"Here we are," said Jim. "And not sorry to get here either."
He pushed open the door of a log-hut. It was perhaps fourteen feet square; a stove burned red-hot in the centre of the hut; on one side was a long bunk built of red cedar.
"I done my best to clean it up," said Jim. "Maybe there's a rat or two around, and perhaps a porcupine, but they won't hurt you. It's dry, that's one thing. And now I'll say good-night."
He tramped off into the wood. Arthur stood a long time listening, but Jim's footsteps were soon lost amid the groaning of the trees. The long, melancholy cry of the coyote again thrilled the air. Arthur shut the door.
And it was so that he came into his heritage.
XVII
THE NEW LIFE
He contrived to make himself some coffee, and after a while extinguished the lamp and crawled into the bunk. The red-hot stove filled the hut with a dim light, and he fell asleep.
An hour later he woke in a sweat of terror. The fire in the stove had died down, the hut was bitterly cold, and he was in total darkness. The darkness was like nothing he had known before; it closed round him with a pressure that was almost tangible, and it seemed alive. There was a horrible sense of something hostile in it; he could have thought it moved stealthily, with a faint rustling of unseen robes, that it breathed and palpitated, that it was a presence inimical to life. A rat ran across his bed, and on the roof there was a long grating sound. Outside, in the wide night, he could recognise the melancholy cry of the coyote; but there were other cries and sounds which he could not recognise. Close to the door of the hut there was audible what seemed like deep, stertorous breathing, deepening into a human groan. From the depth of the wood came a fearful wail, as of a woman in distress. He sprang from the bunk, rushed to the door, and opened it. There was a soft flutter of wings, and the groaning ceased; but the wailing in the woods went on, upon a scale of rising agony. There was nowhere any sign of life. The moon had risen, and the snow-laden trees rose pure and mystic in the silver light. They were like a cohort of silent watchers round his lonely hut, and he welcomed them as comrades. Slowly his fears subsided. It was not until the next day he learned from Flanagan that the soft groaning at the door proceeded from nothing more alarming than a mountain owl, and that the wailing in the forest was merely a mountain lion in search of prey.