"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.