Title: The Voice of the Pack
Author: Marshall, Edison, 1894-1967
Language: English
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                        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 this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Voice of the Pack" ***

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