of
+words could he have explained why; yet he knew that by token of his
+conquest, his spirit was wedded to the dark forests forever. "But heaven
+knows what I'll do for a living."
+
+Snowbird crept near him, and her eyes shone in the bright firelight.
+"I've solved that," she said. "You know you studied forestry--and I told
+the supervisor at the station how much you knew about it. I wasn't going
+to tell you until--until certain things happened--and now they have
+happened, I can't wait another instant. He said that with a little more
+study you could get into the Forest Service--take an examination and
+become a ranger. You're a natural forester if one ever lived, and you'd
+love the work."
+
+"Besides," Lennox added, "it would clip my Snowbird's wings to make her
+live on the plains. My big house will be rebuilt, children. There will
+be fires in the fireplace on the fall nights. There is no use of
+thinking of the plains."
+
+"And there's going to be a smaller house--just a cottage at first--right
+beside it," Dan replied. He could go back to his forests, after all. He
+wouldn't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it
+seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the
+forest rangers,--those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and
+keepers of its keys.
+
+For a long time Snowbird and he stood together at the edge of the
+firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts brimming with
+words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain
+people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted
+to the yearning of his arms.
+
+"We're made for each other, Snowbird darling," he told her breathlessly
+at last. "And at last I can claim what I've been waiting for all these
+months."
+
+He claimed it; and in open defiance to all civil law, he collected fully
+one hundred times in the next few minutes. But it didn't particularly
+matter, and Snowbird didn't even turn her face. "Maybe you've forgotten
+you claimed it when you first came back too," she said.
+
+So he had. It had completely slipped his mind, in the excitement of his
+fight with the wolf pack. And then while Lennox pretended to be asleep,
+they sat, breathless with happiness, on the edge of the sled and watched
+the dawn come out.
+
+They had never seen the snow so lovely in the sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voice of the Pack
+
+Author: Edison Marshall
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2010 [EBook #33877]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS 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
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE VOICE OF THE PACK</h1>
+
+<h2>By EDISON MARSHALL</h2>
+
+
+<h3>A. L. BURT COMPANY<br />
+Publishers      New York</h3>
+
+<h3>Published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company</h3>
+
+<h3><i>Copyright, 1920</i>,<br />
+By Little, Brown, and Company.</h3>
+
+<h3><i>All rights reserved</i></h3>
+
+<h3>Published, April, 1920<br />
+Reprinted, May, 1920</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>TO MY FATHER<br />
+GEORGE EDWARD MARSHALL<br />
+OF MEDFORD, OREGON<br />
+HIMSELF A SON OF FRONTIERSMEN</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#PROLOGUE"><span class="smcap">Prologue</span></a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_ONE">BOOK ONE&mdash;<span class="smcap">Repatriation</span></a><br /><br />
+<a href="#I">I</a><br />
+<a href="#II">II</a><br />
+<a href="#III">III</a><br />
+<a href="#IV">IV</a><br />
+<a href="#V">V</a><br />
+<a href="#VI">VI</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_TWO">BOOK TWO&mdash;<span class="smcap">The Debt</span></a><br /><br />
+<a href="#IB">I</a><br />
+<a href="#IIB">II</a><br />
+<a href="#IIIB">III</a><br />
+<a href="#IVB">IV</a><br />
+<a href="#VB">V</a><br />
+<a href="#VIB">VI</a><br />
+<a href="#VIIB">VII</a><br />
+<a href="#VIIIB">VIII</a><br />
+<a href="#IXB">IX</a><br />
+<a href="#XB">X</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_THREE">BOOK THREE&mdash;<span class="smcap">The Payment</span></a><br /><br />
+<a href="#IC">I</a><br />
+<a href="#IIC">II</a><br />
+<a href="#IIIC">III</a><br />
+<a href="#IVC">IV</a><br />
+<a href="#VC">V</a><br />
+<a href="#VIC">VI</a><br />
+<a href="#VIIC">VII</a><br />
+<a href="#VIIIC">VIII</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE VOICE OF THE PACK</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PROLOGUE" id="PROLOGUE"></a>PROLOGUE</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p>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.&mdash;<i>From a Frontiersman's Diary</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;and when you speak of the speed of a
+descending deer you speak of something the usual mortal eye can
+scarcely follow&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;she didn't think he
+wanted to go very badly. As mothers are usually particularly
+understanding, this was a curious thing.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the lives of uncounted thousands of
+ancestors who fished and hunted for a living.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;with Indian
+names, with muddy, snow-water pools, with slow rivers in which only mud
+cat live&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;say that of the under-chief whose skull he shattered to pay him
+for breaking the vase of Soissons&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;many of them such noble fish as perch and bass&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_ONE" id="BOOK_ONE"></a>BOOK ONE</h2>
+
+<h3>REPATRIATION</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The noise and bustle of the crowd&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;enjoy yourself all you can for about six months."</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe a whole lot shorter. I think that's the limit."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;a rangy, hardy breed
+whose wings would crumple in civilization&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now that he was alone on the path, the utter absence of color in his
+cheeks was startling. That meant the absence of red,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was the squirrel of Destiny. But Dan didn't know it then.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;in an instant rendered as motionless as the rather
+questionable-looking stone stork that was perched on the fountain.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A moment before he had been certain that a living creature&mdash;in fact one
+of the most terrible and powerful living creatures in the world&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The creatures of the wild,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Any relation to Dan Failing of the Umpqua Divide?"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Too busy, I'm afraid," the Chamber of Commerce had replied. "But
+Lennox&mdash;that reminds me. Do you remember old Dan Failing?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"You're just the man I'm looking for, then. You're not going out till
+the day after to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;like old Shag, before he died, followed Snowbird. Of course he
+can come. But he can't pay board."</p>
+
+<p>It was rather characteristic of the mountain men,&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Only one hundred, if you must know. But Steele&mdash;do you suppose he's the
+man his grandfather was before him&mdash;that all the Failings have been
+since the first days of the Oregon trail? If he is&mdash;well, my hat's off
+to him before he steps off the train."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>The bronzed face changed; possibly a shadow of disappointment came into
+his eyes. "A lunger, eh?" Lennox repeated. "Yes&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"You're not afraid to?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p>Dan didn't see his host at first. For the first instant he was entirely
+engrossed by a surging sense of disappointment,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as far as mortal man could
+tame it&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He helped Dan with his bag to a little wiry automobile that waited
+beside the station. They got into the two front seats.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be wondering at my taking you in a car&mdash;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&mdash;only about fifteen miles on low gear. But in the winter&mdash;it's
+either a case of coming down on snowshoes or staying there."</p>
+
+<p>And a moment later they were starting up the long, curved road that led
+to the Divide.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He had never dreamed that the fame of his grandfather had spread so far.
+For the first ten miles, Dan listened to stories,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a long line of
+ancestors who had lived by hunting.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious tone. Perhaps it was a hopeful tone, too. He spoke as
+if he hardly understood.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"In this very stream," the mountaineer told him joyously, "you may
+occasionally catch trout that weigh three pounds."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that it would all soon grow old to him; and Dan
+turned almost in anger.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean that."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean to say&mdash;" Silas Lennox turned in amazement. "You mean that
+you're a&mdash;a goner? That you've given up hope of recovering?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's the impression I meant to convey. I've got a little over four
+months&mdash;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&mdash;to have a dying man on your hands."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;as you say&mdash;ain't the
+impression I'm trying to convey."</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to be groping for words.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Mr. Lennox?" Dan asked.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;he's your people,
+and so are all these ranchers that grub their lives out of the
+forests&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>The Lennox home was a typical mountain ranch-house,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not cold," he said. "It's hardly dark yet. I'd sooner go outdoors
+and look around."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"But, good Heavens! I'm not going to try to spare myself while I'm here.
+It's too late for that."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course&mdash;but sit down now, anyway. I'm sorry that Snowbird isn't
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"Snowbird is&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But a coyote can't kill cattle&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Then she's down in the valley?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;literally
+hundreds of miles across. We're the last outpost&mdash;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 aëroplanes 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."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that the way they are started&mdash;from the carelessness of campers?"</p>
+
+<p>"Partly. There's an old rule in the hills: put out every fire before you
+leave it. Be careful with the cigar butts, too&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"But why on earth&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't make very good sense, does it? Well, one reason is that
+certain stockmen think that a burned forest makes good range&mdash;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&mdash;the real mountain man, such as your
+grandfather was&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll likely see a few of the breed before&mdash;before your visit here is
+ended. There's a family of 'em not three miles away&mdash;and that's real
+neighborly in the mountains&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord&mdash;does she travel over these hills in the darkness?"</p>
+
+<p>The mountaineer laughed&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;the athletic coach! And it
+wasn't his fault that he didn't follow her back to the mountains."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;fully half as
+generous as the bites that Bill was consuming across the table. And its
+first flavor simply filled him with delight.</p>
+
+<p>"What is this meat?" he asked. "I've certainly tasted it before."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;venison."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You have to stand still a moment, to really know anything," Lennox told
+him.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is making the sounds?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;can you <i>smell</i> anything&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord, Lennox! I can smell all kinds of things."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;just enough to satisfy her idea of the
+conventions&mdash;she began a thrilling girlhood tale to her father. And she
+was still telling it when they reached the house.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;light that danced and light that
+laughed and light that went into him and did all manner of things to his
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord!" Dan breathed. "If you make such sudden motions as that I'll
+have heart failure. Where are you going now?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Heavens!" his host exploded. "You sleep the sleep of the just."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But first came target practice. In Dan's baggage he had a certain very
+plain but serviceable sporting rifle of about thirty-forty caliber,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"But I couldn't very well have missed it!" he replied to Lennox's cheer.
+"You see, I aimed at the middle&mdash;but I just grazed the edge."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" he demanded. "I'm getting worse all the time."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;at least it won't hurt
+to try."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But the hammer snapped down ineffectively on the breech. He turned with
+a look of question.</p>
+
+<p>"Your gun only holds five shots," Lennox explained. Reloading, Dan tried
+a more difficult target&mdash;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,&mdash;attempting to hold his aim too long.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the great, tawny mountain lions and their smaller cousins, the
+lynx&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A coyote is wholly without this virtue, as well as most of the other
+virtues of the animal world. He not only eats carrion&mdash;because if one
+started to condemn all the carrion-eating animals of the forest he would
+soon have precious few of them left&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm not sure I want to hunt deer," Dan told him. "You speak of them
+as being so beautiful&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you shoot?" Lennox demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Shoot? It was a doe, wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord, of course it was a doe! But there are no game laws that go
+back this far. Besides&mdash;you aimed at it."</p>
+
+<p>"I aimed just to see if I could catch it through my sights. And I could.
+My glasses sort of made it blur&mdash;but I think&mdash;perhaps&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>Dan answered him with startling emphasis. But the look that he wore said
+more than his words.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Dan!" he cried suddenly. "Haven't you ever been in the woods
+before?"</p>
+
+<p>Dan turned, smiling. "No. What have I done now?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;literally years&mdash;and not know how to do it. And that is&mdash;to place
+your feet."</p>
+
+<p>"Place my feet? I'm afraid I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>Dan laughed, delighted more than he cared to show. "Well, what of it?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"What of it? That's it&mdash;what of it. And what caused it, and all about
+it. Go on and let me think."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Then Dan whispered. Ever so soft a sound, but yet distinct in the
+silence. "There's something living in that thicket."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" Dan asked quietly.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>They waited. The sound ended. They stood straining for a long moment
+without speech.</p>
+
+<p>"That was the dumdest thing!" Lennox went on. "Of course it might have
+been a bear&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was Graycoat, half-blind with his madness, and desperate in his
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Shoot, man!" Lennox shouted. "What are you waiting for?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I take it all back," he said simply.</p>
+
+<p>"You take what back?"</p>
+
+<p>"What I thought about you&mdash;that the Failing line had gone to the dogs.
+I'll never call you a tenderfoot again."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not Dan Failing's grandson&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and win!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and win&mdash;and live.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_TWO" id="BOOK_TWO"></a>BOOK TWO</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DEBT</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IB" id="IB"></a>I</h2>
+
+
+<p>September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,&mdash;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,&mdash;the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;those smaller peoples that live in the dust and
+have beautiful, tropical forests in the ferns&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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&mdash;for that
+is the time that the forest really comes to life&mdash;and Dan Failing,
+sitting in front of Lennox's house, watching the late September moon
+rise over Bald Mountain, could hear them very plainly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;except a sawed-off specimen for family
+contingencies&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Dan nodded. "Twice! Ten times as good! I was a wreck when I came. To-day
+I climbed halfway up Baldy&mdash;within a half mile of Snowbird's
+cabin&mdash;without stopping to rest."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>ows</i> and broad, nasal <i>yahs</i>.
+It came tingling up through hundreds of yards of still forest; and both
+of them leaned forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Another deer killed," Dan suggested softly.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IIB" id="IIB"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;more in his unconscious
+self, rather than conscious&mdash;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&mdash;never in the form of words but only ineffable
+yearnings of his soul&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And because it was, it was also the song of life itself,&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it means the end of the summer?" Dan asked.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;how he's promised to turn State's evidence that will send
+about a dozen of these vipers to the penitentiary?"</p>
+
+<p>"Snowbird told me something about it."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. And there is no living thing in these woods that can stand
+against a wolf pack in its full strength."</p>
+
+<p>"Except man, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>But Dan's imagination was afire. He wasn't content yet. "They couldn't
+be&mdash;hunting man?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;something the wolves and bear of Europe and Asia haven't found out.
+The naturalists say that the reason is rather simple&mdash;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&mdash;armed with
+bows and arrows. Any animal that hunted men was immediately killed, and
+the rest found out it didn't pay."</p>
+
+<p>"Just as human beings have found out the same thing&mdash;that it doesn't pay
+to hunt their fellow men. The laws of life as well as the laws of
+nations are against it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And all he saw was Hildreth, rocking back and forth in the moonlight,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IIIB" id="IIIB"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and straightway tumbled
+back into his house with a near attack of heart failure.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a chill at the end of his
+whiskers.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IVB" id="IVB"></a>IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Whisperfoot drew near, with infinite caution. He made a perfect stalk
+clear to the end of the buckbrush. Thirty feet more&mdash;thirty feet of
+particularly difficult stalking&mdash;and he would be in leaping range. If he
+could only cross this last distance in silence, the game was his.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The distance slowly shortened. He was almost to the last thicket, from
+which he might spring. His wild blood was leaping in his veins.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and he left the lick
+in one bound.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;who, after all, has
+the best sense of humor in the forest&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;those mysterious waters that the events of life can
+hardly trouble&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And as for Whisperfoot,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VB" id="VB"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;because one leg tires before the other&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This is a very common thing for Woof to do,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;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,&mdash;and the girl had wriggled free.</p>
+
+<p>"But you mustn't do that!" she told him.</p>
+
+<p>"But, good Lord, girl! You did it to me! Is there no justice in women?"</p>
+
+<p>"But I did it to thank you for this lovely gift. For remembering me&mdash;for
+being so good&mdash;and considerate. You haven't any cause to thank me."</p>
+
+<p>He had many very serious difficulties in thinking it out. And only one
+conclusion was obtainable,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Before one hundred yards had been traversed, he could better understand
+the joy the cougar takes in his hunting. It was the same process,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Cranston was at his old trade,&mdash;setting a forest fire.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIB" id="VIB"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;full of singular conjecturing&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He had been born in the hills, and his spirit was the spirit of the
+wolf,&mdash;to kill when necessary, without mercy or remorse. Besides, Dan
+represented, in his mind, all that Cranston hated,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Cranston," he said civilly. The men had met on previous
+occasions, and always there had been the same invisible war between
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Dan felt himself straighten; and the color mounted somewhat higher in
+his brown cheeks. But he did not try to avenge the insult&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"I do very well, Cranston," Dan answered in the same tone. "Wouldn't you
+like another match? I believe your pipe has gone out."</p>
+
+<p>Very little can be said for the wisdom of this remark. It was simply
+human,&mdash;that age-old creed to answer blow for blow and insult for
+insult. Of course the inference was obvious,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"It might pay you," Cranston went on. "One of 'em is that one man's word
+is good as another's in a court&mdash;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&mdash;just that I
+don't think you'd find it a healthy thing to do."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose, then, that is a threat?"</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't just a threat." Cranston laughed harshly,&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I give you," said Dan with entire coldness, "an opportunity to take
+that back. Just about four seconds."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The only answer to his words was a laugh,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a point always quickly reached in Cranston&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and his heart
+was evidently about to shiver to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;soon or late&mdash;can never be
+in doubt.</p>
+
+<p>But even now, consciousness still lingered. Dan could hear his enemy's
+curses,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And then he dimly knew that Cranston was climbing from his body. Voices
+were speaking,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIIB" id="VIIB"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Go&mdash;go away," the girl was commanding. "I think you've killed him."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go, Snowbird," he said. "I'll leave you with your sissy. But I
+guess you saw what I did to him&mdash;in two minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"I saw. But you must remember he's sick. Now go."</p>
+
+<p>"If he's sick, let him stay in bed&mdash;and have a wet nurse. Maybe you can
+be that."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>man</i>."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;that most dreadful epithet
+that foul tongues have always used to women held in greatest scorn.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if I could only pull the trigger!" she was crying. "If I could only
+kill him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me," he pleaded. "Give me the pistol. I'll kill him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"We must go home, Snowbird," he told her simply. "I'm not so badly hurt
+but that I can make it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Dan," she said quickly. "You heard&mdash;didn't you&mdash;the last thing
+that he said?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't help but hear, Snowbird."</p>
+
+<p>Her other hand sought for his. "Then if you heard&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;and now you
+must come to mine."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you <i>think</i>, 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&mdash;only my
+own duty."</p>
+
+<p>"But he is so strong&mdash;and you are so weak&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I won't be so weak forever. I never really cared much about living
+before. I'll try now, and you'll see&mdash;oh, Snowbird, wait and trust me: I
+understand everything. It's my own fight&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it again and again.</p>
+
+<p>And for the first time he saw the tears gathering in her dark eyes. "But
+you <i>fought</i> here, didn't you, Dan?" she asked with painful slowness.
+"You didn't put up your arms&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;only that debt I owe to <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I lost, and little else matters.
+And that debt to you can't be paid until sometime I fight again&mdash;for
+you&mdash;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&mdash;that my courage can stand the test.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;too many debts to pay. In the end, I'll prove
+your words to him."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;maybe with a
+dream in the end to kiss your fingers again. When you bent and kissed me
+on that hillside&mdash;for him to see&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"But I kissed you&mdash;once before," she reminded him. The voice was just a
+whisper, hardly louder than the stir of the leaves in the wind.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"And what&mdash;" she leaned toward him, her eyes full on his, "does it mean
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Not until then," she told him, whispering.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;and it means too much."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIIIB" id="VIIIB"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;literal, entreating prayer that could not go unheard. She was a
+mountain girl, and her beliefs were those of her ancestors,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and the cough was practically gone.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the comfort and safety of the valleys or
+the rugged glory of the ridges.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He remembered now: the last blow and the rolling log. He tried to turn
+his head to look up to the hill.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the grayness that lingered over him. He seemed
+to be soaring.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The forest was silent around him, except a bird calling somewhere near
+the house&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and a leg. But we'll have to winter here on the Divide, Snowbird
+mine."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;that
+his back might be broken&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 attention would
+probably cost her father his life. The nearest telephone was at the
+ranger station, twelve miles distant over a mountain trail. The
+telephone line to Bald Mountain, four miles off, had been disconnected
+when the rains had ended the peril of the forest fire.</p>
+
+<p>It all depended upon her. Bill was driving cattle into the valleys, and
+he and his men had in use all the horses on the ranch with one
+exception. The remaining horse had been ridden by Dan to some distant
+marshes, and as Dan would shoot until sunset, that meant he would not
+return until ten o'clock. There was no road for a car to the ranger
+station, only a rough steep trail, and she remembered, with a sinking
+heart, that one of Bill's missions in the valley was to procure a new
+lighting system. By no conceivable possibility could she drive down that
+mountain road in the darkness. But she was somewhat relieved by the
+thought that in all probability she could walk twelve miles across the
+mountains to the ranger station in much less time than she could drive,
+by automobile, seventy miles down to the ranches at the foothills about
+the valley.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, she remembered with a gladdening heart that Richards, one of
+the rangers, had been a student at a medical college and had taken a
+position with the Forest Service to regain his health. She would cross
+the ridge to the station, 'phone for a doctor in the valleys, and would
+return on horseback with Richards for such first aid as he could give.
+The only problem that remained was that of getting her father into the
+house.</p>
+
+<p>He was stirring a little now. Evidently consciousness was returning to
+him. And then she thanked Heaven for the few simple lessons in first aid
+that her father had taught her in the days before his carelessness had
+come upon him. He had been wise enough to know that rare would be her
+fortune if sometime she did not have need of such knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>One of his lessons had been that of carrying an unconscious human
+form,&mdash;a method by which even a woman may carry, for a short distance, a
+heavy man. It was approximately the method used in carrying wounded in
+No Man's Land: the body thrown over the shoulders, one arm through the
+fork of the legs to the wounded man's hand. Her father was not a
+particularly heavy man, and she was an exceptionally strong young woman.
+She knew at once that this problem was solved.</p>
+
+<p>The hardest part was lifting him to her shoulders. Only by calling upon
+her last ounce of strength, and tugging upward with her arms, was she
+able to do it. But it was fairly easy, in her desperation, to carry him
+down the hill. What rest she got she took by leaning against a tree, the
+limp body still across her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>It was a distance of one hundred yards in all. No muscles but those
+trained by the outdoors, no lungs except those made strong by the
+mountain air, could have stood that test. She laid him on his own bed,
+on the lower floor, and set his broken limbs the best she could. She
+covered him up with thick, fleecy blankets, and set a bottle of whisky
+beside the bed. Then she wrote a note to Dan and fastened it upon one of
+the interior doors.</p>
+
+<p>She had learned, long ago, the value of frequent rests. She did not fly
+at once to her long tramp. For three minutes she lay perfectly limp on
+the fireplace divan, resting from the exertion of carrying her father
+down the hill. Then she drew on her hob-nailed boots&mdash;needed sorely for
+the steep climb&mdash;and pocketed her pistol. She thrust a handful of jerked
+venison into the pocket of her coat and lighted the lantern. The forest
+night had fallen, soft and vibrant and tremulous, over the heads of the
+dark trees when she started out.</p>
+
+<p>Far away on a distant hillside, Whisperfoot the cougar howled and
+complained because he could find no deer.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IXB" id="IXB"></a>IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Snowbird felt very glad of her intimate, accurate knowledge of the whole
+region of the Divide. In her infancy the winding trails had been her
+playground, and long ago she had acquired the mountaineer's sixth sense
+for traversing them at night. She had need of that knowledge now. The
+moon was dim beneath thin clouds, and the lantern she carried did not
+promise much aid. The glass was rather smoked from previous burnings,
+and its flame glowed dully and threatened to go out altogether. It cast
+a few lame beams on the trail beneath her feet; but they perished
+quickly in the expanse of darkness.</p>
+
+<p>She slipped into her free, swinging stride; and the last beams from the
+windows of the house were soon lost in the pines behind her. It was one
+of those silent, breathless nights with which no mountaineer is entirely
+unacquainted, and for a long tune the only sound she could hear was her
+own soft tramp in the pine needles. The trees themselves were
+motionless. That peculiar sound, not greatly different from that of
+running water which the wind often makes in the pine tops, was entirely
+lacking. Not that she could be deceived by it,&mdash;as stories tell that
+certain tenderfeet, dying of thirst in the barren hills, have been. But
+she always liked the sound; and she missed it especially to-night.</p>
+
+<p>She felt that if she would stop to listen, there would be many faint
+sounds in the thickets,&mdash;those little hushed noises that the wild things
+make to remind night-wanderers of their presence. But she did not in the
+least care to hear these sounds. They do not tend toward peace of mind
+on a long walk over the ridges.</p>
+
+<p>The wilderness began at once. Whatever influence toward civilization her
+father's house had brought to the wilds chopped off as beneath a blade
+in the first fringe of pines. This is altogether characteristic of the
+Oregon forests. They are much too big and too old to be tamed in any
+large degree by the presence of one house. No one knew this fact better
+than Lennox himself who, in a hard winter of four years before, had
+looked out of his window to find the wolf pack ranged in a hungry circle
+about his house. Within two hundred yards after she had passed through
+her father's door, she was perfectly aware that the wild was stirring
+and throbbing with life about her. At first she tried very hard to think
+of other things. But the attempt wasn't entirely a success. And before
+she had covered the first of the twelve miles, the sounds that from the
+first had been knocking at the door of her consciousness began to make
+an entrance.</p>
+
+<p>If a person lies still long enough, he can usually hear his heart
+beating and the flow of his blood in his arteries. Any sound, no matter
+how faint, will make itself heard at last. It was this way with a very
+peculiar noise that crept up through the silence from the trail behind
+her. She wouldn't give it any heed at first. But in a very little while
+indeed, it grew so insistent that she could no longer disregard it.</p>
+
+<p>Some living creature was trotting along on the trail behind, keeping
+approximately the same distance between them.</p>
+
+<p>Foregoing any attempt to ignore it, she set her cool young mind to
+thinking what manner of beast it might be. Its step was not greatly
+different from that of a large dog,&mdash;except possibly a dog would have
+made slightly more noise. Yet she couldn't even be sure of this basic
+premise, because this animal, whatever it might be, had at first
+seemingly moved with utmost caution, but now took less care with its
+step than is customary with the wild denizens of the woods. A wolf, for
+instance, can simply drift when it wishes, and the silence of a cougar
+is a name. Yet unless her pursuer were a dog, which seemed entirely
+unlikely, it was certainly one of these two. She would have liked very
+much to believe the step was that of Old Woof, the bear, suddenly
+curious as to what this dim light of hers might be; but she couldn't
+bring herself to accept the lie. Woof, except when wounded or cornered,
+is the most amiable creature in the Oregon woods, and it would give her
+almost a sense of security to have him waddling along behind her. The
+wolves and cougar, remembering the arms of Woof, would not be nearly so
+curious. But unfortunately, the black bear had never done such a thing
+in the memory of man, and if he had, he would have made six times as
+much noise. He can go fairly softly when he is stalking, but when he is
+obliged to trot&mdash;as he would be obliged to do to keep up with a
+swift-walking human figure&mdash;he cracks twigs like a rolling log. She had
+the impression that the animal behind had been passing like smoke at
+first, but wasn't taking the trouble to do it now.</p>
+
+<p>The sound was a soft <i>pat-pat</i> on the trail,&mdash;sometimes entirely
+obliterated but always recurring when she began to believe that she had
+only fancied its presence. Sometimes a twig, rain-soaked though it was,
+cracked beneath a heavy foot, and again and again she heard the brush
+crushing and rustling as something passed through. Behind it all, a
+weird <i>motif</i>, remained the <i>pat-pat</i> of cushioned feet. Sometimes, when
+the trail was covered with soft pine needles, it was practically
+indistinguishable. She had to strain to hear it,&mdash;and it is not pleasing
+to the spirit to have to strain to hear any sound. On the bare,
+rain-packed earth, even untrained plainsmen's ears could not possibly
+doubt the reality of the sound.</p>
+
+<p>The animal was approximately one hundred feet behind. It wasn't a wolf,
+she thought. The wolves ran in packs this season, and except in winter
+were more afraid of human beings than any other living creature. It
+wasn't a lynx&mdash;one of those curiosity-devoured little felines that will
+mew all day on a trail and never dare come near. It was much too large
+for a lynx. The feet fell too solidly. She had already given up the idea
+that it could be Woof. There were no dogs in the mountains to follow at
+heel; and she had no desire whatever to meet Shag, the faithful hybrid
+that used to be her guardian in the hills. For Shag had gone to his
+well-deserved rest several seasons before. Two other possibilities
+remained. One was that this follower was a human being, the other that
+it was a cougar.</p>
+
+<p>Ordinarily a human being is much more potentially dangerous to a woman
+in the hills at night than a cougar. A cougar is an abject coward and
+some men are not. But Snowbird felt herself entirely capable of handling
+any human foes. They would have no advantage over her; they would have
+no purpose in killing from ambush; and she trusted to her own
+marksmanship implicitly. While it is an extremely difficult thing to
+shoot at a cougar leaping from the thicket, a tall man standing on a
+trail presents an easy target. Besides, she had a vague sense of
+discomfort that if this animal were a cougar, he wasn't acting true to
+form. He was altogether too bold.</p>
+
+<p>She knew perfectly that many times since men came to live in the
+pine-clad mountains they have been followed by the great, tawny cats.
+Curiosity had something to do with it, and perhaps less pleasing
+reasons. But any dreadful instincts that such a cat may have, he utterly
+lacks courage to obey. He has an inborn fear of men, a fear that goes
+down to the roots of the world, and he simply doesn't dare make an
+attack. It was always a rather distressing experience, but nothing ever
+came of it except a good tale around a fireside. But most of these
+episodes, Snowbird remembered, occurred either in daylight or in the dry
+season. The reason was obviously that in the damp woods or at night a
+stalking cougar cannot be perceived by human senses. Her own senses
+could perceive this animal all too plainly,&mdash;and the fact suggested
+unpleasant possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>The animal on the trail behind her was taking no care at all to go
+silently. He was simply pat-patting along, wholly at his ease. He acted
+as if the fear that men have instilled in his breed was somehow missing.
+And that is why she instinctively tried to hurry on the trail.</p>
+
+<p>The step kept pace. For a long mile, up a barren ridge, she heard every
+step it made. Then, as the brush closed deeper around her, she couldn't
+hear it at all.</p>
+
+<p>She hurried on, straining to the silence. No, the sound was stopped.
+Could it be that the animal, fearful at last, had turned from her trail?
+And then for the first time a gasp that was not greatly different from a
+despairing sob caught at her throat. She heard the steps again, and they
+were in the thickets just beside her.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Two hours before Snowbird had left the house, on her long tramp to the
+ranger station, Dan had started home. He hadn't shot until sunset, as he
+had planned. The rear guard of the waterfowl&mdash;hardy birds who spent most
+of the winter in the Lake region and which had come south in the great
+flight that had been completed some weeks before&mdash;had passed in hundreds
+over his blind, and he had obtained the limit he had set upon
+himself&mdash;ten drake mallards&mdash;by four o'clock in the afternoon. If he had
+stayed to shoot longer, his birds would have been wasted. So he started
+back along a certain winding trail that led through the thickets and
+which would, if followed long enough, carry him to the road that led to
+the valleys.</p>
+
+<p>He rode one of Lennox's cattle ponies, the only piece of horse-flesh
+that Bill had not taken to the valleys when he had driven down the
+livestock. She was a pretty bay, a spirited, high-bred mare that could
+whip about on her hind legs at the touch of the rein on her neck. She
+made good time along the trail. And an hour before sunset he passed the
+only human habitation between the marsh and Lennox's house,&mdash;the cabin
+that had been recently occupied by Landy Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the place as he passed and saw that it was deserted. No
+smell of wood smoke remained in the air. Evidently Landy had gone down
+to the settlements with his precious testimony in regard to the arson
+ring. Yet it was curious that no word had been heard of him. As far as
+Dan knew, neither the courts nor the Forest Service had taken action.</p>
+
+<p>He hurried on, four miles farther. The trail entered the heavy thickets,
+and he had to ride slowly. It was as wild a section as could be found on
+the whole Divide. Once a deer leaped from the trail, and once he heard
+Woof grunting in the thickets. And just as he came to a little cleared
+space, three strange, dark birds flung up on wide-spreading wings.</p>
+
+<p>He knew them at once. All mountaineers come to know them before their
+days are done. They were the buzzards, the followers of the dead. And
+what they were doing in the thicket just beside the trail, Dan did not
+dare to think.</p>
+
+<p>Of course they might be feeding on the body of a deer, mortally wounded
+by some hunter. He resolved to ride by without investigating. He glanced
+up. The buzzards were hovering in the sky, evidently waiting for him to
+pass. Then, mostly to relieve a curious sense of discomfort in his own
+mind, he stopped his horse and dismounted.</p>
+
+<p>The twilight had started to fall, and already its first grayness had
+begun to soften the harder lines of forest and hill. And after his
+first glance at the curious white heap beside the trail, he was
+extremely glad that it had. But there was no chance to mistake the
+thing. The elements and much more terrible agents had each wrought their
+change, yet there was grisly evidence in plenty to show what had
+occurred. Dan didn't doubt for an instant but that it was the skeleton
+of Landy Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>He forced himself to go nearer. The buzzards were almost done, and one
+white bone from the shoulder gave unmistakable evidence of the passage
+of a bullet. What had happened thereafter, he could only guess.</p>
+
+<p>He got back quickly on his horse. He understood, now, why nothing had
+been heard of the evidence that Landy Hildreth was to turn over to the
+courts as to the activities of the arson ring. Some one&mdash;probably Bert
+Cranston himself&mdash;had been waiting on the trail. Others had come
+thereafter. And his lips set in his resolve to let this murder measure
+in the debt he had to pay Cranston.</p>
+
+<p>The Lennox house seemed very silent when, almost an hour later, he
+turned his horse into the corral. He had rather hoped that Snowbird
+would be at the door to meet him. The darkness had just fallen, and all
+the lamps were lighted. He strode into the living room, warming his
+hands an instant beside the fireplace. The fire needed fuel. It had
+evidently been neglected for nearly an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Then he called Snowbird. His voice echoed in the silent room,
+unanswered. He called again, then went to look for her. At the door of
+the dining room he found the note that she had left for him.</p>
+
+<p>It told, very simply and plainly, that her father lay injured in his
+bed, and he was to remain and do what he could for him. She had gone for
+help to the ranger station.</p>
+
+<p>He leaped through the rooms to Lennox's door, then went in on tiptoe.
+And the first thing he saw when he opened the door was the grizzled
+man's gray face on the pillow.</p>
+
+<p>"You're home early, Dan," he said. "How many did you get?"</p>
+
+<p>It was entirely characteristic. Shaggy old Woof is too proud to howl
+over the wounds that lay him low, and this gray old bear on the bed had
+partaken of his spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord," Dan answered. "How badly are you hurt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not so bad but that I'm sorry that Snowbird has gone drifting twelve
+miles over the hills for help. It's dark as pitch."</p>
+
+<p>And it was. Dan could scarcely make out the outline of the somber ridges
+against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>They talked on, and their subject was whether Dan should remain to take
+care of Lennox, or whether he should attempt to overtake Snowbird with
+the horse. Of course the girl had ordered him to stay. Lennox, on the
+other hand, said that Dan could not help him in the least, and desired
+him to follow the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not often anxious about her," he said slowly. "But it is a long
+walk through the wildest part of the Divide. She's got nothing but a
+pistol and a lantern that won't shine. Besides&mdash;I've had bad dreams."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean&mdash;" Dan's words came hard&mdash;"that she's in any danger from
+the animals&mdash;the cougars&mdash;or the wolves?"</p>
+
+<p>"Barring accidents, no. But, Dan&mdash;I want you to go. I'm resting fairly
+easily, and there's whisky on the table in case of a pinch. Someway&mdash;I
+can't bar accidents to-night. I don't like to think of her on those
+mountains alone."</p>
+
+<p>And remembering what had lain beside the trail, Dan felt the same. He
+had heard, long ago, that any animal that has once tasted human flesh
+loses its fear of men and is never to be trusted again. Some wild animal
+that still hunted the ridges had, in the last month, done just that
+thing. He left the room and walked softly to the door.</p>
+
+<p>The night lay silent and mysterious over the Divide. He stood listening.
+The girl had started only an hour before, and it was unlikely that she
+could have traversed more than two miles of the steep trail in that
+time. He could fancy her toiling ever upward, somewhere on the dark
+ridge that lay beyond. Although the horse ordinarily did not climb a
+hill more swiftly than a human being, he didn't doubt but that he could
+overtake her before she went three miles farther. But where lay his
+duty,&mdash;with the injured man in the house or with the daughter on her
+errand of mercy in the darkness?</p>
+
+<p>Then the matter was decided for him. So faint that it only whispered at
+the dim, outer frontiers of hearing, a sound came pricking through the
+darkness. Only his months of listening to the faint sounds of the
+forest, and the incredible silence of the night enabled him to hear it
+at all. But he knew what it was, the report of a pistol. Snowbird had
+met an enemy in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>He called once to Lennox, snatched the shotgun that still stood where he
+had placed it in the corner of the room, and hastened to the corral. The
+mare whickered plaintively when he took her from her food.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XB" id="XB"></a>X</h2>
+
+
+<p>Even in the darkest night, there is one light that never brings hope or
+cannot lead. It is not a twinkling, joyous light like that mysterious
+will-o'-the-wisp that now and again has lured travelers into the marshes
+to their death. Nor can any one ever mistake it, or be soothed and
+cheered by it. It always appears the same way,&mdash;two green circles, close
+together, in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>When Snowbird first heard the step in the thickets beside her, she
+halted bravely and held her lantern high. She understood at last. The
+very extremity of the beams found a reflection in two very curious
+circles of greenish fire: a fire that was old upon the world before man
+ever rubbed two sticks together to strike a flame. Of course the dim
+rays had simply been reflected on the eyes of some great beast of prey.</p>
+
+<p>She identified it at once. Only the eyes of the felines, with vertical
+pupils, have this identical greenish glare. The eyes of the wolves glow
+in the darkness, but the circles are usually just bright points. Of
+course it was a cougar.</p>
+
+<p>She didn't cry out again. Realizing at last the reality of her peril,
+her long training in the mountains came to her aid. That did not mean
+she was not truly and terribly afraid. The sight of the eyes of a
+hunting animal in the darkness calls up memories from the
+germ-plasm,&mdash;deep-buried horrors of thousands of generations past, when
+such lights glowed all about the mouth of the cave. Besides, the beast
+was hunting <i>her</i>. She couldn't doubt this fact. Curiosity might make a
+lion follow her, but it would never beget such a wild light of madness
+in his eyes as this she had just seen. Only the frenzied pulse of wild
+blood through the fine vessels of the corneas could occasion such a glow
+as this. She simply clamped down all her moral strength on her rising
+hysteria and looked her situation in the face. Her hand flew
+instinctively to her side, and the pistol leaped in the lantern light.</p>
+
+<p>But the eyes had already blinked out before she could raise the weapon.
+She shot twice. The echoes roared back, unbelievably loud in the
+silence, and then abruptly died; and the only sound was a rustling of
+leaves as the cougar crouched. She sobbed once, then hurried on.</p>
+
+<p>She was afraid to listen at first. She wanted to believe that her pistol
+fire would frighten the animal from her trail. She knew, under ordinary
+conditions, that it would. If he still followed, it could mean but one
+thing,&mdash;that some unheard-of incident had occurred to destroy his fear
+of men. It would mean that he had knowingly set upon her trail and was
+hunting her with all the age-old remorselessness that is the code of the
+mountains.</p>
+
+<p>For a little while all was silence. Then out of the hush the thickets
+suddenly crashed and shook on the opposite side of the trail. She fired
+blindly into the thicket. Then she caught herself with a sob. But two
+shells remained in her pistol, and they must be saved for the test.</p>
+
+<p>Whisperfoot the cougar, remembering the lessons of his youth, turned
+from the trail when he had first heard Snowbird's step. He had crouched
+and let her pass. She was walking into the wind; and as she was at the
+closest point a message had blown back to him.</p>
+
+<p>The hair went straight on his shoulders and along his spine. His blood,
+running cold an instant before from fear, made a great leap in his
+veins. A picture came in his dark mind: the chase for a deer when the
+moon had set, the stir of a living thing that broke twigs in the
+thickets, and the leap he had made. There had been blood, that
+night,&mdash;the wildness and the madness and the exultation of the kill. Of
+course there had been terror first, but the terror had soon departed and
+left something lying warm and still in the thickets. It was the same
+game that walked his trail in front&mdash;game that died easily and yet, in a
+vague way he did not understand, the noblest game of all. It was living
+flesh, to tear with talon and fang.</p>
+
+<p>All his training, all the instincts imbued in him by a thousand
+generations of cougars who knew this greatest fear, were simply
+obliterated by the sudden violence of his hunting-madness. He had tasted
+this blood once, and it could never be forgotten. The flame leaped in
+his eyes. And then he began the stalk.</p>
+
+<p>A cougar, trying to creep silently on its game, does not move quickly.
+It simply steals, as a serpent steals through the grass. Whisperfoot
+stalked for a period of five minutes, to learn that the prey was farther
+away from him at every step.</p>
+
+<p>He trotted forward until he came close, and again he stalked. Again he
+found, after a few minutes of silent creeping through the thickets, that
+he had lost distance. Evidently this game did not feed slowly, like the
+deer. It was to be a chase then. Again he trotted within one hundred
+feet of the girl.</p>
+
+<p>Three times more he tried to stalk before he finally gave it up
+altogether. This game was like the porcupine,&mdash;simply to be chased down
+and taken. As in the case of all animals that hunt their game by
+overtaking it, there was no longer any occasion for going silently. The
+thing to do was to come close and spring from the trail behind.</p>
+
+<p>Though the fear was mostly gone, the cougar retained enough of that
+caution that most wild animals exhibit when hunting a new game so that
+he didn't attempt to strike Snowbird down at once. But as the chase went
+on, his passion grew upon him. Ever he crept nearer. And at last he
+sprang full into the thickets beside her.</p>
+
+<p>At that instant she had shot for the first time. Because the light had
+left his eyes before she could find aim, both shots had been clean
+misses. And terrible as the reports were, he was too engrossed in the
+chase to be frightened away by mere sound. This was the cry the man-pack
+always made,&mdash;these sudden, startling sounds in the silence. But he felt
+no pain. He crouched a moment, shivering. Then he bounded on again.</p>
+
+<p>The third shot was a miss too: in fact, there had been no chance for a
+hit. A sound in the darkness is as unreliable a target as can possibly
+be imagined. And it didn't frighten him as much as the others.</p>
+
+<p>Three times he crouched, preparing for a spring, and three times his
+tawny tail began that little up-and-down motion that is always the
+warning before his leap. But each time, as he waited to find his
+courage, the game had hurried on.</p>
+
+<p>Now she had her back to a tree and was holding the lantern high. It
+glinted on his eyes. And the fourth time she shot, and something hot and
+strange singed by close to his head. But it wasn't the pain of one quill
+from a porcupine, and it only increased his anger. He waited, crouching,
+and the girl started on.</p>
+
+<p>She was making other sounds now&mdash;queer, whimpering sounds not greatly
+different from the bleat that the fawn utters when it dies. It was a
+fear-sound, and if there is one emotion with which the wild beasts are
+acquainted, in all its phases, it is fear. She was afraid of him then,
+and that meant he need no longer be in the least afraid of her. His skin
+began to twitch all over with that terrible madness and passion of the
+flesh-hunters.</p>
+
+<p>This game was like the deer, and the thing to do was lie in wait. There
+was only one trail. He was simply following his instincts, no conscious
+intelligence, when he made a long circle about her and turned back to
+the trail two hundred yards in front. He wasn't afraid of losing her in
+the darkness. She was neither fleet like the deer nor courageous like
+Woof, the bear. He had only to wait and leap from the darkness when she
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>And because this was his own way of hunting, because the experiences of
+a thousand generations of cougars had taught him that it was the safest
+way, that even an elk may be downed by a surprise leap from ambush, the
+last of his fear went out of him. The step drew nearer, and he knew he
+would not again be afraid to give his stroke.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When Dan Failing, riding like mad over the mountain trail, heard the
+third shot from Snowbird's pistol, he felt that one of the debts he owed
+had come due at last. He seemed to know, as the darkness pressed around
+him, that he was to be tried in the fire. And the horse staggered
+beneath him as he tried to hasten.</p>
+
+<p>He showed no mercy to his mount. Horseflesh isn't made for carrying a
+heavy man over such a trail as this, and she was red-nostriled and
+lathered before half a mile had been covered. He made her leap up the
+rocks, and on the fairly level stretches he loosed the reins and lashed
+her into a gallop. Only a mountain horse could have stood that test. To
+Dan's eyes, the darkness was absolute; yet she kept straight to the
+trail. He made no attempt to guide her. She bounded over logs that he
+couldn't see, and followed turn after turn in the trail without ever a
+misstep.</p>
+
+<p>He gave no thought to his own safety. His courage was at the test, and
+no risk of his own life must interfere with his attempt to save Snowbird
+from the danger that threatened her. He didn't know when the horse would
+fall with him and precipitate him down a precipice, and he was perfectly
+aware that to crash into a low-hanging limb of one of the great trees
+beside the trail would probably crush his skull. But he took the chance.
+And before the ride was done he found himself pleading with the horse,
+even as he lashed her sides with his whip.</p>
+
+<p>The lesser forest creatures sprang from his trail; and once the mare
+leaped high to miss a dark shadow that crossed in front. As she caught
+her stride, Dan heard a squeal and a rattle of quills that identified
+the creature as a porcupine.</p>
+
+<p>By now he had passed the first of the worst grades, coming out upon a
+long, easy slope of open forest. Again he urged his horse, leaving to
+her keen senses alone the choosing of the path between the great tree
+trunks. He rode almost in silence. The deep carpet of pine needles, wet
+from the recent rains, dulled the sound of the horse's hoofs.</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard Snowbird fire for the fourth time; and he knew that he had
+almost overtaken her. The report seemed to smash the air. And he lashed
+his horse into the fastest run she knew,&mdash;a wild, sobbing figure in the
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"She's only got one shot more," he said. He knew how many bullets her
+pistol carried; and the danger&mdash;whatever it was&mdash;must be just at hand.
+Underbrush cracked beneath him. And then the horse drew up with a jerk
+that almost hurled him from the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>He lashed at her in vain. She was not afraid of the darkness and the
+rocks of the trail, but some Terror in the woods in front had in an
+instant broken his control over her. She reared, snorting; then danced
+in an impotent circle. Meanwhile, precious seconds were fleeing.</p>
+
+<p>He understood now. The horse stood still, shivering beneath him, but
+would not advance a step. The silence deepened. Somewhere in the
+darkness before him a great cougar was waiting by the trail, and
+Snowbird, hoping for the moment that it had given up the chase, was
+hastening through the shadows squarely into its ambush.</p>
+
+<p>Whisperfoot crouched lower: and again his long serpent of a tail began
+the little vertical motion that always precedes his leap. He had not
+forgotten the wild rapture of that moment he had inadvertently sprung on
+Landy Hildreth,&mdash;or how, after his terror had died, he had come creeping
+back. He hunted his own way, waiting on the trail; and his madness was
+at its height. He was not just Whisperfoot; the coward, that runs at the
+shadow of a tall form in the thickets. The consummation was complete,
+and that single experience of a month before had made of him a hunter of
+men. His muscles set for the leap.</p>
+
+<p>So intent was he that his keen senses didn't detect the fact that there
+was a curious echo to the girl's footsteps. Dan Failing had slipped down
+from his terrified horse and was running up the trail behind her,
+praying that he could be in time.</p>
+
+<p>Snowbird heard the pat, pat of his feet; but at first she did not dare
+to hope that aid had come to her. She had thought of Dan as on the
+far-away marshes; and her father, the only other living occupant of this
+part of the Divide, might even now be lying dead in his house. In her
+terror, she had lost all power of interpretation of events. The sound
+might be the cougar's mate, or even the wolf pack, jealous of his game.
+Sobbing, she hurried on into Whisperfoot's ambush.</p>
+
+<p>Then she heard a voice, and it seemed to be calling to her.
+"Snowbird&mdash;I'm coming, Snowbird," a man's strong voice was shouting. She
+whirled with a sob of thankfulness.</p>
+
+<p>At that instant the cougar sprang.</p>
+
+<p>Terrified though she was, Snowbird's reflexes had kept sure and true.
+Even as the great cat leaped, a long, lithe shadow out of the shadow,
+her finger pressed back against the trigger of her pistol. She had been
+carrying her gun in front of her, and she fired it, this last time, with
+no conscious effort. It was just a last instinctive effort to defend
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>One other element affected the issue. She had whirled to answer Dan's
+cry just as the cougar left the ground. But she had still been in range.
+The only effect was to lessen, in some degree, the accuracy of the
+spring. The bullet caught the beast in mid-air; but even if it had
+reached its heart, the momentum of the attack was too great to be
+completely overcome. Snowbird only knew that some vast, resistless power
+had struck her, and that the darkness seemed to roar and explode about
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Hurled to her face in the trail, she did not see the cougar sprawl on
+the earth beside her. The flame in the lantern almost flicked out as it
+fell from her hand, then flashed up and down, from the deepest gloom to
+a vivid glare with something of the effect of lightning flickering in
+the sky. Nor did she hear the first frenzied thrashing of the wounded
+animal. Kindly unconsciousness had fallen, obscuring this and also the
+sight of the great cat, in the agony of its wound, creeping with broken
+shoulder and bared claws across the pine needles toward her defenseless
+body.</p>
+
+<p>But the terrible fangs were never to know her white flesh. Some one had
+come between. There was no chance to shoot: Whisperfoot and the girl
+were too near together for that. But one course remained; and there was
+not even time to count the cost. In this most terrible moment of Dan
+Failing's life, there was not even an instant's hesitation. He did not
+know that Whisperfoot was wounded. He saw the beast creeping forward in
+the weird dancing light of the fallen lantern, and he only knew that his
+flesh, not hers, must resist its rending talons. Nothing else mattered.
+No other considerations could come between.</p>
+
+<p>It was the test; and Dan's instincts prompted coolly and well. He
+leaped with all his strength. The cougar bounded into his arms, not upon
+the prone body of the girl. And she opened her eyes to hear a curious
+thrashing in the pine needles, a strange grim battle that, as the
+lantern flashed out, was hidden in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>And that battle, in the far reaches of the Divide, passed into a legend.
+It was the tale of how Dan Failing, his gun knocked from his hands as he
+met the cougar's leap, with his own unaided arms kept the life-giving
+breath from the animal's lungs and killed him in the pine needles. Claw
+and fang and the frenzy of death could not matter at all.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Failing established before all men his right to the name he bore.
+And thus he paid one of his debts&mdash;life for a life, as the code of the
+forest has always decreed&mdash;and in the fire of danger and pain his metal
+was tried and proven.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_THREE" id="BOOK_THREE"></a>BOOK THREE</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PAYMENT</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IC" id="IC"></a>I</h2>
+
+
+<p>The Lennox home, in the far wilderness of the Umpqua Divide, looked
+rather like an emergency hospital for the first few days after Dan's
+fight with Whisperfoot. Its old sounds of laughter and talk were almost
+entirely lacking. Two injured men and a girl recovering from a nervous
+collapse do not tend toward cheer.</p>
+
+<p>But the natural sturdiness of all three quickly came to their aid. Of
+course Lennox had been severely injured by the falling log, and many
+weeks would pass before he would be able to walk again. He could sit up
+for short periods, however; had the partial use of one arm; and could
+propel himself&mdash;after the first few weeks&mdash;at a snail's pace through the
+rooms in a rude wheel chair that Bill's ingenuity had contrived. The
+great livid scratches that Dan bore on his body quickly began to heal;
+and before a week was done, he began to venture forth on the hills
+again. Snowbird had remained in bed for three days: then she had hopped
+out, one bright afternoon, swearing never to go back into it again.
+Evidently the crisp, fall air of the mountains had been a nerve tonic
+for them all.</p>
+
+<p>Of course there had been medical attention. A doctor and a nurse had
+motored up the day after the accident; the physician had set the bones
+and departed, and the nurse remained for a week, to see the grizzled
+mountaineer well on the way of convalescence. But it was an anxious
+wait, and Lennox's car was kept constantly in readiness to speed her
+away in case the snows should start. At last she had left him in
+Snowbird's hands, and Bill had driven her back to the settlements in his
+father's car. The die was now cast as to whether or not Dan and the
+remainder of the family should winter in the mountains. The snow clouds
+deepened every day, the frost was ever heavier in the dawns, and the
+road would surely remain open only a few days more.</p>
+
+<p>Once more the three seemingly had the Divide all to themselves. Bert
+Cranston had evidently deserted his cabin and was working a trap-line on
+the Umpqua side. The rangers left the little station, all danger of fire
+past, and went down to their offices in the Federal building of one of
+the little cities below. Because he was worse than useless in the deep
+snows that were sure to come, one of the ranch hands that had driven up
+with Bill rode away to the valleys the last of the live stock,&mdash;the
+horse that Dan had ridden to Snowbird's defense.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing had been heard of Landy Hildreth, who used to live on the trail
+to the marsh, and both Lennox and his daughter wondered why. There were
+also certain officials who had begun to be curious. As yet, Dan had told
+no one of the grim find he had made on his return from hunting. And he
+would have found it an extremely difficult fact to explain.</p>
+
+<p>It all went back to those inner springs of motive that few men can see
+clearly enough within themselves to recognize. Even the first day, when
+he lay burning from his wounds, he worked out his own explanation in
+regard to the murder mystery. He hadn't the slightest doubt but that
+Cranston had killed Hildreth to prevent his testimony from reaching the
+courts below. Of course any other member of the arson ring of hillmen
+might have been the murderer; yet Dan was inclined to believe that
+Cranston, the leader of the gang, usually preferred to do such dangerous
+work as this himself. If it were true, somewhere on that tree-clad ridge
+clues would be left. By a law that went down to the roots of life, he
+knew, no action is so small but that it leaves its mark. Moreover, it
+was wholly possible that the written testimony Hildreth must have
+gathered had never been found or destroyed. Dan didn't want the aid of
+the courts to find these clues. He wanted to work out the case himself.
+It resolved itself into a simple matter of vengeance: Dan had his debt
+to pay, and he wanted to bring Cranston to ruin by his own hand alone.</p>
+
+<p>While it was true that he took rather more than the casual interest that
+most citizens feel in the destruction of the forest by wanton fire, and
+had an actual sense of duty to do all that he could to stop the
+activities of the arson ring, his motives, stripped and bare, were
+really not utilitarian. He had no particular interest in Hildreth's
+case. He remembered him simply as one of Cranston's disreputable gang, a
+poacher and a fire bug himself. When all is said and done, it remained
+really a personal issue between Dan and Cranston. And personal issues
+are frowned upon by law and society. Civilization has toiled up from the
+darkness in a great measure to get away from them. But human nature
+remains distressingly the same, and Dan's desire to pay his debt was a
+distinctly human emotion. Sometime a breed will live upon the earth that
+can get clear away from personal vengeance&mdash;from that age-old code of
+the hills that demands a blow for a blow and a life for a life&mdash;but the
+time is not yet. And after all, by all the standards of men as men, not
+as read in idealistic philosophies, Dan's debt was entirely real. By the
+light held high by his ancestors, he could not turn his other cheek.</p>
+
+<p>Just as soon as he was able, he went back to the scene of the murder. He
+didn't know when the snow would come to cover what evidence there was.
+It threatened every hour. Every wind promised it. The air was sharp and
+cold, and no drop of rain could fall through it without crystallizing
+into snow. The deer had all gone, and the burrowing people had sought
+their holes. The bees worked no more in the winter flowers. Of all the
+greater forest creatures, only the wolves and the bear remained,&mdash;the
+former because their fear of men would not permit them to go down to the
+lower hills, and the latter because of his knowledge that when food
+became scarce, he could always burrow in the snow. No bear goes into
+hibernation from choice. Wise old bachelor, he much prefers to keep just
+as late hours as he can&mdash;as long as the eating places in the berry
+thickets remain open. The cougars had all gone down with the deer, the
+migratory birds had departed, and even the squirrels were in hiding.</p>
+
+<p>The scene didn't offer much in the way of clues. Of the body itself,
+only a white heap of bones remained; for many and terrible had been the
+agents at work upon them. The clothes, however, particularly the coat,
+were practically intact. Gripping himself, Dan thrust his fingers into
+its pockets, then into the pockets of the shirt and trousers. All papers
+that would in any way serve to identify the murdered man, or tell what
+his purpose had been in journeying down the trail the night of the
+murder had been removed. Only one explanation presented itself. Cranston
+had come before him, and searched the body himself.</p>
+
+<p>Dan looked about for tracks, and he was considerably surprised to find
+the blurred, indistinct imprint of a shoe other than his own. He hadn't
+the least hope that the tracks themselves would offer a clue to a
+detective. They were too dim for that. The surprising fact was that
+since the murder had been committed immediately before the fall rains,
+the water had not completely washed them out. The only possibility
+remaining was that Cranston had returned to the body after the week's
+rain-fall. The track had been dimmed by the lighter rains that had
+fallen since.</p>
+
+<p>But yet it was entirely to be expected that the examination of the body
+would be an after-thought on Cranston's part. Possibly at first his
+only thought was to kill and, following the prompting that has sent so
+many murderers to the gallows, he had afterwards returned to the scene
+of the crime to destroy any clues he might have left and to search the
+body for any evidence against the arson ring.</p>
+
+<p>Dan's next thought was to follow along the trail and find Cranston's
+ambush. Of course it would be in the direction of the settlement from
+the body, as the bullet had entered from the front. He found it hard to
+believe that Hildreth had fallen in the exact spot where the body lay.
+Men journeying at night keep to the trail, and the white heap itself was
+fully forty feet back from the trail in the thickets. Perhaps Cranston
+had dragged it there to hide it from the sight of any one who might pass
+along the lonely trail again; and it was a remote possibility that
+Whisperfoot, coming in the night, had tugged it into the thickets for
+dreadful purposes of his own. Likely the shot was fired when Hildreth
+was in an open place on the trail; and Dan searched for the ambush with
+this conclusion in mind. He walked back, looking for a thicket from
+which such a spot would be visible. Something over fifty yards down he
+found it; and he knew it by the empty brass rifle cartridge that lay
+half buried in the wet leaves.</p>
+
+<p>The shell was of the same caliber as Cranston's hunting rifle. Dan's
+hand shook as he put it in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>Encouraged by this amazing find, he turned up the trail toward
+Hildreth's cabin. It might be possible, he thought, that Hildreth had
+left some of his testimony&mdash;perhaps such rudely scrawled letters as
+Cranston had written him&mdash;in some forgotten drawer in his hut. It was
+but a short walk for Dan's hardened legs, and he made it before
+mid-afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>The search itself was wholly without result. But because he had time to
+think as he climbed the ridge, because as he strode along beneath that
+wintry sky he had a chance to consider every detail of the case, he was
+able to start out on a new tack when, just before sunset, he returned to
+the body. This new train of thought had as its basis that Cranston's
+shot had not been deadly at once; that wounded, Hildreth had himself
+crawled into the thickets where Whisperfoot had found him. And that
+meant that he had to enlarge his search for such documents as Hildreth
+had carried to include all the territory between the trail and the
+location of the body.</p>
+
+<p>It was possibly a distance of forty feet, and getting down on his hands
+and knees, Dan looked for any break in the shrubbery that would
+indicate the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. And it was ten
+minutes well rewarded, as far as clearing up certain details of the
+crime. His senses had been trained and sharpened by his months in the
+wilderness, and he was able to back-track the wounded man from the
+skeleton clear to the clearing on the trail where he had first fallen.
+But as no clues presented themselves, he started to turn home.</p>
+
+<p>He walked twelve feet, then turned back. Out of the corner of his eye it
+seemed to him that he had caught a flash of white, near the end of a
+great, dead log beside the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. It
+was to the credit of his mountain training alone that his eye had been
+keen enough to detect it; that it had been so faithfully recorded on his
+consciousness; and that, knowing at last the importance of details, he
+had turned back. For a moment he searched in vain. Evidently a yellow
+leaf had deceived him. Once more he retraced his steps, trying to find
+the position from which his eye had caught the glimpse of white. Then he
+dived straight for the rotten end of the log.</p>
+
+<p>Into a little hollow in the bark, on the underside of the log, some hand
+had thrust a small roll of papers. They were rain soaked now, and the
+ink had dimmed and blotted; but Dan realized their significance. They
+were the complete evidence that Hildreth had accumulated against the
+arson ring,&mdash;letters that had passed back and forth between himself and
+Cranston, a threat of murder from the former if Hildreth turned State's
+evidence, and a signed statement of the arson activities of the ring by
+Hildreth himself. They were not only enough to break up the ring and
+send its members to prison; with the aid of the empty shell and other
+circumstantial evidence, they could in all probability convict Bert
+Cranston of murder.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time he stood with the shadows of the pines lengthening about
+him, his gray eyes in curious shadow. For the moment a glimpse was given
+him into the deep wells of the human soul; and understanding came to
+him. Was there no balm for hatred even in the moment of death? Were men
+unable to forget the themes and motives of their lives, even when the
+shadows closed down upon them? Hildreth had known what hand had struck
+him down. And even on the frontier of death, his first thought was to
+hide his evidence where Cranston could not find it when he searched the
+body, but where later it might be found by the detectives that were sure
+to come. It was the old creed of a life for a life. He wanted his
+evidence to be preserved,&mdash;not that right should be wronged, but so that
+Cranston would be prosecuted and convicted and made to suffer. His
+hatred of Cranston that had made him turn State's evidence in the first
+place had been carried with him down into death.</p>
+
+<p>As Dan stood wondering, he thought he heard a twig crack on the trail
+behind him, and he wondered what forest creature was still lingering on
+the ridges at the eve of the snows.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IIC" id="IIC"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p>The snow began to fall in earnest at midnight,&mdash;great, white flakes that
+almost in an instant covered the leaves. It was the real beginning of
+winter, and all living creatures knew it. The wolf pack sang to it from
+the ridge,&mdash;a wild and plaintive song that made Bert Cranston, sleeping
+in a lean-to on the Umpqua side of the Divide, swear and mutter in his
+sleep. But he didn't really waken until Jim Gibbs, one of his gang,
+returned from his secret mission.</p>
+
+<p>They wasted no words. Bert flung aside the blankets, lighted a candle,
+and placed it out of the reach of the night wind. It cast queer shadows
+in the lean-to and found a curious reflection in the steel points of his
+eyes. His face looked swarthy and deep-lined in its light.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he demanded. "What did you find?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothin'," Jim Gibbs answered gutturally. "If you ask me what I found
+<i>out</i>, I might have somethin' to answer."</p>
+
+<p>"Then&mdash;" and Bert, after the manner of his kind, breathed an oath&mdash;"what
+did you find out?"</p>
+
+<p>His tone, except for an added note of savagery, remained the same. Yet
+his heart was thumping a great deal louder than he liked to have it. He
+wasn't amused by his associate's play on words. Nor did he like the
+man's knowing tone and his air of importance. Realizing that the snows
+were at hand, he had sent Gibbs for a last search of the body, to find
+and recover the evidence that Hildreth had against him and which had not
+been revealed either on Hildreth's person or in his cabin. He had become
+increasingly apprehensive about those letters he had written Hildreth,
+and certain other documents that had been in his possession. He didn't
+understand why they hadn't turned up. And now the snows had started, and
+Jim Gibbs had returned empty-handed, but evidently not empty-minded.</p>
+
+<p>"I've found out that the body's been uncovered&mdash;and men are already
+searchin' for clues. And moreover&mdash;I think they've found them." He
+paused, weighing the effect of his words. His eyes glittered with
+cunning. Rat that he was, he was wondering whether the time had arrived
+to leave the ship. He had no intention of continuing to give his
+services to a man with a rope-noose closing about him. And Cranston,
+knowing this fact, hated him as he hated the buzzard that would claim
+him in the end and tried to hide his apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on. Blat it out," Cranston ordered. "Or else go away and let me
+sleep."</p>
+
+<p>It was a bluff; but it worked. If Gibbs had gone without speaking,
+Cranston would have known no sleep that night. But the man became more
+fawning.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm tellin' you, fast as I can," he went on, almost whining. "I went to
+the cabin, just as you said. But I didn't get a chance to search it&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" Cranston thundered. His voice reëchoed among the snow-wet
+pines.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you why! Because some one else&mdash;evidently a cop&mdash;was already
+searchin' it. Both of us know there's nothin' there anyway. We've gone
+over it too many times. After a while he went away&mdash;but I didn't turn
+back yet. That wouldn't be Jim Gibbs. I shadowed him, just as you'd want
+me to. And he went straight back to the body."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" Cranston had hard work curbing his impatience. Again Gibbs' eyes
+were full of ominous speculations.</p>
+
+<p>"He stopped at the body, and it was plain he'd been there before. He
+went crawling through the thickets, lookin' for clues. He done what you
+and me never thought to do&mdash;lookin' all the way between the trail and
+the body. He'd already found the brass shell you told me to get. At
+least, it wasn't there when I looked, after he'd gone. You should've
+thought of it before. But he found somethin' else a whole lot more
+important&mdash;a roll of papers that Hildreth had chucked into an old pine
+stump when he was dyin'. It was your fault, Cranston, for not gettin'
+them that night. You needn't 've been afraid of any one hearin' the shot
+and catching you red-handed. This detective stood and read 'em on the
+trail. And you know&mdash;just as well as I do&mdash;what they were."</p>
+
+<p>"Damn you, I went back the next morning, as soon as I could see. And the
+mountain lion had already been there. I went back lots of times since.
+And that shell ain't nothing&mdash;but all the time I supposed I put it in my
+pocket. You know how it is&mdash;a fellow throws his empty shell out by
+habit."</p>
+
+<p>Gibbs' eyes grew more intent. What was this thing? Cranston's tone,
+instead of commanding, was almost pleading. But the leader caught
+himself at once.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why I need to explain any of that to you. What I want to
+know is this: why you didn't shoot and get those papers away from him?"</p>
+
+<p>For an instant their eyes battled. But Gibbs had never the strength of
+his leader. If he had, it would have been asserted long since. He sucked
+in his breath, and his gaze fell away. It rested on Cranston's rifle,
+that in some manner had been pulled up across his knees. And at once he
+was cowed. He was never so fast with a gun as Cranston.</p>
+
+<p>"Blood on my hands, eh&mdash;same as on yours?" he mumbled, looking down.
+"What do you think I want, a rope around my neck? These hills are big,
+but the arm of the law has reached up before, and it might again. You
+might as well know first as last I'm not goin' to do any killin's to
+cover up your murders."</p>
+
+<p>"That comes of not going myself. You fool&mdash;if he gets that evidence down
+to the courts, you're broken the same as me."</p>
+
+<p>"But I wouldn't get more'n a year or so, at most&mdash;and that's a heap
+different from the gallows. I did aim at him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But you just lacked the guts to pull the trigger!"</p>
+
+<p>"I did, and I ain't ashamed of it. But besides&mdash;the snows are here now,
+and he won't be able to even get word down to the valleys in six
+months. If you want him killed so bad, do it yourself."</p>
+
+<p>This was a thought indeed. On the other hand, another murder might not
+be necessary. Months would pass before the road would be opened, and in
+the meantime Cranston could have a thousand chances to steal back the
+accusing letters. Perhaps they would be guarded closely at first, but by
+the late winter months they would be an old story, and a single raid on
+the house might turn the trick. He didn't believe for an instant that
+the man Gibbs had seen a detective. He had kept too close watch over the
+roads for that.</p>
+
+<p>"A tall chap, in outing clothes&mdash;dark-haired and clean-shaven?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wears a tan hat?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's the man."</p>
+
+<p>"I know him&mdash;and I wish you'd punctured him. Why, you could've taken
+those papers away from him and slapped his face, and he wouldn't have
+put up his arms. And now he'll hide 'em somewhere&mdash;afraid to carry 'em
+for fear he meets me. That's Failing&mdash;the tenderfoot that's been staying
+at Lennox's. He's a lunger."</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't look like no lunger to me."</p>
+
+<p>"But no matter about that&mdash;it's just as I thought. And I'll get 'em
+back&mdash;mark my little words."</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime the best thing to do was to move at once to his winter
+trapping grounds,&mdash;a certain neglected region on the lower levels of the
+North Fork. If at any time within the next few weeks, Dan should attempt
+to carry word down to the settlements, he would be certain to pass
+within view of this camp. But he knew that the chance of Dan starting
+upon any such journey before the snow had melted was not one in a
+thousand. To be caught in the Divide in the winter means to be snowed in
+as completely as the Innuits of upper Greenland. No word could pass
+except by a man on snowshoes. Really there was no urgency about this
+matter of the evidence.</p>
+
+<p>Yet if the chance did come, if the house should be left unguarded, it
+might play Cranston to make an immediate search. Dan would have no
+reason for supposing that Cranston suspected his possession of the
+letters; he would not be particularly watchful, and would probably
+pigeonhole them until spring in Lennox's desk.</p>
+
+<p>And the truth was that Cranston had reasoned out the situation almost
+perfectly. When Dan wakened in the morning, and the snow lay already a
+foot deep over the wilderness world, he knew that he would have no
+chance to act upon the Cranston case until the snows melted in the
+spring. So he pushed all thought of it out of his mind and turned his
+attention to more pleasant subjects. It was true that he read the
+documents over twice as he lay in bed. Then he tied them into a neat
+packet and put them away where they would be quickly available. Then he
+thrust his head out of the window and let the great snowflakes sift down
+upon his face. It was winter at last, the season that he loved.</p>
+
+<p>He didn't stir from the house, that first day of the storm. Snowbird and
+he found plenty of pleasant things to do and talk about before the
+roaring fire that he built in the grate. He was glad of the great pile
+of wood that lay outside the door. It meant life itself, in this season.
+Then Snowbird led him to the windows, and they watched the white drifts
+pile up over the low underbrush.</p>
+
+<p>When finally the snowstorm ceased, five days later, the whole face of
+the wilderness was changed. The buckbrush was mostly covered, the fences
+were out of sight; the forest seemed a clear, clean sweep of white,
+broken only by an occasional tall thicket and by the great, snow-covered
+trees.</p>
+
+<p>When the clouds blew away, and the air grew clear, the temperature
+began to fall. Dan had no way of knowing how low it went. Thermometers
+were not considered essential at the Lennox home. But when his eyelids
+congealed with the frost, and his mittens froze to the logs of firewood
+that he carried through the door, and the pine trees exploded and
+cracked in the darkness, he was correct in his belief that it was very,
+very cold.</p>
+
+<p>But he loved the cold, and the silence and austerity that went with it.
+The wilderness claimed him as never before. The rugged breed that were
+his ancestors had struggled through such seasons as this and passed a
+love of them down through the years to him.</p>
+
+<p>When the ice made a crust over the snow, he learned to walk on
+snowshoes. At first there were pained ankles and endless floundering in
+the drifts. But between the fall of fresh snow and the thaws that
+softened the crust, he slowly mastered the art. Snowbird&mdash;and Dan never
+realized the full significance of her name until he saw her flying with
+incredible grace over the snow&mdash;laughed at him at first and ran him
+races that would usually end in his falling head-first into a ten-foot
+snowbank. She taught him how to ski and more than once she would stop in
+the middle of an earnest bit of pedagogy to find that he wasn't
+listening at all. He would seem to be fairly devouring her with his
+eyes, delighting in the play of soft pinks and reds in her cheeks, and
+drinking, as a man drinks wine, the amazing change of light and shadow
+in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to blossom under his gaze. Not one of those short winter days
+went by without the discovery of some new trait or little vanity to
+astonish or delight him,&mdash;sometimes an unlooked-for tenderness toward
+the weak, often a sweet, untainted philosophy of life, or perhaps just a
+lowering of her eyelids in which her eyes would show lustrous through
+the lashes, or some sweeping, exuberant gesture startlingly graceful.</p>
+
+<p>Lennox wakened one morning with the realization that this was one of the
+hardest winters of his experience. More snow had fallen in the night and
+had banked halfway up his windows. The last of the shrubbery&mdash;except for
+the ends of a few tall bushes that would not hold the snow&mdash;was covered,
+and the roofs of some of the lower outbuildings had somewhat the
+impression of drowning things, striving desperately to keep their heads
+above water. He began to be very glad of the abundant stores of
+provisions that overcrowded his pantry&mdash;savory hams and bacons, dried
+venison, sacks of potatoes and evaporated vegetables, and, of course,
+canned goods past counting. With the high fire roaring in the grate, the
+season held no ills for them. But sometimes, when the bitter cold came
+down at twilight, and the moon looked like a thing of ice itself over
+the snow, he began to wonder how the wild creatures who wintered on the
+Divide were faring. Of course most of them were gone. Woof, long since,
+had grunted and mumbled his way into a winter lair. But the wolves
+remained, strange gray shadows on the snow, and possibly a few of the
+hardier smaller creatures.</p>
+
+<p>More than once in those long winter nights their talk was chopped off
+short by the song of the pack on some distant ridge. Sometime, when the
+world is old, possibly a man will be born that can continue to talk and
+keep his mind on his words while the wolf pack sings. But he is
+certainly an unknown quantity to-day. The cry sets in vibration curious
+memory chords, and for a moment the listener sees in his mind's eye his
+ancient home in an ancient world,&mdash;Darkness and Fear and Eyes shining
+about the cave. It carries him back, and he knows the wilderness as it
+really is; and to have such knowledge dries up all inclination to talk,
+as a sponge dries water. Of course the picture isn't entirely plain. It
+is more a thing guessed at, a photograph in some dark part of an
+under-consciousness that has constantly grown more dim as the centuries
+have passed. Possibly sometime it will fade out altogether; and then a
+man may continue to discuss the weather while the Song from the ridge
+shudders in at the windows. But the world will be quite cold by then,
+and no longer particularly interesting. And possibly even the wolves
+themselves will then be tamed to play dead and speak pieces,&mdash;which
+means the wilderness itself will be tamed. For as long as the wild
+lasts, the pack will run through it in the winter. They were here in the
+beginning, and in spite of constant war and constant hatred on the part
+of men, they will be here in the end. The reason is just that they are
+the symbol of the wilderness itself, and the idea of it continuing to
+exist without them is stranger than that of a nation without a flag.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn't quite the same song that Dan had listened to in the first days
+of fall. It had been triumphant then, and proud with the wilderness
+pride. Of course it had been sad then, too, but it was more sad now. And
+it was stranger, too, and crept farther into the souls of its listeners.
+It was the song of strength that couldn't avail against the snow,
+possibly of cold and the despair and courage of starvation. These three
+that heard it were inured to the wilderness; but a moment was always
+needed after its last note had died to regain their gayety.</p>
+
+<p>"They're getting lean and they're getting savage," Lennox said one
+night, stretched on his divan before the fireplace. He was still unable
+to walk; but the fractures were knitting slowly and the doctor had
+promised that the summer would find him well. "If we had a dog, I
+wouldn't offer much for his life. One of these days we'll find 'em in a
+big circle around the house&mdash;and then we'll have to open up with the
+rifles."</p>
+
+<p>But this picture appalled neither of his two young listeners. No wolf
+pack can stand against three marksmen, armed with rifles and behind
+oaken walls.</p>
+
+<p>Christmas came and passed, and January brought clear days and an
+ineffective sun shining on the snow. These were the best days of all.
+Every afternoon Dan and Snowbird would go out on their skis or on
+snowshoes, unarmed except for the pistol that Snowbird carried in the
+deep pocket of her mackinaw. "But why not?" Dan replied to Lennox's
+objection. "She could kill five wolves with five shots, or pretty near
+it, and you know well enough that that would hold 'em off till we got
+home. They'd stop to eat the five. I have hard enough time keeping up
+with her as it is, without carrying a rifle." And Lennox was content.
+In the first place, the wolf pack has to be desperate indeed before it
+will even threaten human beings; and knowing the coward that the wolf is
+in the other three seasons, he couldn't bring himself to believe that
+this point was reached. In the second, Dan had told the truth when he
+said that five deaths, or even fewer, would repel the attack of any wolf
+pack he had ever seen. There was just one troubling thought. He had
+heard, long ago, and he had forgotten who had told him, that in the most
+severe winters the wolves gather in particularly large packs; and a
+quality in the song that they had heard at night seemed to bear it out.
+The chorus had been exceptionally loud and strong, and he had been
+unable to pick out individual voices.</p>
+
+<p>The snow was perfect for skiing. Previously their sport had been many
+times interrupted either by the fall of fresh snow or a thaw that had
+softened the snow crust; but now every afternoon was too perfect to
+remain indoors. They shouted and romped in the silences, and they did
+not dream but that they had the wilderness all to themselves. The fact
+that one night Lennox's keen eyes had seen what looked like the glow of
+a camp fire in the distance didn't affect this belief of theirs at all.
+It was evidently just the phosphorus glowing in a rotten log from which
+the winds had blown the snow.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice they caught glimpses of wild life: once a grouse that had
+buried in the snow flushed from their path and blew the snow-dust from
+its wings; and once or twice they saw snowshoe rabbits bounding away on
+flat feet over the drifts. But just one day they caught sight of a wolf.
+They were on snowshoes on a particularly brilliant afternoon late in
+January.</p>
+
+<p>He was a lone male, evidently a straggler from the pack, and he leaped
+from the top of a tall thicket that had remained above the snow. The man
+and the girl had entirely different reactions. Dan's first impression
+was amazement at the animal's condition. It seemed to be in the last
+stages of starvation: unbelievably gaunt, with rib bones showing plainly
+even through the furry hide. Ordinarily the heavily furred animals do
+not show signs of famine; but even an inexperienced eye could not make a
+mistake in this case. The eyes were red, and they carried Dan back to
+his first adventure in the Oregon forest&mdash;the day he had shot the mad
+coyote. Snowbird thought of the beast only as an enemy. The wolves
+killed her father's stock; they were brigands of the worst order; and
+she shared the hatred of them that is a common trait of all primitive
+peoples. Her hand whipped back, seized her pistol, and she fired twice
+at the fleeing figure.</p>
+
+<p>The second shot was a hit: both of them saw the wolf go to its side,
+then spring up and race on. Shouting, both of them sped after him.</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments he was out of sight among the distant trees, but they
+found the blood-trail and mushed over the ridge. They expected at any
+moment to find him lying dead; but the track led them on clear down the
+next canyon. And now they cared not at all whether they found him: it
+was simply a tramp in the out-of-doors; and both of them were young with
+red blood in their veins.</p>
+
+<p>But all at once Dan stopped in his tracks. The girl sped on for six
+paces before she missed the sound of his snowshoes; then she turned to
+find him standing, wholly motionless, with eyes fixed upon her.</p>
+
+<p>It startled her, and she didn't know why. A companion abruptly freezing
+in his path, his muscles inert, and his eyes filling with speculations
+is always startling. When this occurs, it means simply that a thought so
+compelling and engrossing that even the half-unconscious physical
+functions, such as walking, cannot continue, has come into his mind. And
+it is part of the old creed of self-preservation to dislike greatly to
+be left out on any such thought as this. If danger is present, the
+sooner it is identified the better.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>He turned to her, curiously intent. "How many shells have you in that
+pistol?"</p>
+
+<p>She took one breath and answered him. "It holds five, and I shot twice.
+I haven't any others."</p>
+
+<p>"And I don't suppose it ever occurred to you to carry extra ones in your
+pocket?"</p>
+
+<p>"Father is always telling me to&mdash;and several times I have. But I'd shoot
+them away at target practice and forget to take any more. There was
+never any danger&mdash;except that night with a cougar. I did intend to&mdash;but
+what does it matter now?"</p>
+
+<p>"We're a couple of wise ones, going after that wolf with only three
+shots to our name. Of course by himself he's harmless&mdash;but he's likely
+enough to lead us straight toward the pack. And Snowbird&mdash;I didn't like
+his looks. He's too gaunt, and he's too hungry&mdash;and I haven't a bit of
+doubt he waited in that brush for us to come, intending to attack
+us&mdash;and lost his nerve the last thing. That shows he's desperate. I
+don't like him, and I wouldn't like his pack. And a whole pack might not
+lose <i>its</i> nerve."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you think we'd better turn back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do, and not come out any more without a whole pocket of shells.
+I'm going to carry my rifle, too, just as Lennox has always advised.
+He's only got a flesh-wound. You saw what you did with two
+cartridges&mdash;got in one flesh-wound. Three of 'em against a pack wouldn't
+be a great deal of aid. I don't mean to say you can't shoot, but a
+jumping, lively wolf is worse than a bird in the air. We've gone over
+three miles; and he'd lead us ten miles farther&mdash;even if he didn't go to
+the pack. Let's go back."</p>
+
+<p>"If you say so. But I don't think there's the least bit of danger. We
+can always climb a tree."</p>
+
+<p>"And have 'em make a beautiful circle under it! They've got more
+patience than we have&mdash;and we'd have to come down sometime. Your father
+can't come to our help, you know. It's the sign of the tenderfoot not to
+think there's any danger&mdash;and I'm not going to think that way any more."</p>
+
+<p>They turned back and mushed in silence a long time.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you'll think I'm a coward," Dan asked her humbly.</p>
+
+<p>"Only prudent, Dan," she answered, smiling. Whether she meant it, he did
+not know. "I'm just beginning to understand that you&mdash;living here only a
+few months&mdash;really know and understand all this better than I do." She
+stretched her arms wide to the wilderness. "I guess it's your
+instincts."</p>
+
+<p>"And I do understand," he told her earnestly. "I sensed danger back
+there just as sure as I can see your face. That pack&mdash;and it's a big
+one&mdash;is close; and it's terribly hungry. And you know&mdash;you can't help
+but know&mdash;that the wolves are not to be trusted in famine times."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it only too well," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Then she paused and asked him about a strange grayness, like snow blown
+by the wind, on the sky over the ridge.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IIIC" id="IIIC"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p>Bert Cranston waited in a clump of exposed thicket on the hillside until
+he saw two black dots, that he knew were Dan and Snowbird, leave the
+Lennox home. He lay very still as they circled up the ridge, noticing
+that except for the pistol that he knew Snowbird always carried, they
+were unarmed. There was no particular reason why he should be interested
+in that point. It was just the mountain way always to look for weapons,
+and it is rather difficult to trace the mental processes behind this
+impulse. Perhaps it can be laid to the fact that many mountain families
+are often at feud with one another, and anything in the way of violence
+may happen before the morning.</p>
+
+<p>The two passed out of his sight, and after a long time he heard the
+crack of Snowbird's pistol. He guessed that she had either shot at some
+wild creature, or else was merely at target practice,&mdash;rather a common
+proceeding for the two when they were on the hills together. Thus it is
+to be seen that Cranston knew their habits fairly well. And since he had
+kept a close watch upon them for several days, this was to be expected.</p>
+
+<p>He had no intention of being interrupted in this work he was about to
+do. He had planned it all very well. At first the intermittent
+snow-storms and the thaws between had delayed him. He needed a perfect
+snow crust for the long tramp over the ridge; and at last the bright
+days and the icy dawns had made it. The elder Lennox was still helpless.
+He had noticed that when Dan and Snowbird went out, they were usually
+gone from two to four hours; and that gave him plenty of time for his
+undertaking. The moment had come at last to make a thorough search of
+Lennox's house for those incriminating documents that Dan had found near
+the body of Landy Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p>The only really dangerous part of his undertaking was his approach. If
+by any chance Lennox were looking out of the window, he might be found
+waiting with a rifle across his arms. It would be quite like the old
+mountaineer to have his gun beside him, and to shoot it quick and
+exceptionally straight, without asking questions, at any stealing figure
+in the snow. Yet Cranston felt fairly sure that Lennox was still too
+helpless to raise a gun to a shooting position.</p>
+
+<p>He had observed that the mountaineer spent his time either on the
+fireplace divan or on his own bed. Neither of these places was available
+to the rear windows of the house. So, very wisely, he made his attack
+from the rear.</p>
+
+<p>He came stealing across the snow,&mdash;a musher of the first degree. Very
+silently and swiftly he slipped off his snowshoes at the door. The door
+itself was unlocked, just as he had supposed. In an instant more he was
+tiptoeing, a dark, silent figure, through the corridors of the house. He
+held his rifle ready in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>He peered into Lennox's bedroom first. The room was unoccupied. Then the
+floor of the corridor creaked beneath his step; and he knew nothing
+further was to be gained by waiting. If Lennox suspected his presence,
+he might be waiting with aimed rifle as he opened the door of the living
+room.</p>
+
+<p>He glided faster. He halted once more,&mdash;a moment at the living-room door
+to see if Lennox had been disturbed. He was lying still, however, so
+Cranston pushed through.</p>
+
+<p>Lennox glanced up from his magazine to find that unmistakable thing, the
+barrel of a rifle, pointed at his breast. Cranston was one of those
+rare marksmen who shoots with both eyes open,&mdash;and that meant that he
+kept his full visual powers to the last instant before the hammer fell.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't raise my arms," Lennox said simply. "One of 'em won't work at
+all&mdash;besides, against the doctor's orders."</p>
+
+<p>Cranston stole over toward him, looking closely for weapons. He pulled
+aside the woolen blanket that Lennox had drawn up over his body, and he
+pushed his hand into the cushions of the couch. A few deft pats, holding
+his rifle through the fork of his arm, finger coiled into the trigger
+guard, assured him that Lennox was not "heeled" at all. Then he laughed
+and went to work.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I told you once," Lennox began with perfect coldness, "that
+the doors of my house were no longer open to you."</p>
+
+<p>"You did say that," was Cranston's guttural reply. "But you see I'm here
+just the same, don't you? And what are you going to do about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I probably felt that sooner or later you would come to steal&mdash;just as
+you and your crowd stole the supplies from the forest station last
+winter&mdash;and that probably influenced me to give the orders. I didn't
+want thieves around my house, and I don't want them now. I don't want
+coyotes, either."</p>
+
+<p>"And I don't want any such remarks out of you, either," Cranston
+answered him. "You lie still and shut up, and I suspect that sissy
+boarder of yours will come back, after he's through embracing your
+daughter in the snow, and find you in one piece. Otherwise not."</p>
+
+<p>"If I were in one piece," Lennox answered him very quietly, "instead of
+a bundle of broken bones that can't lift its arms, I'd get up off this
+couch, unarmed as I am, and stamp on your lying lips."</p>
+
+<p>But Cranston only laughed and tied Lennox's feet with a cord from the
+window shade.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>He went to work very systematically. First he rifled Lennox's desk in
+the living room. Then he looked on all the mantels and ransacked the
+cupboards and the drawers. He was taunting and calm at first. But as the
+moments passed, his passion grew upon him. He no longer smiled. The
+rodent features became intent; the eyes narrowed to curious, bright
+slits under the dark lashes. He went to Dan's room, searched his bureau
+drawer and all the pockets of the clothes hanging in his closet. He
+upset his trunk and pawed among old letters in the suitcase. Then,
+stealing like some creature of the wilderness, he came back to the
+living room.</p>
+
+<p>Lennox was not on the divan where he had left him. He lay instead on the
+floor near the fireplace; and he met the passion-drawn face with entire
+calmness. His motives were perfectly plain. He had just made a desperate
+effort to procure Dan's rifle that hung on two sets of deer horns over
+the fireplace, and was entirely exhausted from it. He had succeeded in
+getting down from the couch, though wracked by agony, but had been
+unable to lift himself up in reach of the gun.</p>
+
+<p>Cranston read his intention in one glance. Lennox knew it, but he simply
+didn't care. He had passed the point where anything seemed to matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me where it is," Cranston ordered him. Again he pointed his rifle
+at Lennox's wasted breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you where what is? My money?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know what I want&mdash;and it isn't money. I mean those letters that
+Failing found on the ridge. I'm through fooling, Lennox. Dan learned
+that long ago, and it's time you learned it now."</p>
+
+<p>"Dan learned it because he was sick. He isn't sick now. Don't presume
+too much on that."</p>
+
+<p>Cranston laughed with harsh scorn. "But that isn't the question. I said
+I've wasted all the time I'm going to. You are an old man and helpless;
+but I'm not going to let that stand in the way of getting what I came to
+get. They're hidden somewhere around this house. They wouldn't be out in
+the snow, because he'd want 'em where he could get them. By no means
+would he carry them on his person&mdash;fearing that some day he'd meet me on
+the ridge. He's a fool, but he ain't that much of a fool. I've watched,
+and he's had no chance to take them into town. I'll give you&mdash;just five
+seconds to tell me where they're hidden."</p>
+
+<p>"And I give you," Lennox replied, "one second less than that&mdash;to go to
+Hell!"</p>
+
+<p>Both of them breathed hard in the quiet room. Cranston was trembling
+now, shivering just a little in his arms and shoulders. "Don't get me
+wrong, Lennox," he warned.</p>
+
+<p>"And don't have any delusions in regard to me, either," Lennox replied.
+"I've stood worse pain, from this accident, than any man can give me
+while I yet live, no matter what he does. If you want to get on me and
+hammer me in the approved Cranston way, I can't defend myself&mdash;but you
+won't get a civil answer out of me. I'm used to pain, and I can stand
+it. I'm not used to fawning to a coyote like you, and I can't stand it."</p>
+
+<p>But Cranston hardly heard. An idea had flamed in his mind and cast a red
+glamour over all the scene about him. It was instilling a poison in his
+nerves and a madness in his blood, and it was searing him, like fire, in
+his dark brain. Nothing seemed real. He suddenly bent forward, tense.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right about you," he said. "But you'd be a little more
+polite if it was Snowbird&mdash;and Dan&mdash;that would have to pay."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the color faded slightly in Lennox's face; but his voice did not
+change.</p>
+
+<p>"They'll see your footprints before they come in and be ready," Lennox
+replied evenly. "They always come by the back way. And even with a
+pistol, Snowbird's a match for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you think that was what I meant?" Cranston scorned. "I know a way
+to destroy those letters, and I'll do it&mdash;in the four seconds that I
+said, unless you tell. I'm not even sure I'm goin' to give you a chance
+to tell now; it's too good a scheme. There won't be any witnesses then
+to yell around in the courts. What if I choose to set fire to this
+house?"</p>
+
+<p>"It wouldn't surprise me a great deal. It's your own trade." Lennox
+shuddered once on his place on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't have to worry about those letters then, would I? They are
+somewhere in the house, and they'd be burned to ashes. But that isn't
+all that would be burned. You could maybe crawl out, but you couldn't
+carry the guns, and you couldn't carry the pantry full of food. You're
+nearly eighty miles up here from the nearest occupied house, with two
+pair of snowshoes for the three of you and one dinky pistol. And you
+can't walk at all. It would be a nice pickle, wouldn't it? Wouldn't you
+have a fat chance of getting down to civilization?"</p>
+
+<p>The voice no longer held steady. It trembled with passion. This was no
+idle threat. The brain had already seized upon the scheme with every
+intention of carrying it out. Outside the snow glittered in the
+sunlight, and pine limbs bowed with their load; overhung with that
+curious winter silence that, once felt, returns often in dreams. The
+wilderness lay stark and bare, stripped of all delusion&mdash;not only in the
+snow world outside but in the hearts of these two men, its sons.</p>
+
+<p>"I have only one hope," Lennox replied. "I hope, unknown to me, that Dan
+has already dispatched those letters. The arm of the law is long,
+Cranston. It's easy to forget that fact up here. It will reach you in
+the end."</p>
+
+<p>Cranston turned through the door, into the kitchen. He was gone a long
+time. Lennox heard him at work: the crinkle of paper and then a pouring
+sound around the walls. Then he heard the sharp crack of a match. An
+instant later the first wisp of smoke came curling, pungent with burning
+oil, through the corridor.</p>
+
+<p>"You crawled from your couch to reach that gun," Cranston told him when
+he came in. "Let's see you crawl out now."</p>
+
+<p>Lennox's answer was a curse,&mdash;the last, dread outpouring of an unbroken
+will. He didn't look again at the glittering eyes. He scarcely watched
+Cranston's further preparations: the oil poured on the rugs and
+furnishings, the kindling placed at the base of the curtains. Cranston
+was trained in this work. He was taking no chances on the fire being
+extinguished. And Lennox began to crawl toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>He managed to grasp the corner of the blanket on the divan as he went,
+and he dragged it behind him. Pain wracked him, and smoke half-blinded
+him. But he made it at last. And by the time he had crawled one hundred
+feet over the snow crust, the whole structure was in flames. The red
+tongues spoke with a roar.</p>
+
+<p>Cranston, the fire-madness on his face, hurried to the outbuildings.
+There he repeated the work. He touched a match to the hay in the barn,
+and the wind flung the flame through it in an instant. The sheds and
+other outbuildings were treated with oil. And seeing that his work was
+done, he called once to the prone body of Lennox on the snow and mushed
+away into the silences.</p>
+
+<p>Lennox's answer was not a curse this time. Rather it was a prayer,
+unuttered, and in his long years Lennox had not prayed often. When he
+prayed at all, the words were burning fire. His prayer was that of
+Samson,&mdash;that for a moment his strength might come back to him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IVC" id="IVC"></a>IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Two miles across the ridges, Dan and Snowbird saw a faint mist blowing
+between the trees. They didn't recognize it at first. It might be fine
+snow, blown by the wind, or even one of those mysterious fogs that
+sometimes sweep over the snow.</p>
+
+<p>"But it looks like smoke," Snowbird said.</p>
+
+<p>"But it couldn't be. The trees are too wet to burn."</p>
+
+<p>But then a sound that at first was just the faintest whisper in which
+neither of them would let themselves believe, became distinct past all
+denying. It was that menacing crackle of a great fire, that in the whole
+world of sounds is perhaps the most terrible. They were trained by the
+hills, and neither of them tried to mince words. They had learned to
+face the truth, and they faced it now.</p>
+
+<p>"It's our house," Snowbird told him. "And father can't get out."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke very quietly. Perhaps the most terrible truths of life are
+always spoken in that same quiet voice. Then both of them started across
+the snow, fast as their unwieldy snowshoes would permit.</p>
+
+<p>"He can crawl a little," Dan called to her. "Don't give up, Snowbird
+mine. I think he'll be safe."</p>
+
+<p>They mounted to the top of the ridge; and the long sweep of the forest
+was revealed to them. The house was a singular tall pillar of flame,
+already glowing that dreadful red from which firemen, despairing, turn
+away. Then the girl seized his hands and danced about him in a mad
+circle.</p>
+
+<p>"He's alive," she cried. "You can see him&mdash;just a dot on the snow. He
+crawled out to safety."</p>
+
+<p>She turned and sped at a breakneck pace down the ridge. Dan had to race
+to keep up with her. But it wasn't entirely wise to try to mush so fast.
+A dead log lay beneath the snow with a broken limb stretched almost to
+its surface, and it caught her snowshoe. The wood cracked sharply, and
+she fell forward in the snow. But she wasn't hurt, and the snowshoe
+itself, in spite of a small crack in the wood, was still serviceable.</p>
+
+<p>"Haste makes waste," he told her. "Keep your feet on the ground,
+Snowbird; the house is gone already and your father is safe. Remember
+what lies before us."</p>
+
+<p>The thought sobered and halted her. She glanced once at the dark face of
+her companion. Dan couldn't understand the strange light that suddenly
+leaped to her eyes. Perhaps she herself couldn't have explained the wave
+of tenderness that swept over her,&mdash;with no cause except the look in
+Dan's earnest gray eyes and the lines that cut so deep. Since the world
+was new, it has been the boast of the boldest of men that they looked
+their Fate in the face. And this is no mean looking. For fate is a sword
+from the darkness, a power that reaches out of the mystery, and cannot
+be classed with sights of human origin. It burns out the eyes of all but
+the strongest men. Yet Dan was looking at his fate now, and his eyes
+held straight.</p>
+
+<p>They walked together down to the ruined house, and the three of them sat
+silent while the fire burned red. Then Lennox turned to them with a
+half-smile.</p>
+
+<p>"You're wasting time, you two," he said. "Remember all our food is gone.
+If you start now, and walk hard, maybe you can make it out."</p>
+
+<p>"There are several things to do first," Dan answered simply.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what they are. It isn't going to be any picnic, Dan. A man
+can travel only so far without food to keep up his strength,
+particularly over such ridges as you have to cross. It will be easy to
+give up and die. It's the test, man; it's the test."</p>
+
+<p>"And what about you?" his daughter asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'll be all right. Besides&mdash;it's the only thing that can be done. I
+can't walk, and you can't carry me on your backs. What else remains?
+I'll stay here&mdash;and I'll scrape together enough wood to keep a fire.
+Then you can bring help."</p>
+
+<p>He kept his eyes averted when he talked. He was afraid for Dan to see
+them, knowing that he could read the lie in them.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you expect to find wood&mdash;in this snow?" Dan asked him. "It will
+take four days to get out; do you think you could lie here and battle
+with a fire for four days, and then four days more that it will take to
+come back? You'd have two choices: to burn green wood that I'd cut for
+you before I left, or the rain-soaked dead wood under the snow. You
+couldn't keep either one of them burning, and you'd die in a night.
+Besides&mdash;this is no time for an unarmed man to be alone in the hills."</p>
+
+<p>Lennox's voice grew pleading. "Be sensible, Dan!" he cried. "That
+Cranston's got us, and got us right. I've only one thing more I care
+about&mdash;and that is that you pay the debt! I can't hope to get out
+myself. I say that I can't even hope to. But if you bring my daughter
+through&mdash;and when the spring comes, pay what we owe to Cranston&mdash;I'll be
+content. Heavens, son&mdash;I've lived my life. The old pack leader dies when
+his time comes, and so does a man."</p>
+
+<p>His daughter crept to him and sheltered his gray head against her
+breast. "I'll stay with you then," she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a little fool, Snowbird," he urged. "My clothes are wet
+already from the melted snow. It's too long a way&mdash;it will be too hard a
+fight, and children&mdash;I'm old and tired out. I don't want to make the
+try&mdash;hunger and cold; and even if you'd stay here and grub wood,
+Snowbird, they'd find us both dead when they came back in a week. We
+can't live without food, and work and keep warm&mdash;and there isn't a
+living creature in the hills."</p>
+
+<p>"Except the wolves," Dan reminded him.</p>
+
+<p>"Except the wolves," Lennox echoed. "Remember, we're unarmed&mdash;and they'd
+find it out. You're young, Snowbird, and so is Dan&mdash;and you two will be
+happy. I know how things are, you two&mdash;more than you know
+yourselves&mdash;and in the end you'll be happy. But me&mdash;I'm too tired to
+make the try. I don't care about it enough. I'm going to wave you
+good-by, and smile, and lie here and let the cold come down. You feel
+warm in a little while&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But she stopped his lips with her hand. And he bent and kissed it.</p>
+
+<p>"If anybody's going to stay with you," Dan told them in a clear, firm
+voice, "it's going to be me. But aren't any of the cabins occupied?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know they aren't," Lennox answered. "Not even the houses beyond the
+North Fork, even if we could get across. The nearest help is over
+seventy miles."</p>
+
+<p>"And Snowbird, think! Haven't any supplies been left in the ranger
+station?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not one thing," the girl told him. "You know Cranston and his crowd
+robbed the place last winter. And the telephone lines were disconnected
+when the rangers left."</p>
+
+<p>"Then the only way is for me to stay here. You can take the pistol, and
+you'll have a fair chance of getting through. I'll grub wood for our
+camp meanwhile, and you can bring help."</p>
+
+<p>"And if the wolves come, or if help didn't come in time," Lennox
+whispered, passion-drawn for the first time, "who would pay what we owe
+to Cranston?"</p>
+
+<p>"But her life counts&mdash;first of all."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it does&mdash;but mine doesn't count at all. Believe me, you two. I'm
+speaking from my own desires when I say I don't want to make the fight.
+Snowbird would never make it through alone. There are the wolves, and
+maybe Cranston too&mdash;the worst wolf of all. A woman can't mush across
+those ridges four days without food, without some one who loves her and
+forces her on! Neither can she stay here with me and try to make green
+branches burn in a fire. She's got three little pistol balls&mdash;and we'd
+all die for a whim. Oh, please, please&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But Dan leaped for his hand with glowing eyes. "Listen, man!" he cried.
+"I know another way yet. I know more than one way; but one, if we've got
+the strength, is almost sure. There is an ax in the kitchen, and the
+blade will still be good."</p>
+
+<p>"Likely dulled with the fire&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll cut a limb with my jackknife for the handle. There will be nails
+in the ashes, plenty of them. We'll make a rude sledge, and we'll get
+you out too."</p>
+
+<p>Lennox seemed to be studying his wasted hands. "It's a chance, but it
+isn't worth it," he said at last. "You'll have fight enough, without
+tugging at a heavy sled. It will take all night to build it, and it
+would cut down your chances of getting out by pretty near half. Remember
+the ridges, Dan&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But we'll climb every ridge&mdash;besides, its a slow, down grade most of
+the way. Snowbird&mdash;tell him he must do it."</p>
+
+<p>Snowbird told him, overpowering him with her enthusiasm. And Dan shook
+his shoulders with rough hands. "You're hurting, boy!" Lennox warned.
+"I'm a bag of broken bones."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tote you down there if I have to tie you in," Dan Failing replied.
+"Before, I've bowed to your will; but this time you have to bow to mine.
+I'm not going to let you stay here and die, no matter if you beg on your
+knees! It's the test&mdash;and I'm going to bring you through."</p>
+
+<p>He meant what he said. If mortal strength and sinew could survive such a
+test, he would succeed. There was nothing in these words to suggest the
+physical weakling that both of them had known a few months before. The
+eyes were earnest, the dark face intent, the determined voice did not
+waver at all.</p>
+
+<p>"Dan Failing speaks!" Lennox replied with glowing eyes. He was recalling
+another Dan Failing of the dead years, a boyhood hero, and his
+remembered voice had never been more determined, more masterful than
+this he had just heard.</p>
+
+<p>"And Cranston didn't get his purpose, after all." To prove his words,
+Dan thrust his hand into his inner coat pocket. He drew forth a little,
+flat package, half as thick as a pack of cards. He held it up for them
+to see. "The thing Bert Cranston burned the house down to destroy," he
+explained. "I'm learning to know this mountain breed, Lennox. I kept it
+in my pocket where I could fight for it, at any minute."</p>
+
+<p>Cranston had been mistaken, after all, in thinking that in fear of
+himself Dan would be afraid to keep the packet on his person, and would
+cravenly conceal it in the house. He would have been even more surprised
+to know that Dan had lived in constant hope of meeting Cranston on the
+ridges, showing him what it contained, and fighting him for it, hands to
+hands. And even yet, perhaps the day would come when Cranston would know
+at last that Snowbird's words, after the fight of long ago, were true.</p>
+
+<p>The twilight was falling over the snow, so Snowbird and Dan turned to
+the toil of building a sled.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VC" id="VC"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p>The snow was steel-gray in the moonlight when the little party made
+their start down the long trail. Their preparations, simple and crude as
+they were, had taken hours of ceaseless labor on the part of the three.
+The ax, its edge dulled by the flame and its handle burned away, had
+been cooled in the snow, and with his one sound arm, Lennox had driven
+the hot nails that Snowbird gathered from the ashes of one of the
+outbuildings. The embers of the house itself still glowed red in the
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Dan had cut the green limbs of the trees and planed them with his ax.
+The sled had been completed, handles attached for pushing it, and a
+piece of fence wire fastened with nails as a rope to pull it. The warm
+mackinaws of both of them as well as the one blanket that Lennox had
+saved from the fire were wrapped about the old frontiersman's wasted
+body,&mdash;Dan and Snowbird hoping to keep warm by the exercise of
+propelling the sled. Except for the dull ax and the half-empty pistol,
+their only equipment was a single charred pot for melting snow that Dan
+had recovered from the ashes of the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>The three had worked almost in silence. Words didn't help now. They
+wasted no sorely-needed breath. But they did have one minute of talk
+when they got to the top of the little ridge that had overlooked the
+house.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll travel mostly at night," Dan told them. "We can see in the snow,
+and by taking our rest in the daytime, when the sun is bright and warm,
+we can save our strength. We won't have to keep such big fires then&mdash;and
+at night our exertion will keep us as warm as we can hope for. Getting
+up all night to cut green wood with this dull ax in the snow would break
+us to pieces very soon, for remember that we haven't any food. I know
+how to build a fire even in the snow&mdash;especially if I can find the dead,
+dry heart of a rotten log&mdash;but it isn't any fun to keep it going with
+green wood. We don't want to have to spend any more of our strength
+stripping off wet bark and hacking at saplings than we can help; and
+that means we'd better do our resting in the heat of the day. After all,
+it's a fight against starvation more than anything else."</p>
+
+<p>"Just think," the girl told them, reproaching herself, "if I'd just shot
+straight at that wolf to-day, we could have gone back and got his body.
+It might have carried us through."</p>
+
+<p>Neither of the others as much as looked surprised at these amazing
+regrets over the lost, unsavory flesh of a wolf. They were up against
+realities, and they didn't mince words. Dan smiled at her gently, and
+his great shoulder leaned against the traces.</p>
+
+<p>They moved through a dead world. The ever-present manifestations of wild
+life that had been such a delight to Dan in the summer and fall were
+quite lacking now. The snow was trackless. Once they thought they saw a
+snowshoe rabbit, a strange shadow on the snow, but he was too far away
+for Snowbird to risk a pistol shot. The pound or two of flesh would be
+sorely needed before the journey was over, but the pistol cartridges
+might be needed still more. She didn't let her mind rest on certain
+possibilities wherein they might be needed. Such thoughts stole the
+courage from the spirit, and courage was essential beyond all things
+else to bring them through.</p>
+
+<p>Once a flock of wild geese, stragglers from the main army of waterfowl,
+passed overhead on their southern migration. They were many months too
+late. They called down their eerie cries,&mdash;that song that they had
+learned from the noise the wind makes, blowing over the bleak marshes.
+It wailed down to them a long time after the flock was hidden by the
+distant tree tops, and seemed to shiver, with curious echoes, among the
+pines. Trudging on, they listened to its last note. And possibly they
+understood the cry as never before. It was one of the untamed, primitive
+voices of the wilderness, and they could realize something of its
+sadness, its infinite yearning and complaint. They knew the wilderness
+now, just as the geese themselves did. They knew its cold, its hunger,
+its remorselessness, and beyond all, the fear that was bright eyes in
+the darkness. No man could have crossed that first twenty miles with
+them and remained a tenderfoot. The wild was sending home its lessons,
+one after another, until the spirit broke beneath them. It was showing
+its teeth. It was reminding them, very clearly, that in spite of houses
+built on the ridges and cattle pens and rifles and all the tools and
+aids of civilization, it was still unconquered.</p>
+
+<p>Mostly the forest was heavily laden with silence. And silence, in this
+case, didn't seem to be merely an absence of sound. It seemed like a
+substance in itself, something that lay over the snow, in which all
+sound was immediately smothered and extinguished. They heard their own
+footfalls in the snow and the crunch of the sled. But the sound only
+went a little way. Once in a long time distant trees cracked in the
+frost; and they all stood still a moment, trying to fight down the vain
+hope that this might be some hunter from the valleys who would come to
+their aid. A few times they heard the snow sliding, with the dull sound
+of rolling window shade, down from the overburdened limbs. The trees
+were inert with their load of snow.</p>
+
+<p>As the dawn came out, they all stood still and listened to the wolf
+pack, singing on the ridge somewhere behind them. It was a large pack.
+They couldn't make out individual voices,&mdash;neither the more shrill cry
+of the females, the yapping of the cubs, or the low, clear
+G-below-middle-C note of the males.</p>
+
+<p>"If they should cross our tracks&mdash;" Lennox suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"No use worrying about that now&mdash;not until we come to it," Dan told him.</p>
+
+<p>The morning broke, the sun rose bright in a clear sky. But still they
+trudged on. In spite of the fact that the sled was heavy and broke
+through the snow crust as they tugged at it, they had made good time
+since their departure. But now every step was a pronounced effort. It
+was the dreadful beginning of fatigue that only food and warmth and rest
+could rectify.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll rest now," Dan told them at ten o'clock. "The sun is warm enough
+so that we won't need much of a fire. And we'll try to get five hours'
+sleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Too long, if we're going to make it out," Lennox objected.</p>
+
+<p>"That leaves a work-day of nineteen hours," Dan persisted. "Not any too
+little. Five hours it will be."</p>
+
+<p>He found where the snow had drifted against a great, dead log, leaving
+the white covering only a foot in depth on the lee side. He began to
+scrape the snow away, then hacked at the log with his ax until he had
+procured a piece of comparatively dry wood from its center. They all
+stood breathless while he lighted the little pile of kindling and heaped
+it with green wood,&mdash;the only wood procurable. But it didn't burn
+freely. It smoked fitfully, threatening to die out, and emitting very
+little heat.</p>
+
+<p>But they didn't particularly care. The sun was warm above, as always in
+the mountain winters of Southern Oregon. Snowbird and Dan cleared spaces
+beside the fire and slept. Lennox, who had rested on the journey, lay on
+his sled and with his uninjured arm tried to hack enough wood from the
+saplings that Dan had cut to keep the fire burning.</p>
+
+<p>At three they got up, still tired and aching in their bones from
+exposure. Twenty-four hours had passed since they had tasted food, and
+their unreplenished systems complained. There is no better engine in the
+wide world than the human body. It will stand more neglect and abuse
+than the finest steel motors ever made by the hands of European
+craftsmen. A man may fast many days if he lies quietly in one place and
+keeps warm. But fasting is a deadly proposition while pulling sledges
+over the snow.</p>
+
+<p>Dan was less hopeful now. His face told what his words did not. The
+lines cleft deeper about his lips and eyes; and Snowbird's heart ached
+when he tried to encourage her with a smile. It was a wan, strange smile
+that couldn't quite hide the first sickness of despair.</p>
+
+<p>The shadows quickly lengthened&mdash;simply leaping over the snow from the
+fast-falling sun. Soon it dropped down behind the ridge; and the gray of
+twilight began to deepen among the more distant trees. It blurred the
+outline and dulled the sight. With the twilight came the cold, first
+crisp, then bitter and penetrating to the vitals. The twilight deepened,
+the snow turned gray, and then, in a vague way, the journey began to
+partake of a quality of unreality. It was not that the cold and the
+snow and their hunger were not entirely real, or that the wilderness
+was no longer naked to their eyes. It was just that their whole effort
+seemed like some dreadful, emburdened journey in a dream,&mdash;a stumbling
+advance under difficulties too many and real to be true.</p>
+
+<p>The first sign was the far-off cry of the wolf pack. It was very faint,
+simply a stir in the ear drums, yet it was entirely clear. That clear,
+cold mountain air was a perfect telephone system, conveying a message
+distinctly, no matter how faintly. There were no tall buildings or
+cities to disturb the ether waves. And all three of them knew at the
+same instant it was not exactly the cry they had heard before.</p>
+
+<p>They couldn't have told just why, even if they had wished to talk about
+it. In some dim way, it had lost the strange quality of despair that it
+had held before. It was as if the pack were running with renewed life,
+that each wolf was calling to another with a dreadful sort of
+exultation. It was an excited cry too,&mdash;not the long, sad song they had
+learned to listen for. It sounded immediately behind them.</p>
+
+<p>They couldn't help but listen. No human ears could have shut out the
+sound. But none of them pretended that they had heard. And this was the
+worst sign of all. Each one of the three was hoping against hope in his
+very heart; and at the same time, hoping that the others did not
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time, as the darkness deepened about them, the forests were
+still. Perhaps, Dan thought, he had been mistaken after all. His
+shoulders straightened. Then the chorus blared again.</p>
+
+<p>The man looked back at the girl, smiling into her eyes. Lennox lay as if
+asleep, the lines of his dark face curiously pronounced. And the girl,
+because she was of the mountains, body and soul, answered Dan's smile.
+Then they knew that all of them knew the truth. Not even an
+inexperienced ear could have any delusions about the pack song now. It
+was that oldest of wilderness songs, the hunting-cry,&mdash;that frenzied
+song of blood-lust that the wolf pack utters when it is running on the
+trail of game. It had found the track of living flesh at last.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no use stopping, or trying to climb a tree," Dan told them
+simply. "In the first place, Lennox can't do it. In the second, we've
+got to take a chance&mdash;for cold and hunger can get up a tree where the
+wolf pack can't."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke wholly without emotion. Once more he tightened the traces of
+the sled.</p>
+
+<p>"I've heard that sometimes the pack will chase a man for days without
+attacking," Lennox told them. "It all depends on how long they've gone
+without food. Keep on and try to forget 'em. Maybe we can keep 'em
+bluffed."</p>
+
+<p>But as the hours passed, it became increasingly difficult to forget the
+wolf pack. It was only a matter of turning the head and peering for an
+instant into the shadows to catch a glimpse of one of the creatures.
+Their forms, when they emerged from the shadows of the tree trunks, were
+entirely visible against the snow. They no longer yapped and howled.
+They acted very intent and stealthy. They had spread out in a great
+wing, slipping from shadow and shadow, and what were their mental
+processes no human being may even guess. It was a new game; and they
+seemed to be seeking the best means of attack. Their usual fear of men,
+always their first emotion, had given way wholly to a hunting cunning:
+an effort to procure their game without too great risk of their own
+lives. In the desperation of their hunger they could not remember such
+things as the fear of men. They spread out farther, and at last Dan
+looked up to find one of the gray beasts waiting, like a shadow himself,
+in the shadow of a tree not one hundred feet from the sled. Snowbird
+whipped out her pistol.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't dare!" Dan's voice cracked out to her. He didn't speak loudly;
+yet the words came so sharp and commanding, so like pistol fire itself,
+that they penetrated into her consciousness and choked back the nervous
+reflexes that in an instant might have lost them one of their three
+precious shells. She caught herself with a sob. Dan shouted at the wolf,
+and it melted into the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't do it again, Snowbird?" he asked her very humbly. But his
+meaning was clear. He was not as skilled with a pistol as she; but if
+her nerves were breaking, the gun must be taken from her hands. The
+three shells must be saved to the moment of utmost need.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she told him, looking straight into his eyes. "I won't do it
+again."</p>
+
+<p>He believed her. He knew that she spoke the truth. He met her eyes with
+a half smile. Then, wholly without warning, Fate played its last trump.</p>
+
+<p>Again the wilderness reminded them of its might, and their brave spirits
+were almost broken by the utter remorselessness of the blow. The girl
+went on her face with a crack of wood. Her snowshoe had been cracked by
+her fall of the day before, when running to the fire, and whether she
+struck some other obstruction in the snow, or whether the cracked wood
+had simply given way under her weight, mattered not even enough for them
+to investigate. As in all great disasters, only the result remained. The
+result in this case was that her snowshoe, without which she could not
+walk at all in the snow, was irreparably broken.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIC" id="VIC"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Fate has stacked the cards against us," Lennox told them, after the
+first moment's horror from the broken snowshoe.</p>
+
+<p>But no one answered him. The girl, white-faced, kept her wide eyes on
+Dan. He seemed to be peering into the shadows beside the trail, as if he
+were watching for the gray forms that now and then glided from tree to
+tree. In reality, he was not looking for wolves. He was gazing down into
+his own soul, measuring his own spirit for the trial that lay before
+him.</p>
+
+<p>The girl, unable to step with the broken snowshoe, rested her weight on
+one foot and hobbled like a bird with broken wings across to him. No
+sight of all this terrible journey had been more dreadful in her
+father's eyes than this. It seemed to split open the strong heart of the
+man. She touched her hand to his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry, Dan," she told him. "You tried so hard&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Just one little sound broke from his throat&mdash;a strange, deep gasp that
+could not be suppressed. Then he caught her hand in his and kissed
+it,&mdash;again and again. "Do you think I care about that?" he asked her. "I
+only wish I could have done more&mdash;and what I have done doesn't count.
+Just as in my fight with Cranston, nothing counts because I didn't win.
+It's just fate, Snowbird. It's no one's fault, but maybe, in this world,
+nothing is ever any one's fault." For in the twilight of those winter
+woods, in the shadow of death itself, perhaps he was catching
+glimmerings of eternal truths that are hidden from all but the most
+far-seeing eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"And this is the end?" she asked him. She spoke very bravely.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" His hand tightened on hers. "No, so long as an ounce of strength
+remains. To fight&mdash;never to give up&mdash;may God give me spirit for it till
+I die."</p>
+
+<p>And this was no idle prayer. His eyes raised to the starry sky as he
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"But, son," Lennox asked him rather quietly, "what can you do? The
+wolves aren't going to wait a great deal longer, and we can't go on."</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing more&mdash;one more trial to make," Dan answered. "I
+thought about it at first, but it was too long a chance to try if there
+was any other way. And I suppose you thought of it too."</p>
+
+<p>"Overtaking Cranston?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. And it sounds like a crazy dream. But listen, both of you.
+If we have got to die, up here in the snow&mdash;and it looks like we
+had&mdash;what is the thing you want done worst before we go?"</p>
+
+<p>Lennox's hands clasped, and he leaned forward on the sled. "Pay
+Cranston!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes!" Dan's voice rang. "Cranston's never going to be paid unless we do
+it. There will be no signs of incendiarism at the house, and no proofs.
+They'll find our bodies in the snow, and we'll just be a mystery, with
+no one made to pay. The evidence in my pocket will be taken by Cranston,
+sometime this winter. If I don't make him pay, he never will pay. And
+that's one reason why I'm going to try to carry out this plan I've got.</p>
+
+<p>"The second reason is that it's the one hope we have left. I take it
+that none of us are deceived on that point. And no man can die
+tamely&mdash;if he is a man&mdash;while there's a chance. I mean a young man, like
+me,&mdash;not one who is old and tired. It sounds perfectly silly to talk
+about finding Cranston's winter quarters, and then, with my bare hands,
+conquering him, taking his food and his blankets and his snowshoes and
+his rifle to fight away these wolves, and bringing 'em back here."</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't be barehanded," the girl reminded him. "You could have the
+pistol."</p>
+
+<p>He didn't even seem to hear her. "I've been thinking about it. It's a
+long, long chance&mdash;much worse than the chance we had of getting out by
+straight walking. I think we could have made it, if the wolves had kept
+off and the snowshoe hadn't broken. It would have nearly killed us, but
+I believe we could have got out. That's why I didn't try this other way
+first. A man with his bare hands hasn't much of a chance against another
+with a rifle, and I don't want you to be too hopeful. And of course, the
+hardest problem is finding his camp.</p>
+
+<p>"But I do feel sure of one thing: that he is back to his old trapping
+line on the North Fork&mdash;somewhere south of here&mdash;and his camp is
+somewhere on the river. I think he would have gone there so that he
+could cut off any attempt I might make to get through with those
+letters. My plan is to start back at an angle that will carry me between
+the North Fork and our old house. Somewhere in there I'll find his
+tracks, the tracks he made when he first came over to burn up the house.
+I suppose he was careful to mix 'em up after once he arrived there, but
+the first part of the way he likely walked straight toward the house
+from his camp. Somewhere, if I go that way, I'll cross his
+trail&mdash;within ten miles at least. Then I'll back-track him to his camp."</p>
+
+<p>"And never come back!" the girl cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe not. But at least everything that can be done will be done.
+Nothing will be left. No regrets. We will have made the last trial. I'm
+not going to waste any time, Snowbird. The sooner we get your fire built
+the better."</p>
+
+<p>"Father and I are to stay here&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"What else can you do?" He went back to his traces and drew the sled one
+hundred yards farther. He didn't seem to see the gaunt wolf that backed
+off into the shadows as he approached. He refused to notice that the
+pack seemed to be steadily growing bolder. Human hunters usually had
+guns that could blast and destroy from a distance; but even an animal
+intelligence could perceive that these three seemed to be without this
+means of inflicting death. A wolf is ever so much more intelligent than
+a crow,&mdash;yet a crow shows little fear of an unarmed man and is wholly
+unapproachable by a boy with a gun. The ugly truth was simply that in
+their increasing madness and excitement and hunger, they were becoming
+less and less fearful of these three strange humans with the sled.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a good place for a camp. They worked a long time before they
+cleared a little patch of ground of its snow mantle. Dan cut a number of
+saplings&mdash;laboriously with his ax&mdash;and built a fire with the
+comparatively dry core of a dead tree. True, it was feeble and
+flickering, but as good as could be hoped for, considering the
+difficulties under which he worked. The dead logs under the snow were
+soaked with water from the rains and the thaws. The green wood that he
+cut smoked without blazing.</p>
+
+<p>"No more time to be lost," Dan told Snowbird. "It lies in your hands to
+keep the fire burning. And don't leave the circle of the firelight
+without that pistol in your hand."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean," she asked, unbelieving, "that you are going to go out
+there to fight Cranston&mdash;unarmed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, Snowbird. You must keep the pistol."</p>
+
+<p>"But it means death; that's all it means. What chance would you have
+against a man with a rifle? And as soon as you get away from this fire,
+the wolves will tear you to pieces."</p>
+
+<p>"And what would you and your father do, if I took it? You can't get him
+into a tree. You can't build a big enough fire to frighten them. Please
+don't even talk about this matter, Snowbird. My mind's made up. I think
+the pack will stay here. They usually&mdash;God knows how&mdash;know who is
+helpless and who isn't. Maybe with the gun, you will be able to save
+your lives."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the chance of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"You might&mdash;with one cartridge&mdash;kill one of the devils; and the
+others&mdash;but you know how they devour their own dead. That might break
+their famine enough so that they'd hold off until I can get back. That's
+the prize I'm playing for."</p>
+
+<p>"And what if you don't get back?"</p>
+
+<p>He took her hand in one of his, and with the other he caressed, for a
+single moment, the lovely flesh of her throat. The love he had for her
+spoke from his eyes,&mdash;such speech as no human vision could possibly
+mistake. Both of them were tingling and breathless with a great, sweet
+wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"Never let those fangs tear that softness, while you live," he told her
+gently. "Never let that brave old man on the sled go to his death with
+the pack tearing at him. Cheat 'em, Snowbird! Beat 'em the last minute,
+if no other way remains! Show 'em who's boss, after all&mdash;of all this
+forest."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean&mdash;?" Her eyes widened.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that you must only spend one of those three shells in fighting
+off the wolves. Save that till the moment you need it most. The other
+two must be saved&mdash;for something else."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, shuddering an instant at a menacing shadow that moved within
+sixty feet of the fire. The firelight half-blinded them, dim as it was,
+and they couldn't see into the darkness as well as they had before.
+Except for strange, blue-yellow lights, close together and two and two
+about the fire, they might have thought that the pack was gone.</p>
+
+<p>"Then good-by, Dan!" she told him. And she stretched up her arms. "The
+thing I said&mdash;that day on the hillside&mdash;doesn't hold any more."</p>
+
+<p>His own arms encircled her, but he made no effort to claim her lips.
+Lennox watched them quietly; in this moment of crisis not even
+pretending to look away. Dan shook his head to her entreating eyes. "It
+isn't just a kiss, darling," he told her soberly. "It goes deeper than
+that. It's a symbol. It was your word, too, and mine; and words can't be
+broken, things being as they are. Can't I make you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. His eyes burned. Perhaps she didn't understand, as far as
+actual functioning of the brain was concerned. But she reached up to
+him, as women&mdash;knowing life in the concrete rather than the
+abstract&mdash;have always reached up to men; and she dimly caught the gleam
+of some eternal principle and right behind his words. This strong man of
+the mountains had given his word, had been witness to her own promise to
+him and to herself, and a law that goes down to the roots of life
+prevented him from claiming the kiss.</p>
+
+<p>Many times, since the world was new, comfort&mdash;happiness&mdash;life itself
+have been contingent on the breaking of a law. Yet in spite of what
+seemed common sense, even though no punishment would forthcome if it
+were broken, the law has been kept. It was this way now. It wouldn't
+have been just a kiss such as boys and girls have always had in the
+moonlight. It meant the symbolic renunciation of the debt that Dan owed
+Cranston,&mdash;a debt that in his mind might possibly go unpaid, but which
+no weight of circumstance could make him renounce.</p>
+
+<p>His longing for her lips pulled at the roots of him. But by the laws of
+his being he couldn't claim them until the debt incurred on the
+hillside, months ago, had been paid; to take them now meant to dull the
+fine edge of his resolve to carry the issue through to the end, to dim
+the star that led him, to weaken him, by bending now, for the test to
+come. He didn't know why. It had its font in the deep wells of the
+spirit. Common sense can't reveal how the holy man keeps strong the
+spirit by denying the flesh. It goes too deep for that. Dan kept to his
+consecration.</p>
+
+<p>He did, however, kiss her hands, and he kissed the tears out of her
+eyes. Then he turned into the darkness and broke through the ring of the
+wolves.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIIC" id="VIIC"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Dan Failing was never more thankful for his unerring sense of direction.
+He struck off at a forty-five-degree angle between their late course and
+a direct road to the river, and he kept it as if by a surveyor's line.
+All the old devices of the wilderness&mdash;the ridge on ridge that looked
+just alike, inclines that to the casual eye looked like downward slopes,
+streams that vanished beneath the snow, and the snow-mist blowing across
+the face of the landmarks&mdash;could not avail against him.</p>
+
+<p>A half dozen of the wolves followed him at first. But perhaps their
+fierce eyes marked his long stride and his powerful body, and decided
+that their better chance was with the helpless man and the girl beside
+the flickering fire. They turned back, one by one. Dan kept straight on
+and in two hours crossed Cranston's trail.</p>
+
+<p>It was perfectly plain in the moonlit snow. He began to back-track. He
+headed down a long slope and in an hour more struck the North Fork. He
+didn't doubt but that he would find Cranston in his camp, if he found
+the camp at all. The man had certainly returned to it immediately after
+setting fire to the buildings, if for no other reason than for food. It
+isn't well to be abroad on the wintry mountains without a supply of
+food; and Cranston would certainly know this fact.</p>
+
+<p>Dan didn't know when a rifle bullet from some camp in the thickets would
+put an abrupt end to his advance. The brush grew high by the river, the
+elevation was considerably lower, and there might be one hundred camps
+out of the sight of the casual wayfarer. If Cranston should see him,
+mushing across the moonlit snow, it would give him the most savage joy
+to open fire upon him with his rifle.</p>
+
+<p>Dan's advance became more cautious. He was in a notable trapping region,
+and he might encounter Cranston's camp at any moment. His keen eyes
+searched the thickets, and particularly they watched the sky line for a
+faint glare that might mean a camp fire. He tried to walk silently. It
+wasn't an easy thing to do with awkward snowshoes; but the river drowned
+the little noise that he made. He tried to take advantage of the shelter
+of the thickets and the trees. Then, at the base of a little ridge, he
+came to a sudden halt.</p>
+
+<p>He had estimated just right. Not two hundred yards distant, a camp fire
+flickered and glowed in the shelter of a great log. He saw it, by the
+most astounding good fortune, through a little rift in the trees. Ten
+feet on either side, and it was obscured.</p>
+
+<p>He lost no time. He did not know when the wolves about Snowbird's camp
+would lose the last of their cowardice. Yet he knew he must keep a tight
+grip on his self-control and not let the necessity of haste cost him his
+victory. He crept forward, step by step, placing his snowshoes with
+consummate care. When he was one hundred yards distant he saw that
+Cranston's camp was situated beside a little stream that flowed into the
+river and that&mdash;like the mountaineer he was&mdash;he had built a large
+lean-to reinforced with snowbanks. The fire burned at its opening.
+Cranston was not in sight; either he was absent from camp or asleep in
+his lean-to. The latter seemed the more likely.</p>
+
+<p>Dan made a wide detour, coming in about thirty yards behind the
+construction. Still he moved with incredible caution. Never in his life
+had he possessed a greater mastery over his own nerves. His heart leaped
+somewhat fast in his breast; but this was the only wasted motion. It
+isn't easy to advance through such thickets without ever a misstep,
+without the rustle of a branch or the crack of a twig. Certain of the
+wild creatures find it easy; but men have forgotten how in too many
+centuries of cities and farms. It is hardly a human quality; and a
+spectator would have found a rather ghastly fascination in watching the
+lithe motions, the passionless face, the hands that didn't shake at all.
+But there were no spectators&mdash;unless the little band of wolves,
+stragglers from the pack that had gathered on the hills behind&mdash;watched
+with lighted eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Dan went down at full length upon the snow and softly removed his
+snowshoes. They would be only an impediment in the close work that was
+sure to follow. He slid along the snow crust, clear to the mouth of the
+lean-to.</p>
+
+<p>The moonlight poured through and showed the interior with rather
+remarkable plainness. Cranston was sprawled, half-sitting, half-lying on
+a tree-bough pallet near the rear wall. There was not the slightest
+doubt of the man's wakefulness. Dan heard him stir, and once&mdash;as if at
+the memory of his deed of the day before&mdash;he cursed in a savage whisper.
+Although he was facing the opening of the lean-to, he was wholly unaware
+of Dan's presence. The latter had thrust his head at the side of the
+opening, and it was in shadow. Cranston seemed to be watching the
+great, white snow fields that lay in front, and for a moment Dan was at
+loss to explain this seeming vigil. Then he understood. The white field
+before him was part of the long ridge that the three of them would pass
+on their way to the valleys. Cranston had evidently anticipated that the
+girl and the man would attempt to march out&mdash;even if he hadn't guessed
+they would try to take the helpless Lennox with them&mdash;and he wished to
+be prepared for emergencies. There might be sport to have with Dan,
+unarmed as he was. And his eyes were full of strange conjectures in
+regard to Snowbird. Both would be exhausted now and helpless&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Dan's eyes encompassed the room: the piles of provisions heaped against
+the wall, the snowshoes beside the pallet, but most of all he wished to
+locate Cranston's rifle. Success or failure hung on that. He couldn't
+find it at first. Then he saw the glitter of its barrel in the
+moonlight,&mdash;leaning against a grub-box possibly six feet from Cranston
+and ten from himself.</p>
+
+<p>His heart leaped. The best he had hoped for&mdash;for the sake of Snowbird,
+not himself&mdash;was that he would be nearer to the gun than Cranston and
+would be able to seize it first. But conditions could be greatly worse
+than they were. If Cranston had actually had the weapon in his hands,
+the odds of battle would have been frightfully against Dan. It takes a
+certain length of time to seize, swing, and aim a rifle; and Dan felt
+that while he would be unable to reach it himself, Cranston could not
+procure it either, without giving Dan an opportunity to leap upon him.
+In all his dreams, through the months of preparation, he had pictured it
+thus. It was the test at last.</p>
+
+<p>The gun might be loaded, and still&mdash;in these days of safety
+devices&mdash;unready to fire; and the loss of a fraction of a second might
+enable Cranston to reach his knife. Thus Dan felt justified in ignoring
+the gun altogether and trusting&mdash;as he had most desired&mdash;to a battle of
+hands. And he wanted both hands free when he made his attack.</p>
+
+<p>If Dan had been erect upon his feet, his course would have been an
+immediate leap on the shoulders of his adversary, running the risk of
+Cranston reaching his hunting knife in time. But the second that he
+would require to get to his feet would entirely offset this advantage.
+Cranston could spring up too. So he did the next most disarming thing.</p>
+
+<p>He sprang up and strode into the lean-to.</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening, Cranston," he said pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>Cranston was also upon his feet the same instant. His instincts were
+entirely true. He knew if he leaped for his rifle, Dan would be upon his
+back in an instant, and he would have no chance to use it. His training,
+also, had been that of the hills, and his reflexes flung him erect upon
+his feet at the same instant that he saw the leap of his enemy's shadow.
+They brought up face to face. The rifle was now out of the running, as
+they were at about equal distances from it, and neither would have time
+to swing or aim it.</p>
+
+<p>Dan's sudden appearance had been so utterly unlooked-for, that for a
+moment Cranston could find no answer. His eyes moved to the rifle, then
+to his belt where hung his hunting knife, that still lay on the pallet.
+"Good evening, Failing," he replied, trying his hardest to fall into
+that strange spirit of nonchalance with which brave men have so often
+met their adversaries, and which Dan had now. "I'm surprised to see you
+here. What do you want?"</p>
+
+<p>Dan's voice when he replied was no more warm than the snow banks that
+reinforced the lean-to. "I want your rifle&mdash;also your snowshoes and your
+supplies of food. And I think I'll take your blankets, too."</p>
+
+<p>"And I suppose you mean to fight for them?" Cranston asked. His lips
+drew up in a smile, but there was no smile in the tone of his words.</p>
+
+<p>"You're right," Dan told him, and he stepped nearer. "Not only for that,
+Cranston. We're face to face at last&mdash;hands to hands. I've got a knife
+in my pocket, but I'm not even going to bring it out. It's hands to
+hands&mdash;you and I&mdash;until everything's square between us."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you've forgotten that day on the ridge?" Cranston asked. "You
+haven't any woman to save you this time."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember the day, and that's part of the debt. The thing you did
+yesterday is part of it too. It's all to be settled at last, Cranston,
+and I don't believe I could spare you if you went to your knees before
+me. You've got a clearing out by the fire&mdash;big as a prize ring. We'll go
+out there&mdash;side by side. And hands to hands we'll settle all these debts
+we have between us&mdash;with no rules of fighting and no mercy in the end!"</p>
+
+<p>They measured each other with their eyes. Once more Cranston's gaze
+stole to his rifle, but lunging out, Dan kicked it three feet farther
+into the shadows of the lean-to. Dan saw the dark face drawn with
+passion, the hands clenching, the shoulder muscles growing into hard
+knots. And Cranston looked and knew that merciless vengeance&mdash;that
+age-old sin and Christless creed by which he lived&mdash;had followed him
+down and was clutching him at last.</p>
+
+<p>He saw it in the position of the stalwart form before him, the clear
+level eyes that the moonlight made bright as steel, the hard lines, the
+slim, powerful hands. He could read it in the tones of the voice,&mdash;tones
+that he himself could not imitate or pretend. The hour had come for the
+settling of old debts.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to curse his adversary as a weakling and a degenerate, but the
+obscene words he sought for would not come to his lips. Here was his
+fate, and because the darkness always fades before the light, and the
+courage of wickedness always breaks before the courage of righteousness,
+Cranston was afraid to look it in the face. The fear of defeat, of
+death, of Heaven knows what remorselessness with which this grave giant
+would administer justice was upon him, and his heart seemed to freeze in
+his breast. Cravenly he leaped for his knife on the blankets below him.</p>
+
+<p>Dan was upon him before he ever reached it. He sprang as a cougar
+springs, incredibly fast and with shattering power. Both went down, and
+for a long time they writhed and struggled in each other's arms. The
+pine boughs rustled strangely.</p>
+
+<p>The dark, gaunt hand reached in vain for the knife. Some resistless
+power seemed to be holding his wrist and was bending its bone as an
+Indian bends a bow. Pain lashed through him.&mdash;And then this dark-hearted
+man, who had never known the meaning of mercy, opened his lips to scream
+that this terrible enemy be merciful to him.</p>
+
+<p>But the words wouldn't come. A ghastly weight had come at his throat,
+and his tortured lungs sobbed for breath. Then, for a long time, there
+was a curious pounding, lashing sound in the evergreen boughs. It seemed
+merciless and endless.</p>
+
+<p>But Dan got up at last, in a strange, heavy silence, and swiftly went to
+work. He took the rifle and filled it with cartridges from Cranston's
+belt. Then he put the remaining two boxes of shells into his shirt
+pocket. The supplies of food&mdash;the sack of nutritious jerked venison like
+dried bark, the little package of cheese, the boxes of hardtack and one
+of the small sacks of prepared flour&mdash;he tied, with a single kettle,
+into his heavy blankets and flung them with the rifle upon his back.
+Finally he took the pair of snowshoes from the floor. He worked coldly,
+swiftly, all the time munching at a piece of jerked venison. When he
+had finished he walked to the door of the lean-to.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to Dan that Cranston whispered faintly, from his
+unconsciousness, as he passed; but the victor did not turn to look. The
+snowshoes crunched away into the darkness. On the hill behind a
+half-dozen wolves&mdash;stragglers from the pack&mdash;frisked and leaped about in
+a curious way. A strange smell had reached them on the wind, and when
+the loud, fearful steps were out of hearing, it might pay them to creep
+down, one by one, and investigate its cause.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIIIC" id="VIIIC"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>The gray circle about the fire was growing impatient. Snowbird waited to
+the last instant before she admitted this fact. But it is possible only
+so long to deny the truth of a thing that all the senses verify, and
+that moment for her was past.</p>
+
+<p>At first the wolves had lingered in the deepest shadow and were only
+visible in profile against the gray snow. But as the night wore on, they
+became increasingly careless. They crept up to the very edge of the
+little circle of firelight; and when a high-leaping flame threw a gleam
+over them, they didn't shrink. She had only to look up to see that
+age-old circle of fire&mdash;bright dots, two and two&mdash;at every side.</p>
+
+<p>It is an instinct in the hunting creatures to remain silent before the
+attack. The triumph cries come afterward. But they seemed no longer
+anxious about this, either. Sometimes she would hear their footfall as
+they leaped in the snow, and what excitement stirred them she didn't
+dare to think. Quite often one of them would snarl softly,&mdash;a strange
+sound in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>She noticed that when she went to her hands and knees, laboriously to
+cut a piece of the drier wood from the rain-soaked, rotted snag that was
+her principal supply of fuel, every wolf would leap forward, only to
+draw back when she stood straight again. At such times she saw them
+perfectly plainly,&mdash;their gaunt bodies, their eyes lighted with the
+insanity of famine, their ivory fangs that glistened in the firelight.
+She worked desperately to keep the fire burning bright. She dared not
+neglect it for a moment. Except for the single pistol ball that she
+could afford to expend on the wolves&mdash;of the three she had&mdash;the fire was
+her last defense.</p>
+
+<p>But it was a losing fight. The rain-soaked wood smoked without flame,
+the comparatively dry core with which Dan had started the fire had
+burned down, and the green wood, hacked with such heart-breaking
+difficulty from the saplings that Dan had cut, needed the most tireless
+attention to burn at all.</p>
+
+<p>When Dan had gone, these little trees were well within the circle of the
+wolves. Unfortunately, the circle had drawn in past them. Nevertheless,
+now that the last of the drier dead wood was consumed, she shouldered
+her ax and walked straight toward the gray, crouching bodies in the
+snow. For a tragic second she thought that the nearest of them was going
+to stand its ground. But almost when she was in striking range, and its
+body was sinking to the snow in preparation for a leap, it skulked back
+into the shadow. Exhausted as she was, it seemed to her that she chopped
+endlessly to cut away one little length. The ax blade was dull, the
+handle awkward in her hand, she could scarcely stand on her broken
+snowshoes, and worse, the ice crust broke beneath her blows, burying the
+sapling in the snow. She noticed that every time she bent to strike a
+blow, the circle would plunge a step nearer her, withdrawing as she
+straightened again.</p>
+
+<p>Books of woodcraft often describe with what ease a fire may be built and
+maintained in wet snow. It works fairly well in theory, but it is a
+heart-breaking task in practice. Under such difficulties as she worked,
+it became one of those dreadful undertakings that partake of a nightmare
+quality,&mdash;the walking of a treadmill or the sweeping of waves from the
+shore.</p>
+
+<p>When she secured the first length, her fire was almost extinguished. It
+threw a fault cloud of smoke into the air, but the flame was almost
+gone. The darkness dropped about her, and the wolves came stealing over
+the snow. She worked furiously, with the strength of desperation, and
+little by little she won back a tiny flame.</p>
+
+<p>Her nervous vitality was flowing from her in a frightful stream. Too
+long she had toiled without food in the constant presence of danger, and
+she was very near indeed to utter exhaustion. But at the same time she
+knew she must not faint. That was one thing she could not do,&mdash;to fall
+unconscious before the last of her three cartridges was expended in the
+right way.</p>
+
+<p>Again she went forth to the sapling, and this time it seemed to her that
+if she simply tossed the ax through the air, she could fell one of the
+gray crowd. But when she stooped to pick it up&mdash;She didn't finish the
+thought. She turned to coax the fire. And then she leaned sobbing over
+the sled.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the use?" she cried. "He won't come back. What's the use of
+fighting any more?"</p>
+
+<p>"There's always use of fighting," her father told her. He seemed to
+speak with difficulty, and his face looked strange and white. The cold
+and the exposure were having their effect on his weakened system, and
+unconsciousness was a near shadow indeed. "But, dearest,&mdash;if I could
+only make you do what I want you to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're able to climb a tree, and if you'd take these coats, you
+wouldn't freeze by morning. If you'd only have the strength&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And see you torn to pieces!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm old, dear&mdash;and very tired&mdash;and I'd crawl away into the shadows,
+where you couldn't see. There's no use mincing words, Snowbird. You're a
+brave girl&mdash;always have been since a little thing, as God is my
+Judge&mdash;and you know we must face the truth. Better one of us die than
+both. And I promise&mdash;I'll never feel their fangs. And I won't take your
+pistol with me either."</p>
+
+<p>Her thought flashed to the clasp hunting knife that he carried in his
+pocket. But her eyes lighted, and she bent and kissed him. And the
+wolves leaped forward even at this.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll stay it out," she told him. "We'll fight it to the last&mdash;just as
+Dan would want us to do. Besides&mdash;it would only mean the same fate for
+me, in a little while. I couldn't cling up there forever&mdash;and Dan won't
+come back."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>She was wholly unable to gain on the fire. Only by dint of the most
+heart-breaking toil was she able to secure any dry fuel for it at all.
+Every length of wood she cut had to be scraped of bark, and half the
+time the fire was only a sickly column of white smoke. It became
+increasingly difficult to swing the ax. The trail was almost at its end.</p>
+
+<p>The after-midnight hours drew one by one across the face of the
+wilderness, and she thought that the deepening cold presaged dawn. Her
+fingers were numb. Her nerve control was breaking; she could no longer
+drive a straight blow with the ax. The number of the wolves seemed to be
+increasing: every way she looked she could see them leaping. Or was this
+just hysteria? Surely the battle could go on but a few moments more. The
+wolves themselves, sensing dawn, were losing the last of their
+cowardice.</p>
+
+<p>Once more she went to one of the saplings, but she stumbled and almost
+went to her face at the first blow. It was the instant that her gray
+watchers had been waiting for. The wolf that stood nearest leaped&mdash;a
+gray streak out of the shadow&mdash;and every wolf in the pack shot forward
+with a yell. It was a short, expectant cry; but it chopped off short.
+For with a half-sob, and seemingly without mental process, she aimed her
+pistol and fired.</p>
+
+<p>A fast-leaping wolf is one of the most difficult pistol targets that can
+be imagined. It bordered on the miraculous that she did not miss him
+altogether. Her nerves were torn, their control over her muscles largely
+gone. Yet the bullet coursed down through the lungs, inflicting a mortal
+wound.</p>
+
+<p>The wolf had leaped for her throat; but he fell short. She staggered
+from a blow, and she heard a curious sound in the region of her hip. But
+she didn't know that the fangs had gone home in her soft flesh. The wolf
+rolled on the ground; and if her pistol had possessed the shocking power
+of a rifle, he would have never got up again. As it was, he shrieked
+once, then sped off in the darkness to die. Five or six of the nearest
+wolves, catching the smell of his blood, bayed and sped after him.</p>
+
+<p>But the remainder of the great pack&mdash;fully fifteen of the gray, gaunt
+creatures&mdash;came stealing across the snow toward her. White fangs had
+gone home; and a new madness was in the air.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Straining into the silence, a perfectly straight line between Cranston's
+camp and Snowbird's, Dan Failing came mushing across the snow. His sense
+of direction had never been obliged to stand such a test as this before.
+Snowbird's fire was a single dot on a vast plateau; yet he had gone
+straight toward it.</p>
+
+<p>He was risking everything for the sake of speed. He gave no heed to the
+fallen timber that might have torn the web of his snowshoes to shreds.
+Because he shut out all thought of it, he had no feeling of fatigue. The
+fight with Cranston had been a frightful strain on muscle and nerve; but
+he scarcely remembered it now. His whole purpose was to return to
+Snowbird before the wolves lost the last of their cowardice.</p>
+
+<p>The jerked venison that he had munched had brought him back much of his
+strength. He was wholly unconscious of his heavy pack. Never did he
+glide so swiftly, so softly, with such unerring step; and it was nothing
+more or less than a perfect expression of the ironclad control that his
+steel nerves had over his muscles.</p>
+
+<p>Then, through the silence, he heard the shout of the pack as the wolf
+had leaped at Snowbird. He knew what it meant. The wolves were attacking
+then, and a great flood of black, hating bitterness poured over him at
+the thought he had been too late. It had all been in vain, and before
+the thought could fully go home, he heard the dim, far-off crack of a
+pistol.</p>
+
+<p>Was that the first of the three shots, the one she might expend on the
+wolves, or had the first two already been spent and was she taking the
+last gateway of escape? Perhaps even now Lennox was lying still on the
+sled, and she was standing before the ruin of her fire, praying that her
+soul might have wings. He shouted with all the power of his lungs across
+the snow.</p>
+
+<p>But Snowbird only heard the soft glide of the wolves in the snow. The
+wind was blowing toward Dan; and while he had heard the loud chorus of
+the pack, one of the most far-carrying cries, and the penetrating crack
+of a pistol, she couldn't hear his answering shout. In fact, the
+wilderness seemed preternaturally still. All was breathless, heavy with
+suspense, and she stood, just as Dan had thought, between the ruin of
+her fire and the sled, and she looked with straight eyes to the oncoming
+wolves.</p>
+
+<p>"Hurry, Snowbird," Lennox was whispering. "Give me the pistol&mdash;for that
+last work. We have only a moment more."</p>
+
+<p>He looked very calm and brave, half-raised as he was on the sled, and
+perhaps a half-smile lingered at his bearded lips. And the bravest thing
+of all was that to spare her, he was willing to take the little weapon
+from her hand to use it in its last service. She tried to smile at him,
+then crept over to his side.</p>
+
+<p>The strain was over. They knew what they had to face. She put the
+pistol in his steady hand.</p>
+
+<p>His hand lowered to his side and he sat waiting. The moments passed. The
+wolves seemed to be waiting too, for the last flickering tongue of the
+little fire to die away. The last of her fuel was ignited and burning
+out; they were crouched and ready to spring if she should venture forth
+after more. The darkness closed down deeper, and at last only a column
+of smoke remained.</p>
+
+<p>It was nothing to be afraid of. The great, gray leader of the pack, a
+wolf that weighed nearly one hundred pounds, began slowly and
+deliberately to set his muscles for the spring. It was the same as when
+the great bull elk comes to bay at the base of the cliffs: usually some
+one wolf, often the great pack leader, wishing to remind his followers
+of his might, or else some full-grown male proud in his strength, will
+attack alone. Because this was the noblest game that the pack had ever
+faced, the leader chose to make the first leap himself. It was true that
+these two had neither such horns nor razor-edged hoofs as the elk, yet
+they had eyes that chilled his heart when he tried to look at them. But
+one was lying almost prone, and the fire was out. Besides, the madness
+of starvation, intensified ten times by their terrible realization of
+the wound at her hip, was upon the pack as never before. The muscles
+bunched at his lean flanks.</p>
+
+<p>But as Snowbird and her father gazed at him in fascinated horror, the
+great wolf suddenly smashed down in the snow. She was aware of its
+curious, utter collapse actually before the sound of the rifle shot that
+occasioned it had penetrated her consciousness. It was a perfect shot at
+long range; and for a long instant her tortured faculties refused to
+accept the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Then the rifle spoke again, and a second wolf&mdash;a large male that
+crouched on the other side of the sled&mdash;fell kicking in the snow. The
+pack had leaped forward at the first death; but they halted at the
+second. And then terror came to them when the third wolf suddenly opened
+its savage lips and screamed in the death agony.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time, except for the report of the rifle, the attack had been
+made in utter silence. The reason was just that both breath and nervous
+force are needed to shout; and Dan Failing could afford to waste neither
+of these vital forces. He had dropped to his knee, and was firing again
+and again, his gray eyes looking clear and straight along the barrel,
+his fingers without jerk or tremor pressing again and again at the
+trigger, his hands holding the rifle as in a vice. Every nerve and
+muscle were completely in his command. The distance was far, yet he shot
+with deadly, amazing accuracy. The wolves were within a few feet of the
+girl, and a fraction's waver in the gun barrel might have sped his
+bullet toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Dan Failing," Lennox shouted as the fourth wolf died.</p>
+
+<p>Then Snowbird snatched her pistol from her father's hand and opened
+fire. The two shells were no longer needed to free herself and her
+father from the agony of fangs. She took careful aim, and although a
+pistol is never as accurate or as powerful as a rifle, she killed one
+wolf and wounded another.</p>
+
+<p>Frenzied in their savagery, three or four of the remaining wolves leaped
+at the body of one of the wounded; but the others scattered in all
+directions. Still Dan fired with the same unbelievable accuracy, and
+still the wolves died in the snow. The girl and the man were screaming
+now in the frenzied joy of deliverance. The wolves scurried frantically
+among the trees; and some of them unknowingly ran full in the face of
+their enemy, to be shot down without mercy. And few indeed were those
+that escaped,&mdash;to collect on a distant ridge, and, perhaps, to be
+haunted in dreams by a Death that came out of the shadows to blast the
+pack.</p>
+
+<p>Again the pack-song would be despairing and strange in the winter
+nights,&mdash;that age-old chant of Famine and Fear and the long war of
+existence with only Death and Darkness in the end. And because it is the
+voice of the wilderness itself, the tenderfoot that camps in the
+evergreen forest will listen, and his talk will die at his lips, and he
+will have the beginnings of knowledge. And perhaps he will wonder if God
+has given him the thews and fiber to meet the wilderness breast to
+breast as Dan had met it: to remain and to fight and to conquer. And
+thereby his metal will be tested in the eyes of the Red Gods.</p>
+
+<p>Snowbird stood waiting in the snow, arms stretched to her forester as
+Dan came running through the wood. But his arms were wider yet, and she
+went softly into them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"We will take it easy from now on," Dan Failing told them, after the
+camp was cleared of its dead and the fire was built high. "We have
+plenty of food; and we will travel a little while each day and make warm
+camps at night. We'll have friendship fires, just as sometimes we used
+to build on the ridge."</p>
+
+<p>"But after you get down into the valleys?" Lennox asked anxiously. "Are
+you and Snowbird coming up here to live?"</p>
+
+<p>The silence fell over their camp; and a wounded wolf whined in the
+darkness. "Do you think I could leave it now?" Dan asked. By no gift of
+words could he have explained why; yet he knew that by token of his
+conquest, his spirit was wedded to the dark forests forever. "But heaven
+knows what I'll do for a living."</p>
+
+<p>Snowbird crept near him, and her eyes shone in the bright firelight.
+"I've solved that," she said. "You know you studied forestry&mdash;and I told
+the supervisor at the station how much you knew about it. I wasn't going
+to tell you until&mdash;until certain things happened&mdash;and now they have
+happened, I can't wait another instant. He said that with a little more
+study you could get into the Forest Service&mdash;take an examination and
+become a ranger. You're a natural forester if one ever lived, and you'd
+love the work."</p>
+
+<p>"Besides," Lennox added, "it would clip my Snowbird's wings to make her
+live on the plains. My big house will be rebuilt, children. There will
+be fires in the fireplace on the fall nights. There is no use of
+thinking of the plains."</p>
+
+<p>"And there's going to be a smaller house&mdash;just a cottage at first&mdash;right
+beside it," Dan replied. He could go back to his forests, after all. He
+wouldn't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it
+seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the
+forest rangers,&mdash;those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and
+keepers of its keys.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time Snowbird and he stood together at the edge of the
+firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts brimming with
+words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain
+people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted
+to the yearning of his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"We're made for each other, Snowbird darling," he told her breathlessly
+at last. "And at last I can claim what I've been waiting for all these
+months."</p>
+
+<p>He claimed it; and in open defiance to all civil law, he collected fully
+one hundred times in the next few minutes. But it didn't particularly
+matter, and Snowbird didn't even turn her face. "Maybe you've forgotten
+you claimed it when you first came back too," she said.</p>
+
+<p>So he had. It had completely slipped his mind, in the excitement of his
+fight with the wolf pack. And then while Lennox pretended to be asleep,
+they sat, breathless with happiness, on the edge of the sled and watched
+the dawn come out.</p>
+
+<p>They had never seen the snow so lovely in the sunlight.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voice of the Pack
+
+Author: Edison Marshall
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2010 [EBook #33877]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 attention would
+probably cost her father his life. The nearest telephone was at the
+ranger station, twelve miles distant over a mountain trail. The
+telephone line to Bald Mountain, four miles off, had been disconnected
+when the rains had ended the peril of the forest fire.
+
+It all depended upon her. Bill was driving cattle into the valleys, and
+he and his men had in use all the horses on the ranch with one
+exception. The remaining horse had been ridden by Dan to some distant
+marshes, and as Dan would shoot until sunset, that meant he would not
+return until ten o'clock. There was no road for a car to the ranger
+station, only a rough steep trail, and she remembered, with a sinking
+heart, that one of Bill's missions in the valley was to procure a new
+lighting system. By no conceivable possibility could she drive down that
+mountain road in the darkness. But she was somewhat relieved by the
+thought that in all probability she could walk twelve miles across the
+mountains to the ranger station in much less time than she could drive,
+by automobile, seventy miles down to the ranches at the foothills about
+the valley.
+
+Besides, she remembered with a gladdening heart that Richards, one of
+the rangers, had been a student at a medical college and had taken a
+position with the Forest Service to regain his health. She would cross
+the ridge to the station, 'phone for a doctor in the valleys, and would
+return on horseback with Richards for such first aid as he could give.
+The only problem that remained was that of getting her father into the
+house.
+
+He was stirring a little now. Evidently consciousness was returning to
+him. And then she thanked Heaven for the few simple lessons in first aid
+that her father had taught her in the days before his carelessness had
+come upon him. He had been wise enough to know that rare would be her
+fortune if sometime she did not have need of such knowledge.
+
+One of his lessons had been that of carrying an unconscious human
+form,--a method by which even a woman may carry, for a short distance, a
+heavy man. It was approximately the method used in carrying wounded in
+No Man's Land: the body thrown over the shoulders, one arm through the
+fork of the legs to the wounded man's hand. Her father was not a
+particularly heavy man, and she was an exceptionally strong young woman.
+She knew at once that this problem was solved.
+
+The hardest part was lifting him to her shoulders. Only by calling upon
+her last ounce of strength, and tugging upward with her arms, was she
+able to do it. But it was fairly easy, in her desperation, to carry him
+down the hill. What rest she got she took by leaning against a tree, the
+limp body still across her shoulders.
+
+It was a distance of one hundred yards in all. No muscles but those
+trained by the outdoors, no lungs except those made strong by the
+mountain air, could have stood that test. She laid him on his own bed,
+on the lower floor, and set his broken limbs the best she could. She
+covered him up with thick, fleecy blankets, and set a bottle of whisky
+beside the bed. Then she wrote a note to Dan and fastened it upon one of
+the interior doors.
+
+She had learned, long ago, the value of frequent rests. She did not fly
+at once to her long tramp. For three minutes she lay perfectly limp on
+the fireplace divan, resting from the exertion of carrying her father
+down the hill. Then she drew on her hob-nailed boots--needed sorely for
+the steep climb--and pocketed her pistol. She thrust a handful of jerked
+venison into the pocket of her coat and lighted the lantern. The forest
+night had fallen, soft and vibrant and tremulous, over the heads of the
+dark trees when she started out.
+
+Far away on a distant hillside, Whisperfoot the cougar howled and
+complained because he could find no deer.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Snowbird felt very glad of her intimate, accurate knowledge of the whole
+region of the Divide. In her infancy the winding trails had been her
+playground, and long ago she had acquired the mountaineer's sixth sense
+for traversing them at night. She had need of that knowledge now. The
+moon was dim beneath thin clouds, and the lantern she carried did not
+promise much aid. The glass was rather smoked from previous burnings,
+and its flame glowed dully and threatened to go out altogether. It cast
+a few lame beams on the trail beneath her feet; but they perished
+quickly in the expanse of darkness.
+
+She slipped into her free, swinging stride; and the last beams from the
+windows of the house were soon lost in the pines behind her. It was one
+of those silent, breathless nights with which no mountaineer is entirely
+unacquainted, and for a long tune the only sound she could hear was her
+own soft tramp in the pine needles. The trees themselves were
+motionless. That peculiar sound, not greatly different from that of
+running water which the wind often makes in the pine tops, was entirely
+lacking. Not that she could be deceived by it,--as stories tell that
+certain tenderfeet, dying of thirst in the barren hills, have been. But
+she always liked the sound; and she missed it especially to-night.
+
+She felt that if she would stop to listen, there would be many faint
+sounds in the thickets,--those little hushed noises that the wild things
+make to remind night-wanderers of their presence. But she did not in the
+least care to hear these sounds. They do not tend toward peace of mind
+on a long walk over the ridges.
+
+The wilderness began at once. Whatever influence toward civilization her
+father's house had brought to the wilds chopped off as beneath a blade
+in the first fringe of pines. This is altogether characteristic of the
+Oregon forests. They are much too big and too old to be tamed in any
+large degree by the presence of one house. No one knew this fact better
+than Lennox himself who, in a hard winter of four years before, had
+looked out of his window to find the wolf pack ranged in a hungry circle
+about his house. Within two hundred yards after she had passed through
+her father's door, she was perfectly aware that the wild was stirring
+and throbbing with life about her. At first she tried very hard to think
+of other things. But the attempt wasn't entirely a success. And before
+she had covered the first of the twelve miles, the sounds that from the
+first had been knocking at the door of her consciousness began to make
+an entrance.
+
+If a person lies still long enough, he can usually hear his heart
+beating and the flow of his blood in his arteries. Any sound, no matter
+how faint, will make itself heard at last. It was this way with a very
+peculiar noise that crept up through the silence from the trail behind
+her. She wouldn't give it any heed at first. But in a very little while
+indeed, it grew so insistent that she could no longer disregard it.
+
+Some living creature was trotting along on the trail behind, keeping
+approximately the same distance between them.
+
+Foregoing any attempt to ignore it, she set her cool young mind to
+thinking what manner of beast it might be. Its step was not greatly
+different from that of a large dog,--except possibly a dog would have
+made slightly more noise. Yet she couldn't even be sure of this basic
+premise, because this animal, whatever it might be, had at first
+seemingly moved with utmost caution, but now took less care with its
+step than is customary with the wild denizens of the woods. A wolf, for
+instance, can simply drift when it wishes, and the silence of a cougar
+is a name. Yet unless her pursuer were a dog, which seemed entirely
+unlikely, it was certainly one of these two. She would have liked very
+much to believe the step was that of Old Woof, the bear, suddenly
+curious as to what this dim light of hers might be; but she couldn't
+bring herself to accept the lie. Woof, except when wounded or cornered,
+is the most amiable creature in the Oregon woods, and it would give her
+almost a sense of security to have him waddling along behind her. The
+wolves and cougar, remembering the arms of Woof, would not be nearly so
+curious. But unfortunately, the black bear had never done such a thing
+in the memory of man, and if he had, he would have made six times as
+much noise. He can go fairly softly when he is stalking, but when he is
+obliged to trot--as he would be obliged to do to keep up with a
+swift-walking human figure--he cracks twigs like a rolling log. She had
+the impression that the animal behind had been passing like smoke at
+first, but wasn't taking the trouble to do it now.
+
+The sound was a soft _pat-pat_ on the trail,--sometimes entirely
+obliterated but always recurring when she began to believe that she had
+only fancied its presence. Sometimes a twig, rain-soaked though it was,
+cracked beneath a heavy foot, and again and again she heard the brush
+crushing and rustling as something passed through. Behind it all, a
+weird _motif_, remained the _pat-pat_ of cushioned feet. Sometimes, when
+the trail was covered with soft pine needles, it was practically
+indistinguishable. She had to strain to hear it,--and it is not pleasing
+to the spirit to have to strain to hear any sound. On the bare,
+rain-packed earth, even untrained plainsmen's ears could not possibly
+doubt the reality of the sound.
+
+The animal was approximately one hundred feet behind. It wasn't a wolf,
+she thought. The wolves ran in packs this season, and except in winter
+were more afraid of human beings than any other living creature. It
+wasn't a lynx--one of those curiosity-devoured little felines that will
+mew all day on a trail and never dare come near. It was much too large
+for a lynx. The feet fell too solidly. She had already given up the idea
+that it could be Woof. There were no dogs in the mountains to follow at
+heel; and she had no desire whatever to meet Shag, the faithful hybrid
+that used to be her guardian in the hills. For Shag had gone to his
+well-deserved rest several seasons before. Two other possibilities
+remained. One was that this follower was a human being, the other that
+it was a cougar.
+
+Ordinarily a human being is much more potentially dangerous to a woman
+in the hills at night than a cougar. A cougar is an abject coward and
+some men are not. But Snowbird felt herself entirely capable of handling
+any human foes. They would have no advantage over her; they would have
+no purpose in killing from ambush; and she trusted to her own
+marksmanship implicitly. While it is an extremely difficult thing to
+shoot at a cougar leaping from the thicket, a tall man standing on a
+trail presents an easy target. Besides, she had a vague sense of
+discomfort that if this animal were a cougar, he wasn't acting true to
+form. He was altogether too bold.
+
+She knew perfectly that many times since men came to live in the
+pine-clad mountains they have been followed by the great, tawny cats.
+Curiosity had something to do with it, and perhaps less pleasing
+reasons. But any dreadful instincts that such a cat may have, he utterly
+lacks courage to obey. He has an inborn fear of men, a fear that goes
+down to the roots of the world, and he simply doesn't dare make an
+attack. It was always a rather distressing experience, but nothing ever
+came of it except a good tale around a fireside. But most of these
+episodes, Snowbird remembered, occurred either in daylight or in the dry
+season. The reason was obviously that in the damp woods or at night a
+stalking cougar cannot be perceived by human senses. Her own senses
+could perceive this animal all too plainly,--and the fact suggested
+unpleasant possibilities.
+
+The animal on the trail behind her was taking no care at all to go
+silently. He was simply pat-patting along, wholly at his ease. He acted
+as if the fear that men have instilled in his breed was somehow missing.
+And that is why she instinctively tried to hurry on the trail.
+
+The step kept pace. For a long mile, up a barren ridge, she heard every
+step it made. Then, as the brush closed deeper around her, she couldn't
+hear it at all.
+
+She hurried on, straining to the silence. No, the sound was stopped.
+Could it be that the animal, fearful at last, had turned from her trail?
+And then for the first time a gasp that was not greatly different from a
+despairing sob caught at her throat. She heard the steps again, and they
+were in the thickets just beside her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two hours before Snowbird had left the house, on her long tramp to the
+ranger station, Dan had started home. He hadn't shot until sunset, as he
+had planned. The rear guard of the waterfowl--hardy birds who spent most
+of the winter in the Lake region and which had come south in the great
+flight that had been completed some weeks before--had passed in hundreds
+over his blind, and he had obtained the limit he had set upon
+himself--ten drake mallards--by four o'clock in the afternoon. If he had
+stayed to shoot longer, his birds would have been wasted. So he started
+back along a certain winding trail that led through the thickets and
+which would, if followed long enough, carry him to the road that led to
+the valleys.
+
+He rode one of Lennox's cattle ponies, the only piece of horse-flesh
+that Bill had not taken to the valleys when he had driven down the
+livestock. She was a pretty bay, a spirited, high-bred mare that could
+whip about on her hind legs at the touch of the rein on her neck. She
+made good time along the trail. And an hour before sunset he passed the
+only human habitation between the marsh and Lennox's house,--the cabin
+that had been recently occupied by Landy Hildreth.
+
+He glanced at the place as he passed and saw that it was deserted. No
+smell of wood smoke remained in the air. Evidently Landy had gone down
+to the settlements with his precious testimony in regard to the arson
+ring. Yet it was curious that no word had been heard of him. As far as
+Dan knew, neither the courts nor the Forest Service had taken action.
+
+He hurried on, four miles farther. The trail entered the heavy thickets,
+and he had to ride slowly. It was as wild a section as could be found on
+the whole Divide. Once a deer leaped from the trail, and once he heard
+Woof grunting in the thickets. And just as he came to a little cleared
+space, three strange, dark birds flung up on wide-spreading wings.
+
+He knew them at once. All mountaineers come to know them before their
+days are done. They were the buzzards, the followers of the dead. And
+what they were doing in the thicket just beside the trail, Dan did not
+dare to think.
+
+Of course they might be feeding on the body of a deer, mortally wounded
+by some hunter. He resolved to ride by without investigating. He glanced
+up. The buzzards were hovering in the sky, evidently waiting for him to
+pass. Then, mostly to relieve a curious sense of discomfort in his own
+mind, he stopped his horse and dismounted.
+
+The twilight had started to fall, and already its first grayness had
+begun to soften the harder lines of forest and hill. And after his
+first glance at the curious white heap beside the trail, he was
+extremely glad that it had. But there was no chance to mistake the
+thing. The elements and much more terrible agents had each wrought their
+change, yet there was grisly evidence in plenty to show what had
+occurred. Dan didn't doubt for an instant but that it was the skeleton
+of Landy Hildreth.
+
+He forced himself to go nearer. The buzzards were almost done, and one
+white bone from the shoulder gave unmistakable evidence of the passage
+of a bullet. What had happened thereafter, he could only guess.
+
+He got back quickly on his horse. He understood, now, why nothing had
+been heard of the evidence that Landy Hildreth was to turn over to the
+courts as to the activities of the arson ring. Some one--probably Bert
+Cranston himself--had been waiting on the trail. Others had come
+thereafter. And his lips set in his resolve to let this murder measure
+in the debt he had to pay Cranston.
+
+The Lennox house seemed very silent when, almost an hour later, he
+turned his horse into the corral. He had rather hoped that Snowbird
+would be at the door to meet him. The darkness had just fallen, and all
+the lamps were lighted. He strode into the living room, warming his
+hands an instant beside the fireplace. The fire needed fuel. It had
+evidently been neglected for nearly an hour.
+
+Then he called Snowbird. His voice echoed in the silent room,
+unanswered. He called again, then went to look for her. At the door of
+the dining room he found the note that she had left for him.
+
+It told, very simply and plainly, that her father lay injured in his
+bed, and he was to remain and do what he could for him. She had gone for
+help to the ranger station.
+
+He leaped through the rooms to Lennox's door, then went in on tiptoe.
+And the first thing he saw when he opened the door was the grizzled
+man's gray face on the pillow.
+
+"You're home early, Dan," he said. "How many did you get?"
+
+It was entirely characteristic. Shaggy old Woof is too proud to howl
+over the wounds that lay him low, and this gray old bear on the bed had
+partaken of his spirit.
+
+"Good Lord," Dan answered. "How badly are you hurt?"
+
+"Not so bad but that I'm sorry that Snowbird has gone drifting twelve
+miles over the hills for help. It's dark as pitch."
+
+And it was. Dan could scarcely make out the outline of the somber ridges
+against the sky.
+
+They talked on, and their subject was whether Dan should remain to take
+care of Lennox, or whether he should attempt to overtake Snowbird with
+the horse. Of course the girl had ordered him to stay. Lennox, on the
+other hand, said that Dan could not help him in the least, and desired
+him to follow the girl.
+
+"I'm not often anxious about her," he said slowly. "But it is a long
+walk through the wildest part of the Divide. She's got nothing but a
+pistol and a lantern that won't shine. Besides--I've had bad dreams."
+
+"You don't mean--" Dan's words came hard--"that she's in any danger from
+the animals--the cougars--or the wolves?"
+
+"Barring accidents, no. But, Dan--I want you to go. I'm resting fairly
+easily, and there's whisky on the table in case of a pinch. Someway--I
+can't bar accidents to-night. I don't like to think of her on those
+mountains alone."
+
+And remembering what had lain beside the trail, Dan felt the same. He
+had heard, long ago, that any animal that has once tasted human flesh
+loses its fear of men and is never to be trusted again. Some wild animal
+that still hunted the ridges had, in the last month, done just that
+thing. He left the room and walked softly to the door.
+
+The night lay silent and mysterious over the Divide. He stood listening.
+The girl had started only an hour before, and it was unlikely that she
+could have traversed more than two miles of the steep trail in that
+time. He could fancy her toiling ever upward, somewhere on the dark
+ridge that lay beyond. Although the horse ordinarily did not climb a
+hill more swiftly than a human being, he didn't doubt but that he could
+overtake her before she went three miles farther. But where lay his
+duty,--with the injured man in the house or with the daughter on her
+errand of mercy in the darkness?
+
+Then the matter was decided for him. So faint that it only whispered at
+the dim, outer frontiers of hearing, a sound came pricking through the
+darkness. Only his months of listening to the faint sounds of the
+forest, and the incredible silence of the night enabled him to hear it
+at all. But he knew what it was, the report of a pistol. Snowbird had
+met an enemy in the darkness.
+
+He called once to Lennox, snatched the shotgun that still stood where he
+had placed it in the corner of the room, and hastened to the corral. The
+mare whickered plaintively when he took her from her food.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Even in the darkest night, there is one light that never brings hope or
+cannot lead. It is not a twinkling, joyous light like that mysterious
+will-o'-the-wisp that now and again has lured travelers into the marshes
+to their death. Nor can any one ever mistake it, or be soothed and
+cheered by it. It always appears the same way,--two green circles, close
+together, in the darkness.
+
+When Snowbird first heard the step in the thickets beside her, she
+halted bravely and held her lantern high. She understood at last. The
+very extremity of the beams found a reflection in two very curious
+circles of greenish fire: a fire that was old upon the world before man
+ever rubbed two sticks together to strike a flame. Of course the dim
+rays had simply been reflected on the eyes of some great beast of prey.
+
+She identified it at once. Only the eyes of the felines, with vertical
+pupils, have this identical greenish glare. The eyes of the wolves glow
+in the darkness, but the circles are usually just bright points. Of
+course it was a cougar.
+
+She didn't cry out again. Realizing at last the reality of her peril,
+her long training in the mountains came to her aid. That did not mean
+she was not truly and terribly afraid. The sight of the eyes of a
+hunting animal in the darkness calls up memories from the
+germ-plasm,--deep-buried horrors of thousands of generations past, when
+such lights glowed all about the mouth of the cave. Besides, the beast
+was hunting _her_. She couldn't doubt this fact. Curiosity might make a
+lion follow her, but it would never beget such a wild light of madness
+in his eyes as this she had just seen. Only the frenzied pulse of wild
+blood through the fine vessels of the corneas could occasion such a glow
+as this. She simply clamped down all her moral strength on her rising
+hysteria and looked her situation in the face. Her hand flew
+instinctively to her side, and the pistol leaped in the lantern light.
+
+But the eyes had already blinked out before she could raise the weapon.
+She shot twice. The echoes roared back, unbelievably loud in the
+silence, and then abruptly died; and the only sound was a rustling of
+leaves as the cougar crouched. She sobbed once, then hurried on.
+
+She was afraid to listen at first. She wanted to believe that her pistol
+fire would frighten the animal from her trail. She knew, under ordinary
+conditions, that it would. If he still followed, it could mean but one
+thing,--that some unheard-of incident had occurred to destroy his fear
+of men. It would mean that he had knowingly set upon her trail and was
+hunting her with all the age-old remorselessness that is the code of the
+mountains.
+
+For a little while all was silence. Then out of the hush the thickets
+suddenly crashed and shook on the opposite side of the trail. She fired
+blindly into the thicket. Then she caught herself with a sob. But two
+shells remained in her pistol, and they must be saved for the test.
+
+Whisperfoot the cougar, remembering the lessons of his youth, turned
+from the trail when he had first heard Snowbird's step. He had crouched
+and let her pass. She was walking into the wind; and as she was at the
+closest point a message had blown back to him.
+
+The hair went straight on his shoulders and along his spine. His blood,
+running cold an instant before from fear, made a great leap in his
+veins. A picture came in his dark mind: the chase for a deer when the
+moon had set, the stir of a living thing that broke twigs in the
+thickets, and the leap he had made. There had been blood, that
+night,--the wildness and the madness and the exultation of the kill. Of
+course there had been terror first, but the terror had soon departed and
+left something lying warm and still in the thickets. It was the same
+game that walked his trail in front--game that died easily and yet, in a
+vague way he did not understand, the noblest game of all. It was living
+flesh, to tear with talon and fang.
+
+All his training, all the instincts imbued in him by a thousand
+generations of cougars who knew this greatest fear, were simply
+obliterated by the sudden violence of his hunting-madness. He had tasted
+this blood once, and it could never be forgotten. The flame leaped in
+his eyes. And then he began the stalk.
+
+A cougar, trying to creep silently on its game, does not move quickly.
+It simply steals, as a serpent steals through the grass. Whisperfoot
+stalked for a period of five minutes, to learn that the prey was farther
+away from him at every step.
+
+He trotted forward until he came close, and again he stalked. Again he
+found, after a few minutes of silent creeping through the thickets, that
+he had lost distance. Evidently this game did not feed slowly, like the
+deer. It was to be a chase then. Again he trotted within one hundred
+feet of the girl.
+
+Three times more he tried to stalk before he finally gave it up
+altogether. This game was like the porcupine,--simply to be chased down
+and taken. As in the case of all animals that hunt their game by
+overtaking it, there was no longer any occasion for going silently. The
+thing to do was to come close and spring from the trail behind.
+
+Though the fear was mostly gone, the cougar retained enough of that
+caution that most wild animals exhibit when hunting a new game so that
+he didn't attempt to strike Snowbird down at once. But as the chase went
+on, his passion grew upon him. Ever he crept nearer. And at last he
+sprang full into the thickets beside her.
+
+At that instant she had shot for the first time. Because the light had
+left his eyes before she could find aim, both shots had been clean
+misses. And terrible as the reports were, he was too engrossed in the
+chase to be frightened away by mere sound. This was the cry the man-pack
+always made,--these sudden, startling sounds in the silence. But he felt
+no pain. He crouched a moment, shivering. Then he bounded on again.
+
+The third shot was a miss too: in fact, there had been no chance for a
+hit. A sound in the darkness is as unreliable a target as can possibly
+be imagined. And it didn't frighten him as much as the others.
+
+Three times he crouched, preparing for a spring, and three times his
+tawny tail began that little up-and-down motion that is always the
+warning before his leap. But each time, as he waited to find his
+courage, the game had hurried on.
+
+Now she had her back to a tree and was holding the lantern high. It
+glinted on his eyes. And the fourth time she shot, and something hot and
+strange singed by close to his head. But it wasn't the pain of one quill
+from a porcupine, and it only increased his anger. He waited, crouching,
+and the girl started on.
+
+She was making other sounds now--queer, whimpering sounds not greatly
+different from the bleat that the fawn utters when it dies. It was a
+fear-sound, and if there is one emotion with which the wild beasts are
+acquainted, in all its phases, it is fear. She was afraid of him then,
+and that meant he need no longer be in the least afraid of her. His skin
+began to twitch all over with that terrible madness and passion of the
+flesh-hunters.
+
+This game was like the deer, and the thing to do was lie in wait. There
+was only one trail. He was simply following his instincts, no conscious
+intelligence, when he made a long circle about her and turned back to
+the trail two hundred yards in front. He wasn't afraid of losing her in
+the darkness. She was neither fleet like the deer nor courageous like
+Woof, the bear. He had only to wait and leap from the darkness when she
+passed.
+
+And because this was his own way of hunting, because the experiences of
+a thousand generations of cougars had taught him that it was the safest
+way, that even an elk may be downed by a surprise leap from ambush, the
+last of his fear went out of him. The step drew nearer, and he knew he
+would not again be afraid to give his stroke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Dan Failing, riding like mad over the mountain trail, heard the
+third shot from Snowbird's pistol, he felt that one of the debts he owed
+had come due at last. He seemed to know, as the darkness pressed around
+him, that he was to be tried in the fire. And the horse staggered
+beneath him as he tried to hasten.
+
+He showed no mercy to his mount. Horseflesh isn't made for carrying a
+heavy man over such a trail as this, and she was red-nostriled and
+lathered before half a mile had been covered. He made her leap up the
+rocks, and on the fairly level stretches he loosed the reins and lashed
+her into a gallop. Only a mountain horse could have stood that test. To
+Dan's eyes, the darkness was absolute; yet she kept straight to the
+trail. He made no attempt to guide her. She bounded over logs that he
+couldn't see, and followed turn after turn in the trail without ever a
+misstep.
+
+He gave no thought to his own safety. His courage was at the test, and
+no risk of his own life must interfere with his attempt to save Snowbird
+from the danger that threatened her. He didn't know when the horse would
+fall with him and precipitate him down a precipice, and he was perfectly
+aware that to crash into a low-hanging limb of one of the great trees
+beside the trail would probably crush his skull. But he took the chance.
+And before the ride was done he found himself pleading with the horse,
+even as he lashed her sides with his whip.
+
+The lesser forest creatures sprang from his trail; and once the mare
+leaped high to miss a dark shadow that crossed in front. As she caught
+her stride, Dan heard a squeal and a rattle of quills that identified
+the creature as a porcupine.
+
+By now he had passed the first of the worst grades, coming out upon a
+long, easy slope of open forest. Again he urged his horse, leaving to
+her keen senses alone the choosing of the path between the great tree
+trunks. He rode almost in silence. The deep carpet of pine needles, wet
+from the recent rains, dulled the sound of the horse's hoofs.
+
+Then he heard Snowbird fire for the fourth time; and he knew that he had
+almost overtaken her. The report seemed to smash the air. And he lashed
+his horse into the fastest run she knew,--a wild, sobbing figure in the
+darkness.
+
+"She's only got one shot more," he said. He knew how many bullets her
+pistol carried; and the danger--whatever it was--must be just at hand.
+Underbrush cracked beneath him. And then the horse drew up with a jerk
+that almost hurled him from the saddle.
+
+He lashed at her in vain. She was not afraid of the darkness and the
+rocks of the trail, but some Terror in the woods in front had in an
+instant broken his control over her. She reared, snorting; then danced
+in an impotent circle. Meanwhile, precious seconds were fleeing.
+
+He understood now. The horse stood still, shivering beneath him, but
+would not advance a step. The silence deepened. Somewhere in the
+darkness before him a great cougar was waiting by the trail, and
+Snowbird, hoping for the moment that it had given up the chase, was
+hastening through the shadows squarely into its ambush.
+
+Whisperfoot crouched lower: and again his long serpent of a tail began
+the little vertical motion that always precedes his leap. He had not
+forgotten the wild rapture of that moment he had inadvertently sprung on
+Landy Hildreth,--or how, after his terror had died, he had come creeping
+back. He hunted his own way, waiting on the trail; and his madness was
+at its height. He was not just Whisperfoot; the coward, that runs at the
+shadow of a tall form in the thickets. The consummation was complete,
+and that single experience of a month before had made of him a hunter of
+men. His muscles set for the leap.
+
+So intent was he that his keen senses didn't detect the fact that there
+was a curious echo to the girl's footsteps. Dan Failing had slipped down
+from his terrified horse and was running up the trail behind her,
+praying that he could be in time.
+
+Snowbird heard the pat, pat of his feet; but at first she did not dare
+to hope that aid had come to her. She had thought of Dan as on the
+far-away marshes; and her father, the only other living occupant of this
+part of the Divide, might even now be lying dead in his house. In her
+terror, she had lost all power of interpretation of events. The sound
+might be the cougar's mate, or even the wolf pack, jealous of his game.
+Sobbing, she hurried on into Whisperfoot's ambush.
+
+Then she heard a voice, and it seemed to be calling to her.
+"Snowbird--I'm coming, Snowbird," a man's strong voice was shouting. She
+whirled with a sob of thankfulness.
+
+At that instant the cougar sprang.
+
+Terrified though she was, Snowbird's reflexes had kept sure and true.
+Even as the great cat leaped, a long, lithe shadow out of the shadow,
+her finger pressed back against the trigger of her pistol. She had been
+carrying her gun in front of her, and she fired it, this last time, with
+no conscious effort. It was just a last instinctive effort to defend
+herself.
+
+One other element affected the issue. She had whirled to answer Dan's
+cry just as the cougar left the ground. But she had still been in range.
+The only effect was to lessen, in some degree, the accuracy of the
+spring. The bullet caught the beast in mid-air; but even if it had
+reached its heart, the momentum of the attack was too great to be
+completely overcome. Snowbird only knew that some vast, resistless power
+had struck her, and that the darkness seemed to roar and explode about
+her.
+
+Hurled to her face in the trail, she did not see the cougar sprawl on
+the earth beside her. The flame in the lantern almost flicked out as it
+fell from her hand, then flashed up and down, from the deepest gloom to
+a vivid glare with something of the effect of lightning flickering in
+the sky. Nor did she hear the first frenzied thrashing of the wounded
+animal. Kindly unconsciousness had fallen, obscuring this and also the
+sight of the great cat, in the agony of its wound, creeping with broken
+shoulder and bared claws across the pine needles toward her defenseless
+body.
+
+But the terrible fangs were never to know her white flesh. Some one had
+come between. There was no chance to shoot: Whisperfoot and the girl
+were too near together for that. But one course remained; and there was
+not even time to count the cost. In this most terrible moment of Dan
+Failing's life, there was not even an instant's hesitation. He did not
+know that Whisperfoot was wounded. He saw the beast creeping forward in
+the weird dancing light of the fallen lantern, and he only knew that his
+flesh, not hers, must resist its rending talons. Nothing else mattered.
+No other considerations could come between.
+
+It was the test; and Dan's instincts prompted coolly and well. He
+leaped with all his strength. The cougar bounded into his arms, not upon
+the prone body of the girl. And she opened her eyes to hear a curious
+thrashing in the pine needles, a strange grim battle that, as the
+lantern flashed out, was hidden in the darkness.
+
+And that battle, in the far reaches of the Divide, passed into a legend.
+It was the tale of how Dan Failing, his gun knocked from his hands as he
+met the cougar's leap, with his own unaided arms kept the life-giving
+breath from the animal's lungs and killed him in the pine needles. Claw
+and fang and the frenzy of death could not matter at all.
+
+Thus Failing established before all men his right to the name he bore.
+And thus he paid one of his debts--life for a life, as the code of the
+forest has always decreed--and in the fire of danger and pain his metal
+was tried and proven.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THREE
+
+THE PAYMENT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Lennox home, in the far wilderness of the Umpqua Divide, looked
+rather like an emergency hospital for the first few days after Dan's
+fight with Whisperfoot. Its old sounds of laughter and talk were almost
+entirely lacking. Two injured men and a girl recovering from a nervous
+collapse do not tend toward cheer.
+
+But the natural sturdiness of all three quickly came to their aid. Of
+course Lennox had been severely injured by the falling log, and many
+weeks would pass before he would be able to walk again. He could sit up
+for short periods, however; had the partial use of one arm; and could
+propel himself--after the first few weeks--at a snail's pace through the
+rooms in a rude wheel chair that Bill's ingenuity had contrived. The
+great livid scratches that Dan bore on his body quickly began to heal;
+and before a week was done, he began to venture forth on the hills
+again. Snowbird had remained in bed for three days: then she had hopped
+out, one bright afternoon, swearing never to go back into it again.
+Evidently the crisp, fall air of the mountains had been a nerve tonic
+for them all.
+
+Of course there had been medical attention. A doctor and a nurse had
+motored up the day after the accident; the physician had set the bones
+and departed, and the nurse remained for a week, to see the grizzled
+mountaineer well on the way of convalescence. But it was an anxious
+wait, and Lennox's car was kept constantly in readiness to speed her
+away in case the snows should start. At last she had left him in
+Snowbird's hands, and Bill had driven her back to the settlements in his
+father's car. The die was now cast as to whether or not Dan and the
+remainder of the family should winter in the mountains. The snow clouds
+deepened every day, the frost was ever heavier in the dawns, and the
+road would surely remain open only a few days more.
+
+Once more the three seemingly had the Divide all to themselves. Bert
+Cranston had evidently deserted his cabin and was working a trap-line on
+the Umpqua side. The rangers left the little station, all danger of fire
+past, and went down to their offices in the Federal building of one of
+the little cities below. Because he was worse than useless in the deep
+snows that were sure to come, one of the ranch hands that had driven up
+with Bill rode away to the valleys the last of the live stock,--the
+horse that Dan had ridden to Snowbird's defense.
+
+Nothing had been heard of Landy Hildreth, who used to live on the trail
+to the marsh, and both Lennox and his daughter wondered why. There were
+also certain officials who had begun to be curious. As yet, Dan had told
+no one of the grim find he had made on his return from hunting. And he
+would have found it an extremely difficult fact to explain.
+
+It all went back to those inner springs of motive that few men can see
+clearly enough within themselves to recognize. Even the first day, when
+he lay burning from his wounds, he worked out his own explanation in
+regard to the murder mystery. He hadn't the slightest doubt but that
+Cranston had killed Hildreth to prevent his testimony from reaching the
+courts below. Of course any other member of the arson ring of hillmen
+might have been the murderer; yet Dan was inclined to believe that
+Cranston, the leader of the gang, usually preferred to do such dangerous
+work as this himself. If it were true, somewhere on that tree-clad ridge
+clues would be left. By a law that went down to the roots of life, he
+knew, no action is so small but that it leaves its mark. Moreover, it
+was wholly possible that the written testimony Hildreth must have
+gathered had never been found or destroyed. Dan didn't want the aid of
+the courts to find these clues. He wanted to work out the case himself.
+It resolved itself into a simple matter of vengeance: Dan had his debt
+to pay, and he wanted to bring Cranston to ruin by his own hand alone.
+
+While it was true that he took rather more than the casual interest that
+most citizens feel in the destruction of the forest by wanton fire, and
+had an actual sense of duty to do all that he could to stop the
+activities of the arson ring, his motives, stripped and bare, were
+really not utilitarian. He had no particular interest in Hildreth's
+case. He remembered him simply as one of Cranston's disreputable gang, a
+poacher and a fire bug himself. When all is said and done, it remained
+really a personal issue between Dan and Cranston. And personal issues
+are frowned upon by law and society. Civilization has toiled up from the
+darkness in a great measure to get away from them. But human nature
+remains distressingly the same, and Dan's desire to pay his debt was a
+distinctly human emotion. Sometime a breed will live upon the earth that
+can get clear away from personal vengeance--from that age-old code of
+the hills that demands a blow for a blow and a life for a life--but the
+time is not yet. And after all, by all the standards of men as men, not
+as read in idealistic philosophies, Dan's debt was entirely real. By the
+light held high by his ancestors, he could not turn his other cheek.
+
+Just as soon as he was able, he went back to the scene of the murder. He
+didn't know when the snow would come to cover what evidence there was.
+It threatened every hour. Every wind promised it. The air was sharp and
+cold, and no drop of rain could fall through it without crystallizing
+into snow. The deer had all gone, and the burrowing people had sought
+their holes. The bees worked no more in the winter flowers. Of all the
+greater forest creatures, only the wolves and the bear remained,--the
+former because their fear of men would not permit them to go down to the
+lower hills, and the latter because of his knowledge that when food
+became scarce, he could always burrow in the snow. No bear goes into
+hibernation from choice. Wise old bachelor, he much prefers to keep just
+as late hours as he can--as long as the eating places in the berry
+thickets remain open. The cougars had all gone down with the deer, the
+migratory birds had departed, and even the squirrels were in hiding.
+
+The scene didn't offer much in the way of clues. Of the body itself,
+only a white heap of bones remained; for many and terrible had been the
+agents at work upon them. The clothes, however, particularly the coat,
+were practically intact. Gripping himself, Dan thrust his fingers into
+its pockets, then into the pockets of the shirt and trousers. All papers
+that would in any way serve to identify the murdered man, or tell what
+his purpose had been in journeying down the trail the night of the
+murder had been removed. Only one explanation presented itself. Cranston
+had come before him, and searched the body himself.
+
+Dan looked about for tracks, and he was considerably surprised to find
+the blurred, indistinct imprint of a shoe other than his own. He hadn't
+the least hope that the tracks themselves would offer a clue to a
+detective. They were too dim for that. The surprising fact was that
+since the murder had been committed immediately before the fall rains,
+the water had not completely washed them out. The only possibility
+remaining was that Cranston had returned to the body after the week's
+rain-fall. The track had been dimmed by the lighter rains that had
+fallen since.
+
+But yet it was entirely to be expected that the examination of the body
+would be an after-thought on Cranston's part. Possibly at first his
+only thought was to kill and, following the prompting that has sent so
+many murderers to the gallows, he had afterwards returned to the scene
+of the crime to destroy any clues he might have left and to search the
+body for any evidence against the arson ring.
+
+Dan's next thought was to follow along the trail and find Cranston's
+ambush. Of course it would be in the direction of the settlement from
+the body, as the bullet had entered from the front. He found it hard to
+believe that Hildreth had fallen in the exact spot where the body lay.
+Men journeying at night keep to the trail, and the white heap itself was
+fully forty feet back from the trail in the thickets. Perhaps Cranston
+had dragged it there to hide it from the sight of any one who might pass
+along the lonely trail again; and it was a remote possibility that
+Whisperfoot, coming in the night, had tugged it into the thickets for
+dreadful purposes of his own. Likely the shot was fired when Hildreth
+was in an open place on the trail; and Dan searched for the ambush with
+this conclusion in mind. He walked back, looking for a thicket from
+which such a spot would be visible. Something over fifty yards down he
+found it; and he knew it by the empty brass rifle cartridge that lay
+half buried in the wet leaves.
+
+The shell was of the same caliber as Cranston's hunting rifle. Dan's
+hand shook as he put it in his pocket.
+
+Encouraged by this amazing find, he turned up the trail toward
+Hildreth's cabin. It might be possible, he thought, that Hildreth had
+left some of his testimony--perhaps such rudely scrawled letters as
+Cranston had written him--in some forgotten drawer in his hut. It was
+but a short walk for Dan's hardened legs, and he made it before
+mid-afternoon.
+
+The search itself was wholly without result. But because he had time to
+think as he climbed the ridge, because as he strode along beneath that
+wintry sky he had a chance to consider every detail of the case, he was
+able to start out on a new tack when, just before sunset, he returned to
+the body. This new train of thought had as its basis that Cranston's
+shot had not been deadly at once; that wounded, Hildreth had himself
+crawled into the thickets where Whisperfoot had found him. And that
+meant that he had to enlarge his search for such documents as Hildreth
+had carried to include all the territory between the trail and the
+location of the body.
+
+It was possibly a distance of forty feet, and getting down on his hands
+and knees, Dan looked for any break in the shrubbery that would
+indicate the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. And it was ten
+minutes well rewarded, as far as clearing up certain details of the
+crime. His senses had been trained and sharpened by his months in the
+wilderness, and he was able to back-track the wounded man from the
+skeleton clear to the clearing on the trail where he had first fallen.
+But as no clues presented themselves, he started to turn home.
+
+He walked twelve feet, then turned back. Out of the corner of his eye it
+seemed to him that he had caught a flash of white, near the end of a
+great, dead log beside the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. It
+was to the credit of his mountain training alone that his eye had been
+keen enough to detect it; that it had been so faithfully recorded on his
+consciousness; and that, knowing at last the importance of details, he
+had turned back. For a moment he searched in vain. Evidently a yellow
+leaf had deceived him. Once more he retraced his steps, trying to find
+the position from which his eye had caught the glimpse of white. Then he
+dived straight for the rotten end of the log.
+
+Into a little hollow in the bark, on the underside of the log, some hand
+had thrust a small roll of papers. They were rain soaked now, and the
+ink had dimmed and blotted; but Dan realized their significance. They
+were the complete evidence that Hildreth had accumulated against the
+arson ring,--letters that had passed back and forth between himself and
+Cranston, a threat of murder from the former if Hildreth turned State's
+evidence, and a signed statement of the arson activities of the ring by
+Hildreth himself. They were not only enough to break up the ring and
+send its members to prison; with the aid of the empty shell and other
+circumstantial evidence, they could in all probability convict Bert
+Cranston of murder.
+
+For a long time he stood with the shadows of the pines lengthening about
+him, his gray eyes in curious shadow. For the moment a glimpse was given
+him into the deep wells of the human soul; and understanding came to
+him. Was there no balm for hatred even in the moment of death? Were men
+unable to forget the themes and motives of their lives, even when the
+shadows closed down upon them? Hildreth had known what hand had struck
+him down. And even on the frontier of death, his first thought was to
+hide his evidence where Cranston could not find it when he searched the
+body, but where later it might be found by the detectives that were sure
+to come. It was the old creed of a life for a life. He wanted his
+evidence to be preserved,--not that right should be wronged, but so that
+Cranston would be prosecuted and convicted and made to suffer. His
+hatred of Cranston that had made him turn State's evidence in the first
+place had been carried with him down into death.
+
+As Dan stood wondering, he thought he heard a twig crack on the trail
+behind him, and he wondered what forest creature was still lingering on
+the ridges at the eve of the snows.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The snow began to fall in earnest at midnight,--great, white flakes that
+almost in an instant covered the leaves. It was the real beginning of
+winter, and all living creatures knew it. The wolf pack sang to it from
+the ridge,--a wild and plaintive song that made Bert Cranston, sleeping
+in a lean-to on the Umpqua side of the Divide, swear and mutter in his
+sleep. But he didn't really waken until Jim Gibbs, one of his gang,
+returned from his secret mission.
+
+They wasted no words. Bert flung aside the blankets, lighted a candle,
+and placed it out of the reach of the night wind. It cast queer shadows
+in the lean-to and found a curious reflection in the steel points of his
+eyes. His face looked swarthy and deep-lined in its light.
+
+"Well?" he demanded. "What did you find?"
+
+"Nothin'," Jim Gibbs answered gutturally. "If you ask me what I found
+_out_, I might have somethin' to answer."
+
+"Then--" and Bert, after the manner of his kind, breathed an oath--"what
+did you find out?"
+
+His tone, except for an added note of savagery, remained the same. Yet
+his heart was thumping a great deal louder than he liked to have it. He
+wasn't amused by his associate's play on words. Nor did he like the
+man's knowing tone and his air of importance. Realizing that the snows
+were at hand, he had sent Gibbs for a last search of the body, to find
+and recover the evidence that Hildreth had against him and which had not
+been revealed either on Hildreth's person or in his cabin. He had become
+increasingly apprehensive about those letters he had written Hildreth,
+and certain other documents that had been in his possession. He didn't
+understand why they hadn't turned up. And now the snows had started, and
+Jim Gibbs had returned empty-handed, but evidently not empty-minded.
+
+"I've found out that the body's been uncovered--and men are already
+searchin' for clues. And moreover--I think they've found them." He
+paused, weighing the effect of his words. His eyes glittered with
+cunning. Rat that he was, he was wondering whether the time had arrived
+to leave the ship. He had no intention of continuing to give his
+services to a man with a rope-noose closing about him. And Cranston,
+knowing this fact, hated him as he hated the buzzard that would claim
+him in the end and tried to hide his apprehension.
+
+"Go on. Blat it out," Cranston ordered. "Or else go away and let me
+sleep."
+
+It was a bluff; but it worked. If Gibbs had gone without speaking,
+Cranston would have known no sleep that night. But the man became more
+fawning.
+
+"I'm tellin' you, fast as I can," he went on, almost whining. "I went to
+the cabin, just as you said. But I didn't get a chance to search it--"
+
+"Why not?" Cranston thundered. His voice reechoed among the snow-wet
+pines.
+
+"I'll tell you why! Because some one else--evidently a cop--was already
+searchin' it. Both of us know there's nothin' there anyway. We've gone
+over it too many times. After a while he went away--but I didn't turn
+back yet. That wouldn't be Jim Gibbs. I shadowed him, just as you'd want
+me to. And he went straight back to the body."
+
+"Yes?" Cranston had hard work curbing his impatience. Again Gibbs' eyes
+were full of ominous speculations.
+
+"He stopped at the body, and it was plain he'd been there before. He
+went crawling through the thickets, lookin' for clues. He done what you
+and me never thought to do--lookin' all the way between the trail and
+the body. He'd already found the brass shell you told me to get. At
+least, it wasn't there when I looked, after he'd gone. You should've
+thought of it before. But he found somethin' else a whole lot more
+important--a roll of papers that Hildreth had chucked into an old pine
+stump when he was dyin'. It was your fault, Cranston, for not gettin'
+them that night. You needn't 've been afraid of any one hearin' the shot
+and catching you red-handed. This detective stood and read 'em on the
+trail. And you know--just as well as I do--what they were."
+
+"Damn you, I went back the next morning, as soon as I could see. And the
+mountain lion had already been there. I went back lots of times since.
+And that shell ain't nothing--but all the time I supposed I put it in my
+pocket. You know how it is--a fellow throws his empty shell out by
+habit."
+
+Gibbs' eyes grew more intent. What was this thing? Cranston's tone,
+instead of commanding, was almost pleading. But the leader caught
+himself at once.
+
+"I don't see why I need to explain any of that to you. What I want to
+know is this: why you didn't shoot and get those papers away from him?"
+
+For an instant their eyes battled. But Gibbs had never the strength of
+his leader. If he had, it would have been asserted long since. He sucked
+in his breath, and his gaze fell away. It rested on Cranston's rifle,
+that in some manner had been pulled up across his knees. And at once he
+was cowed. He was never so fast with a gun as Cranston.
+
+"Blood on my hands, eh--same as on yours?" he mumbled, looking down.
+"What do you think I want, a rope around my neck? These hills are big,
+but the arm of the law has reached up before, and it might again. You
+might as well know first as last I'm not goin' to do any killin's to
+cover up your murders."
+
+"That comes of not going myself. You fool--if he gets that evidence down
+to the courts, you're broken the same as me."
+
+"But I wouldn't get more'n a year or so, at most--and that's a heap
+different from the gallows. I did aim at him--"
+
+"But you just lacked the guts to pull the trigger!"
+
+"I did, and I ain't ashamed of it. But besides--the snows are here now,
+and he won't be able to even get word down to the valleys in six
+months. If you want him killed so bad, do it yourself."
+
+This was a thought indeed. On the other hand, another murder might not
+be necessary. Months would pass before the road would be opened, and in
+the meantime Cranston could have a thousand chances to steal back the
+accusing letters. Perhaps they would be guarded closely at first, but by
+the late winter months they would be an old story, and a single raid on
+the house might turn the trick. He didn't believe for an instant that
+the man Gibbs had seen a detective. He had kept too close watch over the
+roads for that.
+
+"A tall chap, in outing clothes--dark-haired and clean-shaven?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Wears a tan hat?"
+
+"That's the man."
+
+"I know him--and I wish you'd punctured him. Why, you could've taken
+those papers away from him and slapped his face, and he wouldn't have
+put up his arms. And now he'll hide 'em somewhere--afraid to carry 'em
+for fear he meets me. That's Failing--the tenderfoot that's been staying
+at Lennox's. He's a lunger."
+
+"He didn't look like no lunger to me."
+
+"But no matter about that--it's just as I thought. And I'll get 'em
+back--mark my little words."
+
+In the meantime the best thing to do was to move at once to his winter
+trapping grounds,--a certain neglected region on the lower levels of the
+North Fork. If at any time within the next few weeks, Dan should attempt
+to carry word down to the settlements, he would be certain to pass
+within view of this camp. But he knew that the chance of Dan starting
+upon any such journey before the snow had melted was not one in a
+thousand. To be caught in the Divide in the winter means to be snowed in
+as completely as the Innuits of upper Greenland. No word could pass
+except by a man on snowshoes. Really there was no urgency about this
+matter of the evidence.
+
+Yet if the chance did come, if the house should be left unguarded, it
+might play Cranston to make an immediate search. Dan would have no
+reason for supposing that Cranston suspected his possession of the
+letters; he would not be particularly watchful, and would probably
+pigeonhole them until spring in Lennox's desk.
+
+And the truth was that Cranston had reasoned out the situation almost
+perfectly. When Dan wakened in the morning, and the snow lay already a
+foot deep over the wilderness world, he knew that he would have no
+chance to act upon the Cranston case until the snows melted in the
+spring. So he pushed all thought of it out of his mind and turned his
+attention to more pleasant subjects. It was true that he read the
+documents over twice as he lay in bed. Then he tied them into a neat
+packet and put them away where they would be quickly available. Then he
+thrust his head out of the window and let the great snowflakes sift down
+upon his face. It was winter at last, the season that he loved.
+
+He didn't stir from the house, that first day of the storm. Snowbird and
+he found plenty of pleasant things to do and talk about before the
+roaring fire that he built in the grate. He was glad of the great pile
+of wood that lay outside the door. It meant life itself, in this season.
+Then Snowbird led him to the windows, and they watched the white drifts
+pile up over the low underbrush.
+
+When finally the snowstorm ceased, five days later, the whole face of
+the wilderness was changed. The buckbrush was mostly covered, the fences
+were out of sight; the forest seemed a clear, clean sweep of white,
+broken only by an occasional tall thicket and by the great, snow-covered
+trees.
+
+When the clouds blew away, and the air grew clear, the temperature
+began to fall. Dan had no way of knowing how low it went. Thermometers
+were not considered essential at the Lennox home. But when his eyelids
+congealed with the frost, and his mittens froze to the logs of firewood
+that he carried through the door, and the pine trees exploded and
+cracked in the darkness, he was correct in his belief that it was very,
+very cold.
+
+But he loved the cold, and the silence and austerity that went with it.
+The wilderness claimed him as never before. The rugged breed that were
+his ancestors had struggled through such seasons as this and passed a
+love of them down through the years to him.
+
+When the ice made a crust over the snow, he learned to walk on
+snowshoes. At first there were pained ankles and endless floundering in
+the drifts. But between the fall of fresh snow and the thaws that
+softened the crust, he slowly mastered the art. Snowbird--and Dan never
+realized the full significance of her name until he saw her flying with
+incredible grace over the snow--laughed at him at first and ran him
+races that would usually end in his falling head-first into a ten-foot
+snowbank. She taught him how to ski and more than once she would stop in
+the middle of an earnest bit of pedagogy to find that he wasn't
+listening at all. He would seem to be fairly devouring her with his
+eyes, delighting in the play of soft pinks and reds in her cheeks, and
+drinking, as a man drinks wine, the amazing change of light and shadow
+in her eyes.
+
+She seemed to blossom under his gaze. Not one of those short winter days
+went by without the discovery of some new trait or little vanity to
+astonish or delight him,--sometimes an unlooked-for tenderness toward
+the weak, often a sweet, untainted philosophy of life, or perhaps just a
+lowering of her eyelids in which her eyes would show lustrous through
+the lashes, or some sweeping, exuberant gesture startlingly graceful.
+
+Lennox wakened one morning with the realization that this was one of the
+hardest winters of his experience. More snow had fallen in the night and
+had banked halfway up his windows. The last of the shrubbery--except for
+the ends of a few tall bushes that would not hold the snow--was covered,
+and the roofs of some of the lower outbuildings had somewhat the
+impression of drowning things, striving desperately to keep their heads
+above water. He began to be very glad of the abundant stores of
+provisions that overcrowded his pantry--savory hams and bacons, dried
+venison, sacks of potatoes and evaporated vegetables, and, of course,
+canned goods past counting. With the high fire roaring in the grate, the
+season held no ills for them. But sometimes, when the bitter cold came
+down at twilight, and the moon looked like a thing of ice itself over
+the snow, he began to wonder how the wild creatures who wintered on the
+Divide were faring. Of course most of them were gone. Woof, long since,
+had grunted and mumbled his way into a winter lair. But the wolves
+remained, strange gray shadows on the snow, and possibly a few of the
+hardier smaller creatures.
+
+More than once in those long winter nights their talk was chopped off
+short by the song of the pack on some distant ridge. Sometime, when the
+world is old, possibly a man will be born that can continue to talk and
+keep his mind on his words while the wolf pack sings. But he is
+certainly an unknown quantity to-day. The cry sets in vibration curious
+memory chords, and for a moment the listener sees in his mind's eye his
+ancient home in an ancient world,--Darkness and Fear and Eyes shining
+about the cave. It carries him back, and he knows the wilderness as it
+really is; and to have such knowledge dries up all inclination to talk,
+as a sponge dries water. Of course the picture isn't entirely plain. It
+is more a thing guessed at, a photograph in some dark part of an
+under-consciousness that has constantly grown more dim as the centuries
+have passed. Possibly sometime it will fade out altogether; and then a
+man may continue to discuss the weather while the Song from the ridge
+shudders in at the windows. But the world will be quite cold by then,
+and no longer particularly interesting. And possibly even the wolves
+themselves will then be tamed to play dead and speak pieces,--which
+means the wilderness itself will be tamed. For as long as the wild
+lasts, the pack will run through it in the winter. They were here in the
+beginning, and in spite of constant war and constant hatred on the part
+of men, they will be here in the end. The reason is just that they are
+the symbol of the wilderness itself, and the idea of it continuing to
+exist without them is stranger than that of a nation without a flag.
+
+It wasn't quite the same song that Dan had listened to in the first days
+of fall. It had been triumphant then, and proud with the wilderness
+pride. Of course it had been sad then, too, but it was more sad now. And
+it was stranger, too, and crept farther into the souls of its listeners.
+It was the song of strength that couldn't avail against the snow,
+possibly of cold and the despair and courage of starvation. These three
+that heard it were inured to the wilderness; but a moment was always
+needed after its last note had died to regain their gayety.
+
+"They're getting lean and they're getting savage," Lennox said one
+night, stretched on his divan before the fireplace. He was still unable
+to walk; but the fractures were knitting slowly and the doctor had
+promised that the summer would find him well. "If we had a dog, I
+wouldn't offer much for his life. One of these days we'll find 'em in a
+big circle around the house--and then we'll have to open up with the
+rifles."
+
+But this picture appalled neither of his two young listeners. No wolf
+pack can stand against three marksmen, armed with rifles and behind
+oaken walls.
+
+Christmas came and passed, and January brought clear days and an
+ineffective sun shining on the snow. These were the best days of all.
+Every afternoon Dan and Snowbird would go out on their skis or on
+snowshoes, unarmed except for the pistol that Snowbird carried in the
+deep pocket of her mackinaw. "But why not?" Dan replied to Lennox's
+objection. "She could kill five wolves with five shots, or pretty near
+it, and you know well enough that that would hold 'em off till we got
+home. They'd stop to eat the five. I have hard enough time keeping up
+with her as it is, without carrying a rifle." And Lennox was content.
+In the first place, the wolf pack has to be desperate indeed before it
+will even threaten human beings; and knowing the coward that the wolf is
+in the other three seasons, he couldn't bring himself to believe that
+this point was reached. In the second, Dan had told the truth when he
+said that five deaths, or even fewer, would repel the attack of any wolf
+pack he had ever seen. There was just one troubling thought. He had
+heard, long ago, and he had forgotten who had told him, that in the most
+severe winters the wolves gather in particularly large packs; and a
+quality in the song that they had heard at night seemed to bear it out.
+The chorus had been exceptionally loud and strong, and he had been
+unable to pick out individual voices.
+
+The snow was perfect for skiing. Previously their sport had been many
+times interrupted either by the fall of fresh snow or a thaw that had
+softened the snow crust; but now every afternoon was too perfect to
+remain indoors. They shouted and romped in the silences, and they did
+not dream but that they had the wilderness all to themselves. The fact
+that one night Lennox's keen eyes had seen what looked like the glow of
+a camp fire in the distance didn't affect this belief of theirs at all.
+It was evidently just the phosphorus glowing in a rotten log from which
+the winds had blown the snow.
+
+Once or twice they caught glimpses of wild life: once a grouse that had
+buried in the snow flushed from their path and blew the snow-dust from
+its wings; and once or twice they saw snowshoe rabbits bounding away on
+flat feet over the drifts. But just one day they caught sight of a wolf.
+They were on snowshoes on a particularly brilliant afternoon late in
+January.
+
+He was a lone male, evidently a straggler from the pack, and he leaped
+from the top of a tall thicket that had remained above the snow. The man
+and the girl had entirely different reactions. Dan's first impression
+was amazement at the animal's condition. It seemed to be in the last
+stages of starvation: unbelievably gaunt, with rib bones showing plainly
+even through the furry hide. Ordinarily the heavily furred animals do
+not show signs of famine; but even an inexperienced eye could not make a
+mistake in this case. The eyes were red, and they carried Dan back to
+his first adventure in the Oregon forest--the day he had shot the mad
+coyote. Snowbird thought of the beast only as an enemy. The wolves
+killed her father's stock; they were brigands of the worst order; and
+she shared the hatred of them that is a common trait of all primitive
+peoples. Her hand whipped back, seized her pistol, and she fired twice
+at the fleeing figure.
+
+The second shot was a hit: both of them saw the wolf go to its side,
+then spring up and race on. Shouting, both of them sped after him.
+
+In a few moments he was out of sight among the distant trees, but they
+found the blood-trail and mushed over the ridge. They expected at any
+moment to find him lying dead; but the track led them on clear down the
+next canyon. And now they cared not at all whether they found him: it
+was simply a tramp in the out-of-doors; and both of them were young with
+red blood in their veins.
+
+But all at once Dan stopped in his tracks. The girl sped on for six
+paces before she missed the sound of his snowshoes; then she turned to
+find him standing, wholly motionless, with eyes fixed upon her.
+
+It startled her, and she didn't know why. A companion abruptly freezing
+in his path, his muscles inert, and his eyes filling with speculations
+is always startling. When this occurs, it means simply that a thought so
+compelling and engrossing that even the half-unconscious physical
+functions, such as walking, cannot continue, has come into his mind. And
+it is part of the old creed of self-preservation to dislike greatly to
+be left out on any such thought as this. If danger is present, the
+sooner it is identified the better.
+
+"What is it?" she demanded.
+
+He turned to her, curiously intent. "How many shells have you in that
+pistol?"
+
+She took one breath and answered him. "It holds five, and I shot twice.
+I haven't any others."
+
+"And I don't suppose it ever occurred to you to carry extra ones in your
+pocket?"
+
+"Father is always telling me to--and several times I have. But I'd shoot
+them away at target practice and forget to take any more. There was
+never any danger--except that night with a cougar. I did intend to--but
+what does it matter now?"
+
+"We're a couple of wise ones, going after that wolf with only three
+shots to our name. Of course by himself he's harmless--but he's likely
+enough to lead us straight toward the pack. And Snowbird--I didn't like
+his looks. He's too gaunt, and he's too hungry--and I haven't a bit of
+doubt he waited in that brush for us to come, intending to attack
+us--and lost his nerve the last thing. That shows he's desperate. I
+don't like him, and I wouldn't like his pack. And a whole pack might not
+lose _its_ nerve."
+
+"Then you think we'd better turn back?"
+
+"Yes, I do, and not come out any more without a whole pocket of shells.
+I'm going to carry my rifle, too, just as Lennox has always advised.
+He's only got a flesh-wound. You saw what you did with two
+cartridges--got in one flesh-wound. Three of 'em against a pack wouldn't
+be a great deal of aid. I don't mean to say you can't shoot, but a
+jumping, lively wolf is worse than a bird in the air. We've gone over
+three miles; and he'd lead us ten miles farther--even if he didn't go to
+the pack. Let's go back."
+
+"If you say so. But I don't think there's the least bit of danger. We
+can always climb a tree."
+
+"And have 'em make a beautiful circle under it! They've got more
+patience than we have--and we'd have to come down sometime. Your father
+can't come to our help, you know. It's the sign of the tenderfoot not to
+think there's any danger--and I'm not going to think that way any more."
+
+They turned back and mushed in silence a long time.
+
+"I suppose you'll think I'm a coward," Dan asked her humbly.
+
+"Only prudent, Dan," she answered, smiling. Whether she meant it, he did
+not know. "I'm just beginning to understand that you--living here only a
+few months--really know and understand all this better than I do." She
+stretched her arms wide to the wilderness. "I guess it's your
+instincts."
+
+"And I do understand," he told her earnestly. "I sensed danger back
+there just as sure as I can see your face. That pack--and it's a big
+one--is close; and it's terribly hungry. And you know--you can't help
+but know--that the wolves are not to be trusted in famine times."
+
+"I know it only too well," she said.
+
+Then she paused and asked him about a strange grayness, like snow blown
+by the wind, on the sky over the ridge.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Bert Cranston waited in a clump of exposed thicket on the hillside until
+he saw two black dots, that he knew were Dan and Snowbird, leave the
+Lennox home. He lay very still as they circled up the ridge, noticing
+that except for the pistol that he knew Snowbird always carried, they
+were unarmed. There was no particular reason why he should be interested
+in that point. It was just the mountain way always to look for weapons,
+and it is rather difficult to trace the mental processes behind this
+impulse. Perhaps it can be laid to the fact that many mountain families
+are often at feud with one another, and anything in the way of violence
+may happen before the morning.
+
+The two passed out of his sight, and after a long time he heard the
+crack of Snowbird's pistol. He guessed that she had either shot at some
+wild creature, or else was merely at target practice,--rather a common
+proceeding for the two when they were on the hills together. Thus it is
+to be seen that Cranston knew their habits fairly well. And since he had
+kept a close watch upon them for several days, this was to be expected.
+
+He had no intention of being interrupted in this work he was about to
+do. He had planned it all very well. At first the intermittent
+snow-storms and the thaws between had delayed him. He needed a perfect
+snow crust for the long tramp over the ridge; and at last the bright
+days and the icy dawns had made it. The elder Lennox was still helpless.
+He had noticed that when Dan and Snowbird went out, they were usually
+gone from two to four hours; and that gave him plenty of time for his
+undertaking. The moment had come at last to make a thorough search of
+Lennox's house for those incriminating documents that Dan had found near
+the body of Landy Hildreth.
+
+The only really dangerous part of his undertaking was his approach. If
+by any chance Lennox were looking out of the window, he might be found
+waiting with a rifle across his arms. It would be quite like the old
+mountaineer to have his gun beside him, and to shoot it quick and
+exceptionally straight, without asking questions, at any stealing figure
+in the snow. Yet Cranston felt fairly sure that Lennox was still too
+helpless to raise a gun to a shooting position.
+
+He had observed that the mountaineer spent his time either on the
+fireplace divan or on his own bed. Neither of these places was available
+to the rear windows of the house. So, very wisely, he made his attack
+from the rear.
+
+He came stealing across the snow,--a musher of the first degree. Very
+silently and swiftly he slipped off his snowshoes at the door. The door
+itself was unlocked, just as he had supposed. In an instant more he was
+tiptoeing, a dark, silent figure, through the corridors of the house. He
+held his rifle ready in his hands.
+
+He peered into Lennox's bedroom first. The room was unoccupied. Then the
+floor of the corridor creaked beneath his step; and he knew nothing
+further was to be gained by waiting. If Lennox suspected his presence,
+he might be waiting with aimed rifle as he opened the door of the living
+room.
+
+He glided faster. He halted once more,--a moment at the living-room door
+to see if Lennox had been disturbed. He was lying still, however, so
+Cranston pushed through.
+
+Lennox glanced up from his magazine to find that unmistakable thing, the
+barrel of a rifle, pointed at his breast. Cranston was one of those
+rare marksmen who shoots with both eyes open,--and that meant that he
+kept his full visual powers to the last instant before the hammer fell.
+
+"I can't raise my arms," Lennox said simply. "One of 'em won't work at
+all--besides, against the doctor's orders."
+
+Cranston stole over toward him, looking closely for weapons. He pulled
+aside the woolen blanket that Lennox had drawn up over his body, and he
+pushed his hand into the cushions of the couch. A few deft pats, holding
+his rifle through the fork of his arm, finger coiled into the trigger
+guard, assured him that Lennox was not "heeled" at all. Then he laughed
+and went to work.
+
+"I thought I told you once," Lennox began with perfect coldness, "that
+the doors of my house were no longer open to you."
+
+"You did say that," was Cranston's guttural reply. "But you see I'm here
+just the same, don't you? And what are you going to do about it?"
+
+"I probably felt that sooner or later you would come to steal--just as
+you and your crowd stole the supplies from the forest station last
+winter--and that probably influenced me to give the orders. I didn't
+want thieves around my house, and I don't want them now. I don't want
+coyotes, either."
+
+"And I don't want any such remarks out of you, either," Cranston
+answered him. "You lie still and shut up, and I suspect that sissy
+boarder of yours will come back, after he's through embracing your
+daughter in the snow, and find you in one piece. Otherwise not."
+
+"If I were in one piece," Lennox answered him very quietly, "instead of
+a bundle of broken bones that can't lift its arms, I'd get up off this
+couch, unarmed as I am, and stamp on your lying lips."
+
+But Cranston only laughed and tied Lennox's feet with a cord from the
+window shade.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went to work very systematically. First he rifled Lennox's desk in
+the living room. Then he looked on all the mantels and ransacked the
+cupboards and the drawers. He was taunting and calm at first. But as the
+moments passed, his passion grew upon him. He no longer smiled. The
+rodent features became intent; the eyes narrowed to curious, bright
+slits under the dark lashes. He went to Dan's room, searched his bureau
+drawer and all the pockets of the clothes hanging in his closet. He
+upset his trunk and pawed among old letters in the suitcase. Then,
+stealing like some creature of the wilderness, he came back to the
+living room.
+
+Lennox was not on the divan where he had left him. He lay instead on the
+floor near the fireplace; and he met the passion-drawn face with entire
+calmness. His motives were perfectly plain. He had just made a desperate
+effort to procure Dan's rifle that hung on two sets of deer horns over
+the fireplace, and was entirely exhausted from it. He had succeeded in
+getting down from the couch, though wracked by agony, but had been
+unable to lift himself up in reach of the gun.
+
+Cranston read his intention in one glance. Lennox knew it, but he simply
+didn't care. He had passed the point where anything seemed to matter.
+
+"Tell me where it is," Cranston ordered him. Again he pointed his rifle
+at Lennox's wasted breast.
+
+"Tell you where what is? My money?"
+
+"You know what I want--and it isn't money. I mean those letters that
+Failing found on the ridge. I'm through fooling, Lennox. Dan learned
+that long ago, and it's time you learned it now."
+
+"Dan learned it because he was sick. He isn't sick now. Don't presume
+too much on that."
+
+Cranston laughed with harsh scorn. "But that isn't the question. I said
+I've wasted all the time I'm going to. You are an old man and helpless;
+but I'm not going to let that stand in the way of getting what I came to
+get. They're hidden somewhere around this house. They wouldn't be out in
+the snow, because he'd want 'em where he could get them. By no means
+would he carry them on his person--fearing that some day he'd meet me on
+the ridge. He's a fool, but he ain't that much of a fool. I've watched,
+and he's had no chance to take them into town. I'll give you--just five
+seconds to tell me where they're hidden."
+
+"And I give you," Lennox replied, "one second less than that--to go to
+Hell!"
+
+Both of them breathed hard in the quiet room. Cranston was trembling
+now, shivering just a little in his arms and shoulders. "Don't get me
+wrong, Lennox," he warned.
+
+"And don't have any delusions in regard to me, either," Lennox replied.
+"I've stood worse pain, from this accident, than any man can give me
+while I yet live, no matter what he does. If you want to get on me and
+hammer me in the approved Cranston way, I can't defend myself--but you
+won't get a civil answer out of me. I'm used to pain, and I can stand
+it. I'm not used to fawning to a coyote like you, and I can't stand it."
+
+But Cranston hardly heard. An idea had flamed in his mind and cast a red
+glamour over all the scene about him. It was instilling a poison in his
+nerves and a madness in his blood, and it was searing him, like fire, in
+his dark brain. Nothing seemed real. He suddenly bent forward, tense.
+
+"That's all right about you," he said. "But you'd be a little more
+polite if it was Snowbird--and Dan--that would have to pay."
+
+Perhaps the color faded slightly in Lennox's face; but his voice did not
+change.
+
+"They'll see your footprints before they come in and be ready," Lennox
+replied evenly. "They always come by the back way. And even with a
+pistol, Snowbird's a match for you."
+
+"Did you think that was what I meant?" Cranston scorned. "I know a way
+to destroy those letters, and I'll do it--in the four seconds that I
+said, unless you tell. I'm not even sure I'm goin' to give you a chance
+to tell now; it's too good a scheme. There won't be any witnesses then
+to yell around in the courts. What if I choose to set fire to this
+house?"
+
+"It wouldn't surprise me a great deal. It's your own trade." Lennox
+shuddered once on his place on the floor.
+
+"I wouldn't have to worry about those letters then, would I? They are
+somewhere in the house, and they'd be burned to ashes. But that isn't
+all that would be burned. You could maybe crawl out, but you couldn't
+carry the guns, and you couldn't carry the pantry full of food. You're
+nearly eighty miles up here from the nearest occupied house, with two
+pair of snowshoes for the three of you and one dinky pistol. And you
+can't walk at all. It would be a nice pickle, wouldn't it? Wouldn't you
+have a fat chance of getting down to civilization?"
+
+The voice no longer held steady. It trembled with passion. This was no
+idle threat. The brain had already seized upon the scheme with every
+intention of carrying it out. Outside the snow glittered in the
+sunlight, and pine limbs bowed with their load; overhung with that
+curious winter silence that, once felt, returns often in dreams. The
+wilderness lay stark and bare, stripped of all delusion--not only in the
+snow world outside but in the hearts of these two men, its sons.
+
+"I have only one hope," Lennox replied. "I hope, unknown to me, that Dan
+has already dispatched those letters. The arm of the law is long,
+Cranston. It's easy to forget that fact up here. It will reach you in
+the end."
+
+Cranston turned through the door, into the kitchen. He was gone a long
+time. Lennox heard him at work: the crinkle of paper and then a pouring
+sound around the walls. Then he heard the sharp crack of a match. An
+instant later the first wisp of smoke came curling, pungent with burning
+oil, through the corridor.
+
+"You crawled from your couch to reach that gun," Cranston told him when
+he came in. "Let's see you crawl out now."
+
+Lennox's answer was a curse,--the last, dread outpouring of an unbroken
+will. He didn't look again at the glittering eyes. He scarcely watched
+Cranston's further preparations: the oil poured on the rugs and
+furnishings, the kindling placed at the base of the curtains. Cranston
+was trained in this work. He was taking no chances on the fire being
+extinguished. And Lennox began to crawl toward the door.
+
+He managed to grasp the corner of the blanket on the divan as he went,
+and he dragged it behind him. Pain wracked him, and smoke half-blinded
+him. But he made it at last. And by the time he had crawled one hundred
+feet over the snow crust, the whole structure was in flames. The red
+tongues spoke with a roar.
+
+Cranston, the fire-madness on his face, hurried to the outbuildings.
+There he repeated the work. He touched a match to the hay in the barn,
+and the wind flung the flame through it in an instant. The sheds and
+other outbuildings were treated with oil. And seeing that his work was
+done, he called once to the prone body of Lennox on the snow and mushed
+away into the silences.
+
+Lennox's answer was not a curse this time. Rather it was a prayer,
+unuttered, and in his long years Lennox had not prayed often. When he
+prayed at all, the words were burning fire. His prayer was that of
+Samson,--that for a moment his strength might come back to him.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Two miles across the ridges, Dan and Snowbird saw a faint mist blowing
+between the trees. They didn't recognize it at first. It might be fine
+snow, blown by the wind, or even one of those mysterious fogs that
+sometimes sweep over the snow.
+
+"But it looks like smoke," Snowbird said.
+
+"But it couldn't be. The trees are too wet to burn."
+
+But then a sound that at first was just the faintest whisper in which
+neither of them would let themselves believe, became distinct past all
+denying. It was that menacing crackle of a great fire, that in the whole
+world of sounds is perhaps the most terrible. They were trained by the
+hills, and neither of them tried to mince words. They had learned to
+face the truth, and they faced it now.
+
+"It's our house," Snowbird told him. "And father can't get out."
+
+She spoke very quietly. Perhaps the most terrible truths of life are
+always spoken in that same quiet voice. Then both of them started across
+the snow, fast as their unwieldy snowshoes would permit.
+
+"He can crawl a little," Dan called to her. "Don't give up, Snowbird
+mine. I think he'll be safe."
+
+They mounted to the top of the ridge; and the long sweep of the forest
+was revealed to them. The house was a singular tall pillar of flame,
+already glowing that dreadful red from which firemen, despairing, turn
+away. Then the girl seized his hands and danced about him in a mad
+circle.
+
+"He's alive," she cried. "You can see him--just a dot on the snow. He
+crawled out to safety."
+
+She turned and sped at a breakneck pace down the ridge. Dan had to race
+to keep up with her. But it wasn't entirely wise to try to mush so fast.
+A dead log lay beneath the snow with a broken limb stretched almost to
+its surface, and it caught her snowshoe. The wood cracked sharply, and
+she fell forward in the snow. But she wasn't hurt, and the snowshoe
+itself, in spite of a small crack in the wood, was still serviceable.
+
+"Haste makes waste," he told her. "Keep your feet on the ground,
+Snowbird; the house is gone already and your father is safe. Remember
+what lies before us."
+
+The thought sobered and halted her. She glanced once at the dark face of
+her companion. Dan couldn't understand the strange light that suddenly
+leaped to her eyes. Perhaps she herself couldn't have explained the wave
+of tenderness that swept over her,--with no cause except the look in
+Dan's earnest gray eyes and the lines that cut so deep. Since the world
+was new, it has been the boast of the boldest of men that they looked
+their Fate in the face. And this is no mean looking. For fate is a sword
+from the darkness, a power that reaches out of the mystery, and cannot
+be classed with sights of human origin. It burns out the eyes of all but
+the strongest men. Yet Dan was looking at his fate now, and his eyes
+held straight.
+
+They walked together down to the ruined house, and the three of them sat
+silent while the fire burned red. Then Lennox turned to them with a
+half-smile.
+
+"You're wasting time, you two," he said. "Remember all our food is gone.
+If you start now, and walk hard, maybe you can make it out."
+
+"There are several things to do first," Dan answered simply.
+
+"I don't know what they are. It isn't going to be any picnic, Dan. A man
+can travel only so far without food to keep up his strength,
+particularly over such ridges as you have to cross. It will be easy to
+give up and die. It's the test, man; it's the test."
+
+"And what about you?" his daughter asked.
+
+"Oh, I'll be all right. Besides--it's the only thing that can be done. I
+can't walk, and you can't carry me on your backs. What else remains?
+I'll stay here--and I'll scrape together enough wood to keep a fire.
+Then you can bring help."
+
+He kept his eyes averted when he talked. He was afraid for Dan to see
+them, knowing that he could read the lie in them.
+
+"How do you expect to find wood--in this snow?" Dan asked him. "It will
+take four days to get out; do you think you could lie here and battle
+with a fire for four days, and then four days more that it will take to
+come back? You'd have two choices: to burn green wood that I'd cut for
+you before I left, or the rain-soaked dead wood under the snow. You
+couldn't keep either one of them burning, and you'd die in a night.
+Besides--this is no time for an unarmed man to be alone in the hills."
+
+Lennox's voice grew pleading. "Be sensible, Dan!" he cried. "That
+Cranston's got us, and got us right. I've only one thing more I care
+about--and that is that you pay the debt! I can't hope to get out
+myself. I say that I can't even hope to. But if you bring my daughter
+through--and when the spring comes, pay what we owe to Cranston--I'll be
+content. Heavens, son--I've lived my life. The old pack leader dies when
+his time comes, and so does a man."
+
+His daughter crept to him and sheltered his gray head against her
+breast. "I'll stay with you then," she cried.
+
+"Don't be a little fool, Snowbird," he urged. "My clothes are wet
+already from the melted snow. It's too long a way--it will be too hard a
+fight, and children--I'm old and tired out. I don't want to make the
+try--hunger and cold; and even if you'd stay here and grub wood,
+Snowbird, they'd find us both dead when they came back in a week. We
+can't live without food, and work and keep warm--and there isn't a
+living creature in the hills."
+
+"Except the wolves," Dan reminded him.
+
+"Except the wolves," Lennox echoed. "Remember, we're unarmed--and they'd
+find it out. You're young, Snowbird, and so is Dan--and you two will be
+happy. I know how things are, you two--more than you know
+yourselves--and in the end you'll be happy. But me--I'm too tired to
+make the try. I don't care about it enough. I'm going to wave you
+good-by, and smile, and lie here and let the cold come down. You feel
+warm in a little while--"
+
+But she stopped his lips with her hand. And he bent and kissed it.
+
+"If anybody's going to stay with you," Dan told them in a clear, firm
+voice, "it's going to be me. But aren't any of the cabins occupied?"
+
+"You know they aren't," Lennox answered. "Not even the houses beyond the
+North Fork, even if we could get across. The nearest help is over
+seventy miles."
+
+"And Snowbird, think! Haven't any supplies been left in the ranger
+station?"
+
+"Not one thing," the girl told him. "You know Cranston and his crowd
+robbed the place last winter. And the telephone lines were disconnected
+when the rangers left."
+
+"Then the only way is for me to stay here. You can take the pistol, and
+you'll have a fair chance of getting through. I'll grub wood for our
+camp meanwhile, and you can bring help."
+
+"And if the wolves come, or if help didn't come in time," Lennox
+whispered, passion-drawn for the first time, "who would pay what we owe
+to Cranston?"
+
+"But her life counts--first of all."
+
+"I know it does--but mine doesn't count at all. Believe me, you two. I'm
+speaking from my own desires when I say I don't want to make the fight.
+Snowbird would never make it through alone. There are the wolves, and
+maybe Cranston too--the worst wolf of all. A woman can't mush across
+those ridges four days without food, without some one who loves her and
+forces her on! Neither can she stay here with me and try to make green
+branches burn in a fire. She's got three little pistol balls--and we'd
+all die for a whim. Oh, please, please--"
+
+But Dan leaped for his hand with glowing eyes. "Listen, man!" he cried.
+"I know another way yet. I know more than one way; but one, if we've got
+the strength, is almost sure. There is an ax in the kitchen, and the
+blade will still be good."
+
+"Likely dulled with the fire--"
+
+"I'll cut a limb with my jackknife for the handle. There will be nails
+in the ashes, plenty of them. We'll make a rude sledge, and we'll get
+you out too."
+
+Lennox seemed to be studying his wasted hands. "It's a chance, but it
+isn't worth it," he said at last. "You'll have fight enough, without
+tugging at a heavy sled. It will take all night to build it, and it
+would cut down your chances of getting out by pretty near half. Remember
+the ridges, Dan--"
+
+"But we'll climb every ridge--besides, its a slow, down grade most of
+the way. Snowbird--tell him he must do it."
+
+Snowbird told him, overpowering him with her enthusiasm. And Dan shook
+his shoulders with rough hands. "You're hurting, boy!" Lennox warned.
+"I'm a bag of broken bones."
+
+"I'll tote you down there if I have to tie you in," Dan Failing replied.
+"Before, I've bowed to your will; but this time you have to bow to mine.
+I'm not going to let you stay here and die, no matter if you beg on your
+knees! It's the test--and I'm going to bring you through."
+
+He meant what he said. If mortal strength and sinew could survive such a
+test, he would succeed. There was nothing in these words to suggest the
+physical weakling that both of them had known a few months before. The
+eyes were earnest, the dark face intent, the determined voice did not
+waver at all.
+
+"Dan Failing speaks!" Lennox replied with glowing eyes. He was recalling
+another Dan Failing of the dead years, a boyhood hero, and his
+remembered voice had never been more determined, more masterful than
+this he had just heard.
+
+"And Cranston didn't get his purpose, after all." To prove his words,
+Dan thrust his hand into his inner coat pocket. He drew forth a little,
+flat package, half as thick as a pack of cards. He held it up for them
+to see. "The thing Bert Cranston burned the house down to destroy," he
+explained. "I'm learning to know this mountain breed, Lennox. I kept it
+in my pocket where I could fight for it, at any minute."
+
+Cranston had been mistaken, after all, in thinking that in fear of
+himself Dan would be afraid to keep the packet on his person, and would
+cravenly conceal it in the house. He would have been even more surprised
+to know that Dan had lived in constant hope of meeting Cranston on the
+ridges, showing him what it contained, and fighting him for it, hands to
+hands. And even yet, perhaps the day would come when Cranston would know
+at last that Snowbird's words, after the fight of long ago, were true.
+
+The twilight was falling over the snow, so Snowbird and Dan turned to
+the toil of building a sled.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The snow was steel-gray in the moonlight when the little party made
+their start down the long trail. Their preparations, simple and crude as
+they were, had taken hours of ceaseless labor on the part of the three.
+The ax, its edge dulled by the flame and its handle burned away, had
+been cooled in the snow, and with his one sound arm, Lennox had driven
+the hot nails that Snowbird gathered from the ashes of one of the
+outbuildings. The embers of the house itself still glowed red in the
+darkness.
+
+Dan had cut the green limbs of the trees and planed them with his ax.
+The sled had been completed, handles attached for pushing it, and a
+piece of fence wire fastened with nails as a rope to pull it. The warm
+mackinaws of both of them as well as the one blanket that Lennox had
+saved from the fire were wrapped about the old frontiersman's wasted
+body,--Dan and Snowbird hoping to keep warm by the exercise of
+propelling the sled. Except for the dull ax and the half-empty pistol,
+their only equipment was a single charred pot for melting snow that Dan
+had recovered from the ashes of the kitchen.
+
+The three had worked almost in silence. Words didn't help now. They
+wasted no sorely-needed breath. But they did have one minute of talk
+when they got to the top of the little ridge that had overlooked the
+house.
+
+"We'll travel mostly at night," Dan told them. "We can see in the snow,
+and by taking our rest in the daytime, when the sun is bright and warm,
+we can save our strength. We won't have to keep such big fires then--and
+at night our exertion will keep us as warm as we can hope for. Getting
+up all night to cut green wood with this dull ax in the snow would break
+us to pieces very soon, for remember that we haven't any food. I know
+how to build a fire even in the snow--especially if I can find the dead,
+dry heart of a rotten log--but it isn't any fun to keep it going with
+green wood. We don't want to have to spend any more of our strength
+stripping off wet bark and hacking at saplings than we can help; and
+that means we'd better do our resting in the heat of the day. After all,
+it's a fight against starvation more than anything else."
+
+"Just think," the girl told them, reproaching herself, "if I'd just shot
+straight at that wolf to-day, we could have gone back and got his body.
+It might have carried us through."
+
+Neither of the others as much as looked surprised at these amazing
+regrets over the lost, unsavory flesh of a wolf. They were up against
+realities, and they didn't mince words. Dan smiled at her gently, and
+his great shoulder leaned against the traces.
+
+They moved through a dead world. The ever-present manifestations of wild
+life that had been such a delight to Dan in the summer and fall were
+quite lacking now. The snow was trackless. Once they thought they saw a
+snowshoe rabbit, a strange shadow on the snow, but he was too far away
+for Snowbird to risk a pistol shot. The pound or two of flesh would be
+sorely needed before the journey was over, but the pistol cartridges
+might be needed still more. She didn't let her mind rest on certain
+possibilities wherein they might be needed. Such thoughts stole the
+courage from the spirit, and courage was essential beyond all things
+else to bring them through.
+
+Once a flock of wild geese, stragglers from the main army of waterfowl,
+passed overhead on their southern migration. They were many months too
+late. They called down their eerie cries,--that song that they had
+learned from the noise the wind makes, blowing over the bleak marshes.
+It wailed down to them a long time after the flock was hidden by the
+distant tree tops, and seemed to shiver, with curious echoes, among the
+pines. Trudging on, they listened to its last note. And possibly they
+understood the cry as never before. It was one of the untamed, primitive
+voices of the wilderness, and they could realize something of its
+sadness, its infinite yearning and complaint. They knew the wilderness
+now, just as the geese themselves did. They knew its cold, its hunger,
+its remorselessness, and beyond all, the fear that was bright eyes in
+the darkness. No man could have crossed that first twenty miles with
+them and remained a tenderfoot. The wild was sending home its lessons,
+one after another, until the spirit broke beneath them. It was showing
+its teeth. It was reminding them, very clearly, that in spite of houses
+built on the ridges and cattle pens and rifles and all the tools and
+aids of civilization, it was still unconquered.
+
+Mostly the forest was heavily laden with silence. And silence, in this
+case, didn't seem to be merely an absence of sound. It seemed like a
+substance in itself, something that lay over the snow, in which all
+sound was immediately smothered and extinguished. They heard their own
+footfalls in the snow and the crunch of the sled. But the sound only
+went a little way. Once in a long time distant trees cracked in the
+frost; and they all stood still a moment, trying to fight down the vain
+hope that this might be some hunter from the valleys who would come to
+their aid. A few times they heard the snow sliding, with the dull sound
+of rolling window shade, down from the overburdened limbs. The trees
+were inert with their load of snow.
+
+As the dawn came out, they all stood still and listened to the wolf
+pack, singing on the ridge somewhere behind them. It was a large pack.
+They couldn't make out individual voices,--neither the more shrill cry
+of the females, the yapping of the cubs, or the low, clear
+G-below-middle-C note of the males.
+
+"If they should cross our tracks--" Lennox suggested.
+
+"No use worrying about that now--not until we come to it," Dan told him.
+
+The morning broke, the sun rose bright in a clear sky. But still they
+trudged on. In spite of the fact that the sled was heavy and broke
+through the snow crust as they tugged at it, they had made good time
+since their departure. But now every step was a pronounced effort. It
+was the dreadful beginning of fatigue that only food and warmth and rest
+could rectify.
+
+"We'll rest now," Dan told them at ten o'clock. "The sun is warm enough
+so that we won't need much of a fire. And we'll try to get five hours'
+sleep."
+
+"Too long, if we're going to make it out," Lennox objected.
+
+"That leaves a work-day of nineteen hours," Dan persisted. "Not any too
+little. Five hours it will be."
+
+He found where the snow had drifted against a great, dead log, leaving
+the white covering only a foot in depth on the lee side. He began to
+scrape the snow away, then hacked at the log with his ax until he had
+procured a piece of comparatively dry wood from its center. They all
+stood breathless while he lighted the little pile of kindling and heaped
+it with green wood,--the only wood procurable. But it didn't burn
+freely. It smoked fitfully, threatening to die out, and emitting very
+little heat.
+
+But they didn't particularly care. The sun was warm above, as always in
+the mountain winters of Southern Oregon. Snowbird and Dan cleared spaces
+beside the fire and slept. Lennox, who had rested on the journey, lay on
+his sled and with his uninjured arm tried to hack enough wood from the
+saplings that Dan had cut to keep the fire burning.
+
+At three they got up, still tired and aching in their bones from
+exposure. Twenty-four hours had passed since they had tasted food, and
+their unreplenished systems complained. There is no better engine in the
+wide world than the human body. It will stand more neglect and abuse
+than the finest steel motors ever made by the hands of European
+craftsmen. A man may fast many days if he lies quietly in one place and
+keeps warm. But fasting is a deadly proposition while pulling sledges
+over the snow.
+
+Dan was less hopeful now. His face told what his words did not. The
+lines cleft deeper about his lips and eyes; and Snowbird's heart ached
+when he tried to encourage her with a smile. It was a wan, strange smile
+that couldn't quite hide the first sickness of despair.
+
+The shadows quickly lengthened--simply leaping over the snow from the
+fast-falling sun. Soon it dropped down behind the ridge; and the gray of
+twilight began to deepen among the more distant trees. It blurred the
+outline and dulled the sight. With the twilight came the cold, first
+crisp, then bitter and penetrating to the vitals. The twilight deepened,
+the snow turned gray, and then, in a vague way, the journey began to
+partake of a quality of unreality. It was not that the cold and the
+snow and their hunger were not entirely real, or that the wilderness
+was no longer naked to their eyes. It was just that their whole effort
+seemed like some dreadful, emburdened journey in a dream,--a stumbling
+advance under difficulties too many and real to be true.
+
+The first sign was the far-off cry of the wolf pack. It was very faint,
+simply a stir in the ear drums, yet it was entirely clear. That clear,
+cold mountain air was a perfect telephone system, conveying a message
+distinctly, no matter how faintly. There were no tall buildings or
+cities to disturb the ether waves. And all three of them knew at the
+same instant it was not exactly the cry they had heard before.
+
+They couldn't have told just why, even if they had wished to talk about
+it. In some dim way, it had lost the strange quality of despair that it
+had held before. It was as if the pack were running with renewed life,
+that each wolf was calling to another with a dreadful sort of
+exultation. It was an excited cry too,--not the long, sad song they had
+learned to listen for. It sounded immediately behind them.
+
+They couldn't help but listen. No human ears could have shut out the
+sound. But none of them pretended that they had heard. And this was the
+worst sign of all. Each one of the three was hoping against hope in his
+very heart; and at the same time, hoping that the others did not
+understand.
+
+For a long time, as the darkness deepened about them, the forests were
+still. Perhaps, Dan thought, he had been mistaken after all. His
+shoulders straightened. Then the chorus blared again.
+
+The man looked back at the girl, smiling into her eyes. Lennox lay as if
+asleep, the lines of his dark face curiously pronounced. And the girl,
+because she was of the mountains, body and soul, answered Dan's smile.
+Then they knew that all of them knew the truth. Not even an
+inexperienced ear could have any delusions about the pack song now. It
+was that oldest of wilderness songs, the hunting-cry,--that frenzied
+song of blood-lust that the wolf pack utters when it is running on the
+trail of game. It had found the track of living flesh at last.
+
+"There's no use stopping, or trying to climb a tree," Dan told them
+simply. "In the first place, Lennox can't do it. In the second, we've
+got to take a chance--for cold and hunger can get up a tree where the
+wolf pack can't."
+
+He spoke wholly without emotion. Once more he tightened the traces of
+the sled.
+
+"I've heard that sometimes the pack will chase a man for days without
+attacking," Lennox told them. "It all depends on how long they've gone
+without food. Keep on and try to forget 'em. Maybe we can keep 'em
+bluffed."
+
+But as the hours passed, it became increasingly difficult to forget the
+wolf pack. It was only a matter of turning the head and peering for an
+instant into the shadows to catch a glimpse of one of the creatures.
+Their forms, when they emerged from the shadows of the tree trunks, were
+entirely visible against the snow. They no longer yapped and howled.
+They acted very intent and stealthy. They had spread out in a great
+wing, slipping from shadow and shadow, and what were their mental
+processes no human being may even guess. It was a new game; and they
+seemed to be seeking the best means of attack. Their usual fear of men,
+always their first emotion, had given way wholly to a hunting cunning:
+an effort to procure their game without too great risk of their own
+lives. In the desperation of their hunger they could not remember such
+things as the fear of men. They spread out farther, and at last Dan
+looked up to find one of the gray beasts waiting, like a shadow himself,
+in the shadow of a tree not one hundred feet from the sled. Snowbird
+whipped out her pistol.
+
+"Don't dare!" Dan's voice cracked out to her. He didn't speak loudly;
+yet the words came so sharp and commanding, so like pistol fire itself,
+that they penetrated into her consciousness and choked back the nervous
+reflexes that in an instant might have lost them one of their three
+precious shells. She caught herself with a sob. Dan shouted at the wolf,
+and it melted into the shadows.
+
+"You won't do it again, Snowbird?" he asked her very humbly. But his
+meaning was clear. He was not as skilled with a pistol as she; but if
+her nerves were breaking, the gun must be taken from her hands. The
+three shells must be saved to the moment of utmost need.
+
+"No," she told him, looking straight into his eyes. "I won't do it
+again."
+
+He believed her. He knew that she spoke the truth. He met her eyes with
+a half smile. Then, wholly without warning, Fate played its last trump.
+
+Again the wilderness reminded them of its might, and their brave spirits
+were almost broken by the utter remorselessness of the blow. The girl
+went on her face with a crack of wood. Her snowshoe had been cracked by
+her fall of the day before, when running to the fire, and whether she
+struck some other obstruction in the snow, or whether the cracked wood
+had simply given way under her weight, mattered not even enough for them
+to investigate. As in all great disasters, only the result remained. The
+result in this case was that her snowshoe, without which she could not
+walk at all in the snow, was irreparably broken.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Fate has stacked the cards against us," Lennox told them, after the
+first moment's horror from the broken snowshoe.
+
+But no one answered him. The girl, white-faced, kept her wide eyes on
+Dan. He seemed to be peering into the shadows beside the trail, as if he
+were watching for the gray forms that now and then glided from tree to
+tree. In reality, he was not looking for wolves. He was gazing down into
+his own soul, measuring his own spirit for the trial that lay before
+him.
+
+The girl, unable to step with the broken snowshoe, rested her weight on
+one foot and hobbled like a bird with broken wings across to him. No
+sight of all this terrible journey had been more dreadful in her
+father's eyes than this. It seemed to split open the strong heart of the
+man. She touched her hand to his arm.
+
+"I'm sorry, Dan," she told him. "You tried so hard--"
+
+Just one little sound broke from his throat--a strange, deep gasp that
+could not be suppressed. Then he caught her hand in his and kissed
+it,--again and again. "Do you think I care about that?" he asked her. "I
+only wish I could have done more--and what I have done doesn't count.
+Just as in my fight with Cranston, nothing counts because I didn't win.
+It's just fate, Snowbird. It's no one's fault, but maybe, in this world,
+nothing is ever any one's fault." For in the twilight of those winter
+woods, in the shadow of death itself, perhaps he was catching
+glimmerings of eternal truths that are hidden from all but the most
+far-seeing eyes.
+
+"And this is the end?" she asked him. She spoke very bravely.
+
+"No!" His hand tightened on hers. "No, so long as an ounce of strength
+remains. To fight--never to give up--may God give me spirit for it till
+I die."
+
+And this was no idle prayer. His eyes raised to the starry sky as he
+spoke.
+
+"But, son," Lennox asked him rather quietly, "what can you do? The
+wolves aren't going to wait a great deal longer, and we can't go on."
+
+"There's one thing more--one more trial to make," Dan answered. "I
+thought about it at first, but it was too long a chance to try if there
+was any other way. And I suppose you thought of it too."
+
+"Overtaking Cranston?"
+
+"Of course. And it sounds like a crazy dream. But listen, both of you.
+If we have got to die, up here in the snow--and it looks like we
+had--what is the thing you want done worst before we go?"
+
+Lennox's hands clasped, and he leaned forward on the sled. "Pay
+Cranston!" he said.
+
+"Yes!" Dan's voice rang. "Cranston's never going to be paid unless we do
+it. There will be no signs of incendiarism at the house, and no proofs.
+They'll find our bodies in the snow, and we'll just be a mystery, with
+no one made to pay. The evidence in my pocket will be taken by Cranston,
+sometime this winter. If I don't make him pay, he never will pay. And
+that's one reason why I'm going to try to carry out this plan I've got.
+
+"The second reason is that it's the one hope we have left. I take it
+that none of us are deceived on that point. And no man can die
+tamely--if he is a man--while there's a chance. I mean a young man, like
+me,--not one who is old and tired. It sounds perfectly silly to talk
+about finding Cranston's winter quarters, and then, with my bare hands,
+conquering him, taking his food and his blankets and his snowshoes and
+his rifle to fight away these wolves, and bringing 'em back here."
+
+"You wouldn't be barehanded," the girl reminded him. "You could have the
+pistol."
+
+He didn't even seem to hear her. "I've been thinking about it. It's a
+long, long chance--much worse than the chance we had of getting out by
+straight walking. I think we could have made it, if the wolves had kept
+off and the snowshoe hadn't broken. It would have nearly killed us, but
+I believe we could have got out. That's why I didn't try this other way
+first. A man with his bare hands hasn't much of a chance against another
+with a rifle, and I don't want you to be too hopeful. And of course, the
+hardest problem is finding his camp.
+
+"But I do feel sure of one thing: that he is back to his old trapping
+line on the North Fork--somewhere south of here--and his camp is
+somewhere on the river. I think he would have gone there so that he
+could cut off any attempt I might make to get through with those
+letters. My plan is to start back at an angle that will carry me between
+the North Fork and our old house. Somewhere in there I'll find his
+tracks, the tracks he made when he first came over to burn up the house.
+I suppose he was careful to mix 'em up after once he arrived there, but
+the first part of the way he likely walked straight toward the house
+from his camp. Somewhere, if I go that way, I'll cross his
+trail--within ten miles at least. Then I'll back-track him to his camp."
+
+"And never come back!" the girl cried.
+
+"Maybe not. But at least everything that can be done will be done.
+Nothing will be left. No regrets. We will have made the last trial. I'm
+not going to waste any time, Snowbird. The sooner we get your fire built
+the better."
+
+"Father and I are to stay here--?"
+
+"What else can you do?" He went back to his traces and drew the sled one
+hundred yards farther. He didn't seem to see the gaunt wolf that backed
+off into the shadows as he approached. He refused to notice that the
+pack seemed to be steadily growing bolder. Human hunters usually had
+guns that could blast and destroy from a distance; but even an animal
+intelligence could perceive that these three seemed to be without this
+means of inflicting death. A wolf is ever so much more intelligent than
+a crow,--yet a crow shows little fear of an unarmed man and is wholly
+unapproachable by a boy with a gun. The ugly truth was simply that in
+their increasing madness and excitement and hunger, they were becoming
+less and less fearful of these three strange humans with the sled.
+
+It was not a good place for a camp. They worked a long time before they
+cleared a little patch of ground of its snow mantle. Dan cut a number of
+saplings--laboriously with his ax--and built a fire with the
+comparatively dry core of a dead tree. True, it was feeble and
+flickering, but as good as could be hoped for, considering the
+difficulties under which he worked. The dead logs under the snow were
+soaked with water from the rains and the thaws. The green wood that he
+cut smoked without blazing.
+
+"No more time to be lost," Dan told Snowbird. "It lies in your hands to
+keep the fire burning. And don't leave the circle of the firelight
+without that pistol in your hand."
+
+"You don't mean," she asked, unbelieving, "that you are going to go out
+there to fight Cranston--unarmed?"
+
+"Of course, Snowbird. You must keep the pistol."
+
+"But it means death; that's all it means. What chance would you have
+against a man with a rifle? And as soon as you get away from this fire,
+the wolves will tear you to pieces."
+
+"And what would you and your father do, if I took it? You can't get him
+into a tree. You can't build a big enough fire to frighten them. Please
+don't even talk about this matter, Snowbird. My mind's made up. I think
+the pack will stay here. They usually--God knows how--know who is
+helpless and who isn't. Maybe with the gun, you will be able to save
+your lives."
+
+"What's the chance of that?"
+
+"You might--with one cartridge--kill one of the devils; and the
+others--but you know how they devour their own dead. That might break
+their famine enough so that they'd hold off until I can get back. That's
+the prize I'm playing for."
+
+"And what if you don't get back?"
+
+He took her hand in one of his, and with the other he caressed, for a
+single moment, the lovely flesh of her throat. The love he had for her
+spoke from his eyes,--such speech as no human vision could possibly
+mistake. Both of them were tingling and breathless with a great, sweet
+wonder.
+
+"Never let those fangs tear that softness, while you live," he told her
+gently. "Never let that brave old man on the sled go to his death with
+the pack tearing at him. Cheat 'em, Snowbird! Beat 'em the last minute,
+if no other way remains! Show 'em who's boss, after all--of all this
+forest."
+
+"You mean--?" Her eyes widened.
+
+"I mean that you must only spend one of those three shells in fighting
+off the wolves. Save that till the moment you need it most. The other
+two must be saved--for something else."
+
+She nodded, shuddering an instant at a menacing shadow that moved within
+sixty feet of the fire. The firelight half-blinded them, dim as it was,
+and they couldn't see into the darkness as well as they had before.
+Except for strange, blue-yellow lights, close together and two and two
+about the fire, they might have thought that the pack was gone.
+
+"Then good-by, Dan!" she told him. And she stretched up her arms. "The
+thing I said--that day on the hillside--doesn't hold any more."
+
+His own arms encircled her, but he made no effort to claim her lips.
+Lennox watched them quietly; in this moment of crisis not even
+pretending to look away. Dan shook his head to her entreating eyes. "It
+isn't just a kiss, darling," he told her soberly. "It goes deeper than
+that. It's a symbol. It was your word, too, and mine; and words can't be
+broken, things being as they are. Can't I make you understand?"
+
+She nodded. His eyes burned. Perhaps she didn't understand, as far as
+actual functioning of the brain was concerned. But she reached up to
+him, as women--knowing life in the concrete rather than the
+abstract--have always reached up to men; and she dimly caught the gleam
+of some eternal principle and right behind his words. This strong man of
+the mountains had given his word, had been witness to her own promise to
+him and to herself, and a law that goes down to the roots of life
+prevented him from claiming the kiss.
+
+Many times, since the world was new, comfort--happiness--life itself
+have been contingent on the breaking of a law. Yet in spite of what
+seemed common sense, even though no punishment would forthcome if it
+were broken, the law has been kept. It was this way now. It wouldn't
+have been just a kiss such as boys and girls have always had in the
+moonlight. It meant the symbolic renunciation of the debt that Dan owed
+Cranston,--a debt that in his mind might possibly go unpaid, but which
+no weight of circumstance could make him renounce.
+
+His longing for her lips pulled at the roots of him. But by the laws of
+his being he couldn't claim them until the debt incurred on the
+hillside, months ago, had been paid; to take them now meant to dull the
+fine edge of his resolve to carry the issue through to the end, to dim
+the star that led him, to weaken him, by bending now, for the test to
+come. He didn't know why. It had its font in the deep wells of the
+spirit. Common sense can't reveal how the holy man keeps strong the
+spirit by denying the flesh. It goes too deep for that. Dan kept to his
+consecration.
+
+He did, however, kiss her hands, and he kissed the tears out of her
+eyes. Then he turned into the darkness and broke through the ring of the
+wolves.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Dan Failing was never more thankful for his unerring sense of direction.
+He struck off at a forty-five-degree angle between their late course and
+a direct road to the river, and he kept it as if by a surveyor's line.
+All the old devices of the wilderness--the ridge on ridge that looked
+just alike, inclines that to the casual eye looked like downward slopes,
+streams that vanished beneath the snow, and the snow-mist blowing across
+the face of the landmarks--could not avail against him.
+
+A half dozen of the wolves followed him at first. But perhaps their
+fierce eyes marked his long stride and his powerful body, and decided
+that their better chance was with the helpless man and the girl beside
+the flickering fire. They turned back, one by one. Dan kept straight on
+and in two hours crossed Cranston's trail.
+
+It was perfectly plain in the moonlit snow. He began to back-track. He
+headed down a long slope and in an hour more struck the North Fork. He
+didn't doubt but that he would find Cranston in his camp, if he found
+the camp at all. The man had certainly returned to it immediately after
+setting fire to the buildings, if for no other reason than for food. It
+isn't well to be abroad on the wintry mountains without a supply of
+food; and Cranston would certainly know this fact.
+
+Dan didn't know when a rifle bullet from some camp in the thickets would
+put an abrupt end to his advance. The brush grew high by the river, the
+elevation was considerably lower, and there might be one hundred camps
+out of the sight of the casual wayfarer. If Cranston should see him,
+mushing across the moonlit snow, it would give him the most savage joy
+to open fire upon him with his rifle.
+
+Dan's advance became more cautious. He was in a notable trapping region,
+and he might encounter Cranston's camp at any moment. His keen eyes
+searched the thickets, and particularly they watched the sky line for a
+faint glare that might mean a camp fire. He tried to walk silently. It
+wasn't an easy thing to do with awkward snowshoes; but the river drowned
+the little noise that he made. He tried to take advantage of the shelter
+of the thickets and the trees. Then, at the base of a little ridge, he
+came to a sudden halt.
+
+He had estimated just right. Not two hundred yards distant, a camp fire
+flickered and glowed in the shelter of a great log. He saw it, by the
+most astounding good fortune, through a little rift in the trees. Ten
+feet on either side, and it was obscured.
+
+He lost no time. He did not know when the wolves about Snowbird's camp
+would lose the last of their cowardice. Yet he knew he must keep a tight
+grip on his self-control and not let the necessity of haste cost him his
+victory. He crept forward, step by step, placing his snowshoes with
+consummate care. When he was one hundred yards distant he saw that
+Cranston's camp was situated beside a little stream that flowed into the
+river and that--like the mountaineer he was--he had built a large
+lean-to reinforced with snowbanks. The fire burned at its opening.
+Cranston was not in sight; either he was absent from camp or asleep in
+his lean-to. The latter seemed the more likely.
+
+Dan made a wide detour, coming in about thirty yards behind the
+construction. Still he moved with incredible caution. Never in his life
+had he possessed a greater mastery over his own nerves. His heart leaped
+somewhat fast in his breast; but this was the only wasted motion. It
+isn't easy to advance through such thickets without ever a misstep,
+without the rustle of a branch or the crack of a twig. Certain of the
+wild creatures find it easy; but men have forgotten how in too many
+centuries of cities and farms. It is hardly a human quality; and a
+spectator would have found a rather ghastly fascination in watching the
+lithe motions, the passionless face, the hands that didn't shake at all.
+But there were no spectators--unless the little band of wolves,
+stragglers from the pack that had gathered on the hills behind--watched
+with lighted eyes.
+
+Dan went down at full length upon the snow and softly removed his
+snowshoes. They would be only an impediment in the close work that was
+sure to follow. He slid along the snow crust, clear to the mouth of the
+lean-to.
+
+The moonlight poured through and showed the interior with rather
+remarkable plainness. Cranston was sprawled, half-sitting, half-lying on
+a tree-bough pallet near the rear wall. There was not the slightest
+doubt of the man's wakefulness. Dan heard him stir, and once--as if at
+the memory of his deed of the day before--he cursed in a savage whisper.
+Although he was facing the opening of the lean-to, he was wholly unaware
+of Dan's presence. The latter had thrust his head at the side of the
+opening, and it was in shadow. Cranston seemed to be watching the
+great, white snow fields that lay in front, and for a moment Dan was at
+loss to explain this seeming vigil. Then he understood. The white field
+before him was part of the long ridge that the three of them would pass
+on their way to the valleys. Cranston had evidently anticipated that the
+girl and the man would attempt to march out--even if he hadn't guessed
+they would try to take the helpless Lennox with them--and he wished to
+be prepared for emergencies. There might be sport to have with Dan,
+unarmed as he was. And his eyes were full of strange conjectures in
+regard to Snowbird. Both would be exhausted now and helpless--
+
+Dan's eyes encompassed the room: the piles of provisions heaped against
+the wall, the snowshoes beside the pallet, but most of all he wished to
+locate Cranston's rifle. Success or failure hung on that. He couldn't
+find it at first. Then he saw the glitter of its barrel in the
+moonlight,--leaning against a grub-box possibly six feet from Cranston
+and ten from himself.
+
+His heart leaped. The best he had hoped for--for the sake of Snowbird,
+not himself--was that he would be nearer to the gun than Cranston and
+would be able to seize it first. But conditions could be greatly worse
+than they were. If Cranston had actually had the weapon in his hands,
+the odds of battle would have been frightfully against Dan. It takes a
+certain length of time to seize, swing, and aim a rifle; and Dan felt
+that while he would be unable to reach it himself, Cranston could not
+procure it either, without giving Dan an opportunity to leap upon him.
+In all his dreams, through the months of preparation, he had pictured it
+thus. It was the test at last.
+
+The gun might be loaded, and still--in these days of safety
+devices--unready to fire; and the loss of a fraction of a second might
+enable Cranston to reach his knife. Thus Dan felt justified in ignoring
+the gun altogether and trusting--as he had most desired--to a battle of
+hands. And he wanted both hands free when he made his attack.
+
+If Dan had been erect upon his feet, his course would have been an
+immediate leap on the shoulders of his adversary, running the risk of
+Cranston reaching his hunting knife in time. But the second that he
+would require to get to his feet would entirely offset this advantage.
+Cranston could spring up too. So he did the next most disarming thing.
+
+He sprang up and strode into the lean-to.
+
+"Good evening, Cranston," he said pleasantly.
+
+Cranston was also upon his feet the same instant. His instincts were
+entirely true. He knew if he leaped for his rifle, Dan would be upon his
+back in an instant, and he would have no chance to use it. His training,
+also, had been that of the hills, and his reflexes flung him erect upon
+his feet at the same instant that he saw the leap of his enemy's shadow.
+They brought up face to face. The rifle was now out of the running, as
+they were at about equal distances from it, and neither would have time
+to swing or aim it.
+
+Dan's sudden appearance had been so utterly unlooked-for, that for a
+moment Cranston could find no answer. His eyes moved to the rifle, then
+to his belt where hung his hunting knife, that still lay on the pallet.
+"Good evening, Failing," he replied, trying his hardest to fall into
+that strange spirit of nonchalance with which brave men have so often
+met their adversaries, and which Dan had now. "I'm surprised to see you
+here. What do you want?"
+
+Dan's voice when he replied was no more warm than the snow banks that
+reinforced the lean-to. "I want your rifle--also your snowshoes and your
+supplies of food. And I think I'll take your blankets, too."
+
+"And I suppose you mean to fight for them?" Cranston asked. His lips
+drew up in a smile, but there was no smile in the tone of his words.
+
+"You're right," Dan told him, and he stepped nearer. "Not only for that,
+Cranston. We're face to face at last--hands to hands. I've got a knife
+in my pocket, but I'm not even going to bring it out. It's hands to
+hands--you and I--until everything's square between us."
+
+"Perhaps you've forgotten that day on the ridge?" Cranston asked. "You
+haven't any woman to save you this time."
+
+"I remember the day, and that's part of the debt. The thing you did
+yesterday is part of it too. It's all to be settled at last, Cranston,
+and I don't believe I could spare you if you went to your knees before
+me. You've got a clearing out by the fire--big as a prize ring. We'll go
+out there--side by side. And hands to hands we'll settle all these debts
+we have between us--with no rules of fighting and no mercy in the end!"
+
+They measured each other with their eyes. Once more Cranston's gaze
+stole to his rifle, but lunging out, Dan kicked it three feet farther
+into the shadows of the lean-to. Dan saw the dark face drawn with
+passion, the hands clenching, the shoulder muscles growing into hard
+knots. And Cranston looked and knew that merciless vengeance--that
+age-old sin and Christless creed by which he lived--had followed him
+down and was clutching him at last.
+
+He saw it in the position of the stalwart form before him, the clear
+level eyes that the moonlight made bright as steel, the hard lines, the
+slim, powerful hands. He could read it in the tones of the voice,--tones
+that he himself could not imitate or pretend. The hour had come for the
+settling of old debts.
+
+He tried to curse his adversary as a weakling and a degenerate, but the
+obscene words he sought for would not come to his lips. Here was his
+fate, and because the darkness always fades before the light, and the
+courage of wickedness always breaks before the courage of righteousness,
+Cranston was afraid to look it in the face. The fear of defeat, of
+death, of Heaven knows what remorselessness with which this grave giant
+would administer justice was upon him, and his heart seemed to freeze in
+his breast. Cravenly he leaped for his knife on the blankets below him.
+
+Dan was upon him before he ever reached it. He sprang as a cougar
+springs, incredibly fast and with shattering power. Both went down, and
+for a long time they writhed and struggled in each other's arms. The
+pine boughs rustled strangely.
+
+The dark, gaunt hand reached in vain for the knife. Some resistless
+power seemed to be holding his wrist and was bending its bone as an
+Indian bends a bow. Pain lashed through him.--And then this dark-hearted
+man, who had never known the meaning of mercy, opened his lips to scream
+that this terrible enemy be merciful to him.
+
+But the words wouldn't come. A ghastly weight had come at his throat,
+and his tortured lungs sobbed for breath. Then, for a long time, there
+was a curious pounding, lashing sound in the evergreen boughs. It seemed
+merciless and endless.
+
+But Dan got up at last, in a strange, heavy silence, and swiftly went to
+work. He took the rifle and filled it with cartridges from Cranston's
+belt. Then he put the remaining two boxes of shells into his shirt
+pocket. The supplies of food--the sack of nutritious jerked venison like
+dried bark, the little package of cheese, the boxes of hardtack and one
+of the small sacks of prepared flour--he tied, with a single kettle,
+into his heavy blankets and flung them with the rifle upon his back.
+Finally he took the pair of snowshoes from the floor. He worked coldly,
+swiftly, all the time munching at a piece of jerked venison. When he
+had finished he walked to the door of the lean-to.
+
+It seemed to Dan that Cranston whispered faintly, from his
+unconsciousness, as he passed; but the victor did not turn to look. The
+snowshoes crunched away into the darkness. On the hill behind a
+half-dozen wolves--stragglers from the pack--frisked and leaped about in
+a curious way. A strange smell had reached them on the wind, and when
+the loud, fearful steps were out of hearing, it might pay them to creep
+down, one by one, and investigate its cause.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+The gray circle about the fire was growing impatient. Snowbird waited to
+the last instant before she admitted this fact. But it is possible only
+so long to deny the truth of a thing that all the senses verify, and
+that moment for her was past.
+
+At first the wolves had lingered in the deepest shadow and were only
+visible in profile against the gray snow. But as the night wore on, they
+became increasingly careless. They crept up to the very edge of the
+little circle of firelight; and when a high-leaping flame threw a gleam
+over them, they didn't shrink. She had only to look up to see that
+age-old circle of fire--bright dots, two and two--at every side.
+
+It is an instinct in the hunting creatures to remain silent before the
+attack. The triumph cries come afterward. But they seemed no longer
+anxious about this, either. Sometimes she would hear their footfall as
+they leaped in the snow, and what excitement stirred them she didn't
+dare to think. Quite often one of them would snarl softly,--a strange
+sound in the darkness.
+
+She noticed that when she went to her hands and knees, laboriously to
+cut a piece of the drier wood from the rain-soaked, rotted snag that was
+her principal supply of fuel, every wolf would leap forward, only to
+draw back when she stood straight again. At such times she saw them
+perfectly plainly,--their gaunt bodies, their eyes lighted with the
+insanity of famine, their ivory fangs that glistened in the firelight.
+She worked desperately to keep the fire burning bright. She dared not
+neglect it for a moment. Except for the single pistol ball that she
+could afford to expend on the wolves--of the three she had--the fire was
+her last defense.
+
+But it was a losing fight. The rain-soaked wood smoked without flame,
+the comparatively dry core with which Dan had started the fire had
+burned down, and the green wood, hacked with such heart-breaking
+difficulty from the saplings that Dan had cut, needed the most tireless
+attention to burn at all.
+
+When Dan had gone, these little trees were well within the circle of the
+wolves. Unfortunately, the circle had drawn in past them. Nevertheless,
+now that the last of the drier dead wood was consumed, she shouldered
+her ax and walked straight toward the gray, crouching bodies in the
+snow. For a tragic second she thought that the nearest of them was going
+to stand its ground. But almost when she was in striking range, and its
+body was sinking to the snow in preparation for a leap, it skulked back
+into the shadow. Exhausted as she was, it seemed to her that she chopped
+endlessly to cut away one little length. The ax blade was dull, the
+handle awkward in her hand, she could scarcely stand on her broken
+snowshoes, and worse, the ice crust broke beneath her blows, burying the
+sapling in the snow. She noticed that every time she bent to strike a
+blow, the circle would plunge a step nearer her, withdrawing as she
+straightened again.
+
+Books of woodcraft often describe with what ease a fire may be built and
+maintained in wet snow. It works fairly well in theory, but it is a
+heart-breaking task in practice. Under such difficulties as she worked,
+it became one of those dreadful undertakings that partake of a nightmare
+quality,--the walking of a treadmill or the sweeping of waves from the
+shore.
+
+When she secured the first length, her fire was almost extinguished. It
+threw a fault cloud of smoke into the air, but the flame was almost
+gone. The darkness dropped about her, and the wolves came stealing over
+the snow. She worked furiously, with the strength of desperation, and
+little by little she won back a tiny flame.
+
+Her nervous vitality was flowing from her in a frightful stream. Too
+long she had toiled without food in the constant presence of danger, and
+she was very near indeed to utter exhaustion. But at the same time she
+knew she must not faint. That was one thing she could not do,--to fall
+unconscious before the last of her three cartridges was expended in the
+right way.
+
+Again she went forth to the sapling, and this time it seemed to her that
+if she simply tossed the ax through the air, she could fell one of the
+gray crowd. But when she stooped to pick it up--She didn't finish the
+thought. She turned to coax the fire. And then she leaned sobbing over
+the sled.
+
+"What's the use?" she cried. "He won't come back. What's the use of
+fighting any more?"
+
+"There's always use of fighting," her father told her. He seemed to
+speak with difficulty, and his face looked strange and white. The cold
+and the exposure were having their effect on his weakened system, and
+unconsciousness was a near shadow indeed. "But, dearest,--if I could
+only make you do what I want you to--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You're able to climb a tree, and if you'd take these coats, you
+wouldn't freeze by morning. If you'd only have the strength--"
+
+"And see you torn to pieces!"
+
+"I'm old, dear--and very tired--and I'd crawl away into the shadows,
+where you couldn't see. There's no use mincing words, Snowbird. You're a
+brave girl--always have been since a little thing, as God is my
+Judge--and you know we must face the truth. Better one of us die than
+both. And I promise--I'll never feel their fangs. And I won't take your
+pistol with me either."
+
+Her thought flashed to the clasp hunting knife that he carried in his
+pocket. But her eyes lighted, and she bent and kissed him. And the
+wolves leaped forward even at this.
+
+"We'll stay it out," she told him. "We'll fight it to the last--just as
+Dan would want us to do. Besides--it would only mean the same fate for
+me, in a little while. I couldn't cling up there forever--and Dan won't
+come back."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was wholly unable to gain on the fire. Only by dint of the most
+heart-breaking toil was she able to secure any dry fuel for it at all.
+Every length of wood she cut had to be scraped of bark, and half the
+time the fire was only a sickly column of white smoke. It became
+increasingly difficult to swing the ax. The trail was almost at its end.
+
+The after-midnight hours drew one by one across the face of the
+wilderness, and she thought that the deepening cold presaged dawn. Her
+fingers were numb. Her nerve control was breaking; she could no longer
+drive a straight blow with the ax. The number of the wolves seemed to be
+increasing: every way she looked she could see them leaping. Or was this
+just hysteria? Surely the battle could go on but a few moments more. The
+wolves themselves, sensing dawn, were losing the last of their
+cowardice.
+
+Once more she went to one of the saplings, but she stumbled and almost
+went to her face at the first blow. It was the instant that her gray
+watchers had been waiting for. The wolf that stood nearest leaped--a
+gray streak out of the shadow--and every wolf in the pack shot forward
+with a yell. It was a short, expectant cry; but it chopped off short.
+For with a half-sob, and seemingly without mental process, she aimed her
+pistol and fired.
+
+A fast-leaping wolf is one of the most difficult pistol targets that can
+be imagined. It bordered on the miraculous that she did not miss him
+altogether. Her nerves were torn, their control over her muscles largely
+gone. Yet the bullet coursed down through the lungs, inflicting a mortal
+wound.
+
+The wolf had leaped for her throat; but he fell short. She staggered
+from a blow, and she heard a curious sound in the region of her hip. But
+she didn't know that the fangs had gone home in her soft flesh. The wolf
+rolled on the ground; and if her pistol had possessed the shocking power
+of a rifle, he would have never got up again. As it was, he shrieked
+once, then sped off in the darkness to die. Five or six of the nearest
+wolves, catching the smell of his blood, bayed and sped after him.
+
+But the remainder of the great pack--fully fifteen of the gray, gaunt
+creatures--came stealing across the snow toward her. White fangs had
+gone home; and a new madness was in the air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Straining into the silence, a perfectly straight line between Cranston's
+camp and Snowbird's, Dan Failing came mushing across the snow. His sense
+of direction had never been obliged to stand such a test as this before.
+Snowbird's fire was a single dot on a vast plateau; yet he had gone
+straight toward it.
+
+He was risking everything for the sake of speed. He gave no heed to the
+fallen timber that might have torn the web of his snowshoes to shreds.
+Because he shut out all thought of it, he had no feeling of fatigue. The
+fight with Cranston had been a frightful strain on muscle and nerve; but
+he scarcely remembered it now. His whole purpose was to return to
+Snowbird before the wolves lost the last of their cowardice.
+
+The jerked venison that he had munched had brought him back much of his
+strength. He was wholly unconscious of his heavy pack. Never did he
+glide so swiftly, so softly, with such unerring step; and it was nothing
+more or less than a perfect expression of the ironclad control that his
+steel nerves had over his muscles.
+
+Then, through the silence, he heard the shout of the pack as the wolf
+had leaped at Snowbird. He knew what it meant. The wolves were attacking
+then, and a great flood of black, hating bitterness poured over him at
+the thought he had been too late. It had all been in vain, and before
+the thought could fully go home, he heard the dim, far-off crack of a
+pistol.
+
+Was that the first of the three shots, the one she might expend on the
+wolves, or had the first two already been spent and was she taking the
+last gateway of escape? Perhaps even now Lennox was lying still on the
+sled, and she was standing before the ruin of her fire, praying that her
+soul might have wings. He shouted with all the power of his lungs across
+the snow.
+
+But Snowbird only heard the soft glide of the wolves in the snow. The
+wind was blowing toward Dan; and while he had heard the loud chorus of
+the pack, one of the most far-carrying cries, and the penetrating crack
+of a pistol, she couldn't hear his answering shout. In fact, the
+wilderness seemed preternaturally still. All was breathless, heavy with
+suspense, and she stood, just as Dan had thought, between the ruin of
+her fire and the sled, and she looked with straight eyes to the oncoming
+wolves.
+
+"Hurry, Snowbird," Lennox was whispering. "Give me the pistol--for that
+last work. We have only a moment more."
+
+He looked very calm and brave, half-raised as he was on the sled, and
+perhaps a half-smile lingered at his bearded lips. And the bravest thing
+of all was that to spare her, he was willing to take the little weapon
+from her hand to use it in its last service. She tried to smile at him,
+then crept over to his side.
+
+The strain was over. They knew what they had to face. She put the
+pistol in his steady hand.
+
+His hand lowered to his side and he sat waiting. The moments passed. The
+wolves seemed to be waiting too, for the last flickering tongue of the
+little fire to die away. The last of her fuel was ignited and burning
+out; they were crouched and ready to spring if she should venture forth
+after more. The darkness closed down deeper, and at last only a column
+of smoke remained.
+
+It was nothing to be afraid of. The great, gray leader of the pack, a
+wolf that weighed nearly one hundred pounds, began slowly and
+deliberately to set his muscles for the spring. It was the same as when
+the great bull elk comes to bay at the base of the cliffs: usually some
+one wolf, often the great pack leader, wishing to remind his followers
+of his might, or else some full-grown male proud in his strength, will
+attack alone. Because this was the noblest game that the pack had ever
+faced, the leader chose to make the first leap himself. It was true that
+these two had neither such horns nor razor-edged hoofs as the elk, yet
+they had eyes that chilled his heart when he tried to look at them. But
+one was lying almost prone, and the fire was out. Besides, the madness
+of starvation, intensified ten times by their terrible realization of
+the wound at her hip, was upon the pack as never before. The muscles
+bunched at his lean flanks.
+
+But as Snowbird and her father gazed at him in fascinated horror, the
+great wolf suddenly smashed down in the snow. She was aware of its
+curious, utter collapse actually before the sound of the rifle shot that
+occasioned it had penetrated her consciousness. It was a perfect shot at
+long range; and for a long instant her tortured faculties refused to
+accept the truth.
+
+Then the rifle spoke again, and a second wolf--a large male that
+crouched on the other side of the sled--fell kicking in the snow. The
+pack had leaped forward at the first death; but they halted at the
+second. And then terror came to them when the third wolf suddenly opened
+its savage lips and screamed in the death agony.
+
+Up to this time, except for the report of the rifle, the attack had been
+made in utter silence. The reason was just that both breath and nervous
+force are needed to shout; and Dan Failing could afford to waste neither
+of these vital forces. He had dropped to his knee, and was firing again
+and again, his gray eyes looking clear and straight along the barrel,
+his fingers without jerk or tremor pressing again and again at the
+trigger, his hands holding the rifle as in a vice. Every nerve and
+muscle were completely in his command. The distance was far, yet he shot
+with deadly, amazing accuracy. The wolves were within a few feet of the
+girl, and a fraction's waver in the gun barrel might have sped his
+bullet toward her.
+
+"It's Dan Failing," Lennox shouted as the fourth wolf died.
+
+Then Snowbird snatched her pistol from her father's hand and opened
+fire. The two shells were no longer needed to free herself and her
+father from the agony of fangs. She took careful aim, and although a
+pistol is never as accurate or as powerful as a rifle, she killed one
+wolf and wounded another.
+
+Frenzied in their savagery, three or four of the remaining wolves leaped
+at the body of one of the wounded; but the others scattered in all
+directions. Still Dan fired with the same unbelievable accuracy, and
+still the wolves died in the snow. The girl and the man were screaming
+now in the frenzied joy of deliverance. The wolves scurried frantically
+among the trees; and some of them unknowingly ran full in the face of
+their enemy, to be shot down without mercy. And few indeed were those
+that escaped,--to collect on a distant ridge, and, perhaps, to be
+haunted in dreams by a Death that came out of the shadows to blast the
+pack.
+
+Again the pack-song would be despairing and strange in the winter
+nights,--that age-old chant of Famine and Fear and the long war of
+existence with only Death and Darkness in the end. And because it is the
+voice of the wilderness itself, the tenderfoot that camps in the
+evergreen forest will listen, and his talk will die at his lips, and he
+will have the beginnings of knowledge. And perhaps he will wonder if God
+has given him the thews and fiber to meet the wilderness breast to
+breast as Dan had met it: to remain and to fight and to conquer. And
+thereby his metal will be tested in the eyes of the Red Gods.
+
+Snowbird stood waiting in the snow, arms stretched to her forester as
+Dan came running through the wood. But his arms were wider yet, and she
+went softly into them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We will take it easy from now on," Dan Failing told them, after the
+camp was cleared of its dead and the fire was built high. "We have
+plenty of food; and we will travel a little while each day and make warm
+camps at night. We'll have friendship fires, just as sometimes we used
+to build on the ridge."
+
+"But after you get down into the valleys?" Lennox asked anxiously. "Are
+you and Snowbird coming up here to live?"
+
+The silence fell over their camp; and a wounded wolf whined in the
+darkness. "Do you think I could leave it now?" Dan asked. By no gift of
+words could he have explained why; yet he knew that by token of his
+conquest, his spirit was wedded to the dark forests forever. "But heaven
+knows what I'll do for a living."
+
+Snowbird crept near him, and her eyes shone in the bright firelight.
+"I've solved that," she said. "You know you studied forestry--and I told
+the supervisor at the station how much you knew about it. I wasn't going
+to tell you until--until certain things happened--and now they have
+happened, I can't wait another instant. He said that with a little more
+study you could get into the Forest Service--take an examination and
+become a ranger. You're a natural forester if one ever lived, and you'd
+love the work."
+
+"Besides," Lennox added, "it would clip my Snowbird's wings to make her
+live on the plains. My big house will be rebuilt, children. There will
+be fires in the fireplace on the fall nights. There is no use of
+thinking of the plains."
+
+"And there's going to be a smaller house--just a cottage at first--right
+beside it," Dan replied. He could go back to his forests, after all. He
+wouldn't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it
+seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the
+forest rangers,--those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and
+keepers of its keys.
+
+For a long time Snowbird and he stood together at the edge of the
+firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts brimming with
+words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain
+people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted
+to the yearning of his arms.
+
+"We're made for each other, Snowbird darling," he told her breathlessly
+at last. "And at last I can claim what I've been waiting for all these
+months."
+
+He claimed it; and in open defiance to all civil law, he collected fully
+one hundred times in the next few minutes. But it didn't particularly
+matter, and Snowbird didn't even turn her face. "Maybe you've forgotten
+you claimed it when you first came back too," she said.
+
+So he had. It had completely slipped his mind, in the excitement of his
+fight with the wolf pack. And then while Lennox pretended to be asleep,
+they sat, breathless with happiness, on the edge of the sled and watched
+the dawn come out.
+
+They had never seen the snow so lovely in the sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Pack, by Edison Marshall
+
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