"But stop!" Bruce commanded. He lighted a cigarette. "I thought you were against killing bears—any except the big boys up North."
"That's just it. I am against killing the little black fellows—they are the only folk with any brains in the woods. But this, Bruce, was a real bear,—a left-over from fifty years ago. There used to be grizzlies through that country, you see, but everybody supposed that the last of them had been shot. But evidently there was one family that still remained—in the farthest recesses of Trail's End—and all at once the biggest, meanest grizzly ever remembered showed up on the cattle ranges of the plateau. With some others, I went to get him. 'The Killer', they call him—and he certainly is death on live stock. I didn't get the bear, but one day my guide stopped at a broken-down old cabin on the hillside for a drink of water. I was four miles away in camp. The guide came back and asked me if I was from this very city.
"I told him yes, and asked him why he wanted to know. He said that this old woman sent word, secretly, to every stranger that ever came to fish or hunt in the region of Trail's End, wanting to know if they came from here. I was the first one that answered 'yes.' And the guide said that she wanted me to come to her cabin and see her.
"I went—and I won't describe to you how she looked. I'll let you see for yourself, if you care to follow out her instructions. And now the strange part comes in. The old witch raised her arm, pointed her cane at me, and asked me if I knew Newton Duncan.
"I told her there might be several Newton Duncans in a city this size. You should have seen the pain grow on her face. 'After so long, after so long!' she cried, in the queerest, sobbing way. She seemed to have waited years to find some one from here, and when I came I didn't know what she wanted. Then she took heart and began again.
"'This Newton Duncan had a son—a foster-son—named Bruce,' she told me. And then I said I knew you.
"You can't imagine the change that came over her. I thought she'd die of heart failure. The whole thing, Bruce—if you must know—gave me the creeps. 'Tell him to come here,' she begged me. 'Don't lose a moment. As soon as you get home, tell him to come here.'
"Of course I asked other questions, but I couldn't get much out of her. One of 'em was why she hadn't written to Duncan. The answer was simple enough—that she didn't know how to write. Those in the mountains that could write wouldn't, or couldn't—she was a trifle vague on that point—dispatch a letter. Something is up."