THE SNOWSHOE TRAIL

by

EDISON MARSHALL

Author of "The Strength of the Pines,"
"The Voice of the Pack," etc.

With Frontispiece by Marshall Frantz

A.L. Burt Company Publishers, New York
Published by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company.
Copyright 1921, By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved

To Agnes, of the South—this story of the North

The Snowshoe Trail

I

It was not the first time that people of the forest had paused on the hill at twilight to look down on Bradleyburg. The sight always seemed to intrigue and mystify the wild folk,—the shadowed street, the spire of the moldering church ghostly in the half-light, the long row of unpainted shacks, and the dim, pale gleam of an occasional lighted window. The old bull moose, in rutting days, was wont to pause and call, listen an instant for such answer as the twilight city might give him, then push on through the spruce forests; and often the coyotes gathered in a ring and wailed out their cries over the rooftops. More than once the wolf pack had halted here for a fleeting instant; but they were never people to linger in the vicinity of men.

But to-night it was not one of these four-footed wild folk—this tall form—that emerged from the dark fringe of the spruce forest to gaze down at the town. But he was none the less of the forest. Its mark was upon him; in the silence of his tread, the sinuous strength of his motions; perhaps it lay even in a certain dimness and obscurity of outline, framed by the thickets as he was, that was particularly characteristic of the wild denizens of the woods. But even in the heavy shadows his identity was clear at once. He was simply a woodsman,—and he held his horse by the bridle rein.

The long file of pack horses behind him halted, waiting for their master to go on. He stood musing, held by the darkened scene below him. Hard to read, in the deepening shadows, was the expression on his bronzed face. It revealed relief, of course, simple and heartfelt joy at the sight of his destination. Men do not wander over the blazed trails of the North Woods and not feel relief at the journey's end. There was a hint of fatigue in his posture, the horses' heads were low; and the shacks below meant food and rest. But there was also a pensiveness, a dreamy quietude in his dark eyes that revealed the greater sweep of his thoughts.

He had looked down on Bradleyburg on many previous occasions, but the scene had never impressed him in quite this way before. Already the shadows had crept out from the dark forests that enclosed the little city and had enfolded it in gloom: the buildings were obscured and the street was lost, and there was little left to tell that here was the abode of men. A dim light, faint as the glowing eyes of the wild creatures in the darkness, burned here and there from the window of a house: except for this the wilderness would have seemed unbroken.

"It's getting you down," the man muttered. "It's closing you in and smothering you—just as it has me."

Perhaps, had his words carried far enough in the silence, the townspeople in the houses below wouldn't have understood. His horses, sniffing at his knees, did not seem to hear. But the woodsman could not have made himself any clearer. Words never come easy to those that dwell in the silences of the North. To him it seemed that the twilight was symbolic of the wilderness,—stealing forth with slow encroachments until all of the little town was enfolded within itself. It was a twilight city, the little cluster of frame shacks below him. It could be brave and gay enough in the daylight, a few children could play in its streets and women could call from door to door, but the falling darkness revealed it as it was,—simply a fragment that the dark forests were about to claim. The day was done in Bradleyburg; as in the case of many of the gold camps of the North the wilderness was about to take back its own.

It had had a glorious past, this little city lost in the northern reaches of the Selkirks. In the man's own boyhood it had been one of the flourishing gold camps of the North; and miners had come from all over the continent to wash the gravel of its streams. In all directions up the hillside the tents and shacks had stretched, dance halls were gay, freighters plied along the winding road to the south. The man's mother had been one of the first women in the camp; and one of the last to go. The mines were fabulously rich; tens of thousands in dust were often taken in a single day by a lone miner, fortunes were made and lost at the gambling tables, and even the terrible winters could not triumph over the gold seekers. But in a little while the mines gave out, one terrible winter night the whole town was destroyed by fire, and now that the miners were drifting to other camps, few of the shacks were rebuilt. Of the six thousand that had been, scarcely threescore remained. A few trappers ran their lines out from the town, a few men had placer claims in the old diggings, two or three woodsmen made precarious livings as guides for such wealthy men as came to hunt moose and caribou, and Bradleyburg's course was run. The winter cold had triumphed at last, and its curse was over the city from October till June. The spruce forest, cleared away to make room for the cabins, had sprung up again and was steadily marching toward the main street of the town.

But the man on the hilltop felt no regret. Except for a few memories of his young days he had no particular fondness for the little cluster of shacks. Long ago the wilderness had claimed him for its own; his home was the dark forest from which even now he was emerging. Bradleyburg was simply his source of supplies and his post office, the market for his furs. He had reached back and stroked the warm nose of his horse.

"Another half mile, old fellow," he said gently. "Then oats—rice and meat for me at Johnson's—and oats—honest-to-goodness oats—for you. What you think about that, eh, Mulvaney? Then show a little speed this last half-mile."

The man swung on his horse, and even the cattlemen of the plains would have found something to admire in the ease and grace with which his body slipped down into the saddle. The horse moved forward, the pack animals pushed on behind him. A few minutes later they had swung down into the still street of the town. Tired as he was, his hands were swift and strong as he unpacked the animals and tied them in the bar back of Johnson's,—the little frontier inn. As always, after the supper hour, a group of the townsmen were gathered about the hotel stove; and all of them spoke to him as he entered. He stood among them an instant, warming his hands.

They had few words at first. The lesson of silence is taught deeply and sure in the North. The hostess went to her kitchen to order the man's supper, the townsmen drew at their pipes.

"Well, Bill," one of them asked at last, "how's everything with you?"

It was not the usual how-d'ye-do of greeting. The words were spoken in actual question, as if they had special significance.

The man straightened, turning sober eyes. "Nothing startling yet," he replied.

"In after supplies?"

"Yes—and my mail."

There was a long pause. The conversation was apparently ended. Bill turned to go. A stranger spoke from the other side of the fire.

"How's Grizzly River?" he asked. Bill turned to him with a smile.

"Getting higher and higher. All the streams are up. You know that bald-faced bay of Fargo's?"

Fargo was the Bradleyburg merchant, and the stranger knew the horse,—one of the little band that, after the frontier custom, Fargo kept to rent. "Yes, I remember him."

"Well, I've got him this fall. You know he's a yellow cuss."

The stranger nodded. In this little community the dumb brutes were almost as well known as the human inhabitants. The meaning was wholly plain to him too, and the term did not apply to the horse's color. Yellow, on the frontier, means just one thing: the most damning and unforgivable thing of all. When one is yellow he gives up easily, he dares not lift his arms to fight, and the wilderness claims him quickly. "There's a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford," Bill went on. "All the horses got through but Baldy, and he could have made it easy if he'd tried. But what did he do but just sit back on his haunches in the mud, like an old man in a chair, his head up and his front legs in his lap, and just give up? Quite a sight—that horse sitting in the mud. I had to snag him out."

The others smiled, but none of them with the brilliance of the story-teller himself. The wilderness picture—with the cowardly horse sitting in the mud—was again before his eyes; and none of the hardship of the journey could cost him his joy in it. Bill Bronson was no longer just a dim form on the twilight hilltop. The lamplight showed him plain. In this circle of townspeople he was a man to notice twice.

The forests had done well by him. Like the spruce themselves he had grown straight and tall, but his form was sturdy too. There was a lithe strength about him that suggested the larger felines; the hard trails of the forest had left not a spare ounce of flesh on his powerful frame. His mold, except for a vague and indistinct refinement in his long-fingered and strong hands, was simply that of a woodsman,—sturdy, muscular, untiring. His speech was not greatly different from that of others: the woodspeople, spending many of the long winter days in reading, are usually careless in speech but rarely ungrammatical. His clothes were homely and worn. He wore a blue mackinaw over a flannel shirt, dark trousers and rubber boots: garments that were suited to his life.

But it was true that men looked twice into Bill Bronson's face. His features were rugged, now his mouth and jowls were dark with beard, yet written all over his sunburned face was a kindliness and gentleness that could not be denied. There was strength and good humor in plenty; and it was hard to reconcile these qualities with an unquestioned wistfulness and boyishness in his eyes. They were dark eyes, the eyes of a man of action who could also dream, kindly, thoughtful eyes which even the deep shadows of the forest had not blinded to beauty.

As he waited for his meal he crossed the dark road to the little frontier post office, there to be given his two months' accumulation of letters. He looked them over with significant anxiety. There were the usual forders from fur buyers, a few advertisements and circulars, and a small batch of business mail. The smile died from his eyes as he read one of these communications after another. Their context was usually the same,—that his proposition did not look good, and no investment would be made in a plan as vague as his. The correspondents understood that he had been grubstaked before without result. They remained, however, his respectfully,—and Bill's great hand crumpled each in turn.

Only one letter remained, written in an unknown hand from a far-off city; and it dropped, for the moment, unnoticed into his lap. His eyes were brooding and lifeless as he stared out the hotel window into the darkened street. There was no use of appealing again to the business folk of the provincial towns; the tone of their letters was all too decisive. The great plans he had made would come to nothing after all. His proposition simply did not hold water.

He had been seeking a "grubstake,"—some one to finance another expedition into the virgin Clearwater for half of such gains as he should make. In a few weeks more the winter would close down; the horses, essential to such a trip as this, had to be driven down to the gate of the Outside,—three hundred miles to the bank of a great river. He had time for one more dash for the rainbow's end, and no one could stake him for it. He had some food supplies, but the horse-rent was an unsolved problem. He could see no ray of hope as he picked up, half-heartedly, the last letter of the pile.

But at once his interest returned. It had been mailed in a far distant city in the United States, and the fine, clear handwriting was obviously feminine. He didn't have to rub the paper between his thumb and forefinger to mark its rich, heavy quality and its beauty,—the stationery of an aristocrat. The message was singularly terse:

My Dear Mr. Bronson:

I am informed, by the head of your provincial game commission, that you can be employed to guide for hunting parties wishing to hunt in the Clearwater, north of Bradleyburg. I do not wish to hunt game, but I do wish to penetrate that country in search of my fiance, Mr. Harold Lounsbury, of whom doubtless you have heard, and who disappeared in the Clearwater district six years ago. I will be accompanied by Mr. Lounsbury's uncle, Kenly Lounsbury, and I wish you to secure the outfit and a man to cook at once. You will be paid the usual outfitter's rates for thirty days. We will arrive in Bradleyburg September twentieth by stage. Yours sincerely, Virginia Tremont.

Bill finished the note, pocketed it carefully, and a boyish light was in his eyes as he shook fragrant tobacco into his pipe. "The way out," he told himself. "She won't care if I do my prospecting the same time."

His thought swung back to a scene of many Septembers before, of a camp he had made beside a distant stream and of a wayfarer who had eaten of his bread and journeyed on,—never to pass that way again. There had been one curious circumstance connected with the meeting, otherwise it might not have lingered so clearly in Bill's memory. It had seemed to him, at the time, that he had encountered the stranger on some previous occasion. There was a haunting familiarity in his face, a fleeting memory that he could not trace or identify. Yet nothing in the stranger's past life had offered an explanation. He was a newcomer, he said,—on his first trip north. Bill, on the other hand, had never gone south. It had been but a trick of the imagination, after all. And Bill did not doubt that he was the man for whom the girl sought.

The little lines seemed to draw and deepen about the man's eyes. "Six years—but six years is too long, for Clearwater," he murmured. "Men either come out by then, or it gets 'em. I'm afraid she'll never find her lover."

He went to make arrangements with Fargo, the merchant, about supplies. At midnight he sat alone in the little lobby of the inn; all the other townsmen had gone. The fire was nearly out; a single lamp threw a doubtful glow on the woodsman's face. His thoughts had been tireless to-night. He couldn't have told why. Evidently some little event of the evening, some word that he had not consciously noticed had been the impulse for a flood of memories. They haunted him and held him, and he couldn't escape from them.

His thought moved in great circles, always returning to the same starting point,—the tragedy and mystery of his own boyhood. He knew perfectly that there was neither pleasure nor profit in dwelling upon this subject. In the years that he had had his full manhood he had tried to force the matter from his thoughts, and mostly he had succeeded. Self-mastery was his first law, the code by which he lived; and mostly the blue devils had lifted their curse from him. But they were shrieking from the gloom at him to-night. In the late years some of the great tranquility of the forest had reposed in him and the bitter hours of brooding came ever at longer intervals. But to-night they held him in bondage.

It was twenty-five years past and he had been only a child when the thing had happened. He had been but seven years old,—more of a baby than a child. He smiled grimly as the thought went home to him that childhood, in its true sense, was one stage of life that he had missed. He had been cheated of it by a remorseless destiny; he had been a baby, and then he had been a man. There were no joyous gradations between. The sober little boy had sensed at once that the responsibilities of manhood had been thrust upon him, and he must make good. After all, that was the code of his life,—to take what destiny gave and stand up under it.

If the event had occurred anywhere but in the North, the outcome might have been wholly different. Life was easy and gentle in the river bottoms of the United States. Women could make a brave fight unaided; even fatherless boys were not entirely cheated of their youth. Besides, in these desolate wastes the code of life is a personal code, primitive emotions have full sway, and men to not change their dreams from day to day. Constancy and steadfastness are the first impulses of their lives; neither Bill nor his mother had been able to forget or to forgive. Here was an undying ignominy and hatred; besides—for the North is a far-famed keeper of secrets—the mystery and the dreadful uncertainty, haunting like a ghost. As a little boy he had tried to comfort his mother with his high plans for revenge; and she had whispered to him, and cried over him, and pressed him hard against her; and he had promised, over and over again, that when manhood came to him he would right her wrongs and his own. He remembered his pathetic efforts to comfort her, and it had never occurred to him that he had been in need of comforting himself. He had been a sober, wistful-eyed little boy, bearing bravely the whole tragic weight upon his own small shoulders.

The story was very simple and short,—nothing particularly unusual in the North. His father had come early to the gold fields of Bradleyburg, and he had been one of few that was accompanied by his wife,—a tender creature, scarcely molded for life in the northern gold camps. Then there had been Rutheford, his father's partner, a man whom neither Bill nor his mother liked or trusted, but to whom the elder Bronson gave full trust. Somewhere beyond far Grizzly River, in the Clearwater, Bronson had made a wonderful strike,—a fabulous mine where the gravel was simply laden with the yellow dust; and because they had prospected together in times past, Bronson gave his partner a share in it.

They had worked for months at their mine, in secret, and then Rutheford had come with pack horses into Bradleyburg, ostensibly for supplies. He had been a guest at the Bronson cabin and had reported that all was well with his generous partner. And the next night he had disappeared.

Weeks were to pass before the truth was known. Rutheford did not return to the mine at all; he was traced clear to the shipping point, three hundred miles below Bradleyburg. And he did not go empty-handed. The pack horses had not carried empty saddlebags. They had been simply laden with gold. And Bronson never returned to his family in Bradleyburg.

There was only one possible explanation. The gold had represented the season's washings—an amount that went into the hundreds of thousands—and Rutheford had murdered his benefactor and absconded with the entire amount. No living human being except Rutheford himself knew where the mine lay; there was no way for Bronson's family either to reclaim the body or to continue to work on the mine. Search parties had sought it in vain, and the lost mine of the Bronsons became a legend, a mystery that had grown constantly more dim in the passing years.

"When I am gone," little Bill would whisper to his mother, as she knelt crying at his feet, "I will go out and find my papa's mine. Also I will chase down Rutheford, and track him all over the world until I find him, and make him suffer for all he has done!"

This was a northern child, and his baby eyes would gleam and his features draw, and then his mother, half-frightened, would try to quiet him in her arms. This was the North, the land of primitive emotions, take and give, receive and pay, simple justice and remorseless vengeance; and when the storm swept over the cabin and the snow deepened at the doorway, those terrible, whispered promises seemed wholly fitting and true.

"I'll follow him till I die, and he and his wife and his son will pay for what he has done to us."

But the years had come and passed, and Rutheford had not been brought to justice nor the mine found. It was true that in a past summer Bill had traced his father's murderer as far as the shipping point, but there all trace of him was irremediably lost. Bill had made many excursions into the Clearwater in search of the lost mine, all without success. He had had but one guide,—a hastily scrawled map that Bronson had once drawn for his wife, to show her the approximate position of the claim. There had been no hope of avenging the murder, but with each recurring spring Bill had felt certain of clearing up the mystery, at least of finding the mine and its wealth and the bones of his father. But the last days of his mother, gone at last to her old home in the United States, could be made easier; but his own future would be assured. But now, at thirty-two, the recovery of the mine seemed as far distant as ever. Devoting his life to the pursuit of it, he had not prepared himself for any other occupation; he had only a rather unusual general education, procured from the Bradleyburg schools and his winter reading, and now he was face to face with economic problems, too.

He would try once more. If he did not win, the dream of his youth would have to be given over. He had devoted his days to it; such a force as was about to send Virginia Tremont into the wilderness in search of her lover had never come up in his life. He sat dreaming, the ashes cold in is pipe.

He was called to himself by a distinct feeling of cold. The fire was out, the chill of the early midnight hours had crept into the room. The man rose wearily, then strode to the door for a moment's survey of the sky.

For a breath he stood watching. His was the only lamp still glowing: only the starlight, wan and pale, lay over the town. The night wind came stealing, an icy ghost, up the dark street; and it chilled his uncovered throat. The moon rose over the spruce forest, ringed with white. Already the frost was growing on the roofs.

The ring around the moon, the nip in the air, the little wind that came so gently, yet with such sinister stealth, all portended one thing,—that the great northern winter was lurking just beyond the mountains, ready to swoop forth. Of course there would be likely time in plenty for a dash into Clearwater; yet the little breath of fall was almost gone. Far away, rising and falling faint as a cobweb in the air, a coyote sang to the rising moon,—a strange, sobbing song of pain and sadness and fear that only the woodsman, to whom the North had sent home its lessons, could understand.

II

Bill Bronson found that he had the usual number of difficulties to contend with, when arranging for the journey. He had to procure more horses for the larger outfit, and he was obliged to comb the town of them before he had enough. This was not an agricultural land, this wild realm of the Selkirks, and all of the animals were originally Indian stock,—the usual type of mountain cayuses with which most big-game hunters are acquainted. Some of them were faithful and trustworthy animals, but many were half-broken, many cowardly and vicious. On those he rented he took the risk; he would be charged on the books for all those that were not returned to their owners at Bradleyburg by October twentieth.

Bill knew perfectly that he would play in good fortune if the loss in horseflesh did not cost him most of the gains of the undertaking. Even the sturdy mustangs were not bred for traversing the trails of Clearwater. There were steep hills where a single misstep meant death, there were narrow trails and dangerous fords, and here and there were inoffensive-looking pools where the body of a horse may sink out of sight in less time than it takes to tell it. These were not the immense-chested moose or the strong-limbed caribou, natives of the place and monarchs of its trails. Besides, if the winter caught them on the higher levels, they would never eat oats in Johnson's barn again. The six feet of snow covers all horse feed, and the alternatives that remain are simply a merciful bullet from the wrangler's pistol or death of slow starvation.

Bill had certain stores in his cabins,—the long line of log huts from which he operated in the trapping season,—yet further supplies were needed for the trip. He bought sugar, flour, great sacks of rice—that nutritious and delightful grain that all outdoor men learn to love—coffee and canned goods past all description. Savory bacon, a great cured ham of a caribou, dehydrated vegetables and cans of marmalade and jam: all these went into the big saddle-bags for the journey. He was fully aware that the punishing days' ride could never be endured on half-rations. Camp equipment, rifles, shells and a linen tent made up the outfit.

He encountered real difficulty when he tried to hire a man to act as cook. Evidently the Bradleyburg citizens had no love for the mountain realms in the last days of fall. For the double wage that he promised he was only able to secure a half-rate man,—Vosper by name, a shifty-eyed youth from one of the placer mines, farther down toward the settlements.

Up to the time that he heard the far-off sound of their automobile struggling up the long hill, he had made no mental picture of his employers. He rather hoped that Mr. Kenly Lounsbury—uncle of the missing man—would represent the usual type of middle-aged American with whom he had previously dealt,—cold-nerved, likeable business men that came for recreation on the caribou trails. Virginia Tremont would of course be a new type, but he felt no especial interest in her. But as he waited at the door of the hotel he began to be aware of a curious excitement, a sense of grave and portentous developments. He did not feel the least self-conscious. But he did know a suddenly awakened interest in this girl who would come clear to these northern realms to find her lover.

The car was in evident difficulties. It was the end of the road: in fact, the old highway for the last three miles of its length was simply two ruts on the hillside. As soon as it came in sight Bill recognized the driver,—a man who operated a line of auto-stages, during the summer months, on the long river-road below. The next instant the car drew up beside the hotel.

To a man of cities there would have been nothing particularly unusual in this sight of a well-groomed man and girl in the tonneau of an automobile. The man was a familiar type, of medium size, precise, his outing clothes just a trifle garish; the girl trim and sweet-faced, and stylish from the top of her head to the soles of her expensive little boots. But no moment of Bill's life had ever been fraught with a greater wonder. None had ever such a quality of the miraculous. None had ever gone so deep.

He had not known many women, this dark man of the forests. He had seen Indian squaws in plenty, stolid and fat, he had known a few of the wives of the Bradleyburg men,—women pretty enough, good housekeepers, neatly clad and perhaps a little saddened and crushed by the very remorselessness of this land in which they lived. But there had been no girls in Bradleyburg to grow up with, no schoolday sweethearts. He had known the dark and desolate forests, never a sweetheart's kiss. His mother was now but a memory: tenderness, loveliness, personal beauty to hold the eyes had been wholly without his bourne. And he gazed at Virginia Tremont as a man might look at a celestial light.

If the girl could have seen the swift flood of worship that flowed into his face, she would have felt no scorn. She was of the cities, caste had hardened her as far as it could harden one of her nature, she was a thoroughbred to the last inch, used to flattery and the attentions of men of her own class; yet she would have held no contempt for this tall, bronzed man that looked at her with such awe and wonder. The surge of feeling was real in him; and reality is one thing, over the broad earth, that no human being dares to scorn. If she could have read deeper she would have found in herself an unlooked-for answer, in a small measure at least, to a lifelong dream, an ideal come true, and even she—in her high place—would have known a little whisper of awe.

All his life, it seemed to him, Bill had dreamed dreams—dreams that he would not admit into his conscious thought and which he constantly tried to disavow because he considered their substance did not exist in reality and thus they were out of accord with the realism with which he regarded life. On the long winter nights, when the snow lay endless and deep over the wilderness, and the terrible cold locked the land tight, he would sit in his trapping cabins, gazing into the smoke clouds from his pipe, and a tender enchantment would steal over him. He would have admitted to no human being those wistful and beautiful hours that he spent alone. He was known as a man among men, one who could battle the snows and meet the grizzly in his lair, and he would have been ashamed to reveal this dreamy, romantic side of his nature, these longings that swept him to the depths. He would go to his bed and lie for long, tingling, wakeful hours stirred by dreams that through no earthly chance could he conceive as coming true. Arms about him, lips near, beauty and tenderness and hallowed wakenings,—he had imagined them all in his secret hours.

In the deep realms of his spirit, it seemed to him, he had always known this girl,—this straight, graceful, lovely being with eyes of an angel and smile of a happy child. He had denied her existence, and here she was before him. Dark hair, waving and just a little untidy in the brisk wind, oval face and determined little chin, shadowing lashes and the exquisite contrasts of brunette beauty, a glimpse of soft, white flesh at the throat through her dark furs, smart tailored suit and dainty hands,—they were all known to him of old. For all the indifference and distance with which she looked at him and at the other townspeople, there was a world of girlish sweetness in her face. For all her caste, there was spiritual beauty and gracious charm in every facial line.

Curiously, Bill had no tinge of the resentment he might have expected that his dream should come half-true only to be shattered like the bubble it was. Because he had no delusions. He knew that he was only an employee, that a girl of her caste would ever regard him as the great regard those that serve them—kindly but impersonally—but for now he asked for nothing more. To him she was a creature past belief, a being from another world, and he was content to serve her humbly. He knew that he was of the forest and she of the cities of men, and soon they would take separate trails. His only comfort, heretofore, had been that his dream could not possibly come true, that the stuff of which it was made could never exist in the barren, dreadful, accursed place that was his home; but his nature was too big and true for any bitterness—to hate her because she was of a sphere so infinitely apart from his. But he wouldn't give her his love, he told himself, only his adoration. He wasn't going to be foolish enough to fall in love with a star! Yet he was swept with joy, for did not a whole month intervene before she would go back to her kind? Would she not be in his own keeping for a while, before she left him to his forests and his snows? Could he not see her across the fire, exult in her beauty, even aid her in finding her lost lover? His eye kindled and his face flushed, and he leaped to help her from the tonneau.

"I suppose you are Mr. Bronson?" she asked.

It was the same friendly but impersonal tone that he had expected, but he felt no resentment. His spirits had rallied promptly; and he was already partly adjusted to the fact that his joy in the journey would consist of the mere, unembellished fact of her presence.

"Yes. Of course this is Miss Tremont and Mr. Lounsbury. And just as soon as I pack the horses we'll be ready to start."

"I don't see why you haven't got 'em already packed," Lounsburg broke in. "If I ran my business in this shiftless way——"

Bill turned quickly toward him. He saw at once that other elements beside pleasure were to enter into this journey. The man spoke querulously, in a tone to which Bill was neither accustomed nor reconciled. If the girl had chosen to abuse him, he would have taken it meekly as his due; but it hadn't been his training to accept too many rude words from a fellow man. Yet, he remembered, he was the uncle of the girl's fiance, and that meant he was a privileged person. Besides, his temper had likely been severely strained by the rough road.

"Don't be ridiculous, Uncle," the girl reproved her. "How did he know exactly when we were going to arrive?" She tuned back to Bill. "Now tell us where we can get lunch. I'm starved."

"This country does—stimulate the appetite," Bill responded gravely. Then he showed them into the hotel.

He did a queer and sprightly little dance as he hurried toward the barn to get his horse.

III

Mr. Kenly Lounsbury, addressed affectionately as Uncle by his nephew's fiancee, was in ill humor as he devoured his lunch. In the first place he hadn't been getting the attention that he had expected. He was used to being treated with a certain deference, an abject humility was as fitting to a man of wealth and position. These northern people, however, didn't seem to know how to fawn. They were courteous enough, gave good service, but were inclined to speak to him as man to man,—an inference of equality that he regarded with great displeasure. His nephew's penniless fiancee, instead of himself, received all the attentions. Even the burly ruffian who was to guide them looked at her as if she were an angel.

The girl's voice rang over the table. "What's worrying you now, Uncle?" she asked.

Lounsbury looked up angrily. "What's worrying me now is—that I was such a fool as to come up into this country at the approach of winter. I don't like the place, and I don't like the people, and I abominate the service! Fancy eating on these great, thick plates for a month! I don't trust that big outlaw who is going to take us into the woods, either. Virginia, I have a distinct premonition of disaster."

"I rather think—that we'll be glad enough to have any china plates at all before we get back. And Mr. Bronson——"

"By the way, don't call him Mr. Bronson. You must learn to teach these beggars their places. Call him just Bronson. You'll get twice the service."

"Yes, Uncle. I was just going to say that he seemed very trustworthy. And it's hardly—well, the sporting thing to become discouraged so soon."

All through the journey so far this had been Lounsbury's one satisfaction—that he was doing the sporting thing. He knew perfectly that many of his business associates, many of his city's great whom he would have been flattered to know, came up into these gloomy forests every year in pursuit of big game; and he had heard of enduring hardships in a "sporting" way. But the term was already threadbare,—and the journey only commenced. The reason went back to the simple fact that Lounsbury was not a sportsman and never could be, that the red corpuscle content in his blood was wholly within the law.

Yes, Virginia felt at a disadvantage. This man's money had financed the trip; the fortune her own father had left had been almost depleted from reverses resulting from the war, and only the most meager sort of an income—according to her standards—was left. An orphan, she had always looked up to her fiance's uncle as her guardian and adviser; to see signs of discouragement in him now was a serious blow to her.

She had been somewhat surprised, in the first place, at his willingness to undertake the journey. He usually did not care to go so far from the White Way of his native city. The years had taught her to look for selfish motives behind his every action; certainly, she told herself, he was not of the unselfish mold of his nephew, Harold Lounsbury, the sweetheart of her youth, but in this particular case the expedition seemed entirely altruistic. She wondered now whether, after all her dreams, she would be forced to turn back before her purpose was accomplished.

They pushed back their chairs and started to leave the dining room. But it was not written that Kenly Lounsbury should reach the door without further annoyance. The waiter came shouting after them.

"Excuse me, Mister," he said kindly, holding out a quarter, "you left some money on the table."

Virginia laughed with delight and pocketed the coin herself, but Lounsbury's face became purple. These northern fools did not even know the meaning of a tip.

A few minutes later the pack train emerged through the little alley at the side of the hotel and halted in front. Bill Bronson led his own bay, Mulvaney, and the pack horses were tailed,—the halter rope of each tied to the tail of the horse in front, like elephants on parade. The idea was simply to keep them in formation till they were launched forth upon the trail. Vosper, the cook, led three horses with riding saddles at the end of the line.

Virginia had changed to outing clothes when she emerged into the street, leaving her tailored suit in charge of the innkeeper. Bill beamed at her appearance. "Miss Tremont," he began, doing the honors, "this is Mr. Vosper, who will cook the beans."

Both nodded, the girl smiling rather impersonally, and Bill noticed a horrifying omission. Vosper actually lacked the intelligence to remove his hat! The first instinct of the woodsman was to march toward him and inflict physical violence for such an insult to his queen, but he caught himself in time. Vosper, damaged in the encounter, would likely refuse to make the trip, upsetting all their plans.

But at that instant Bill forgot all about it. He suddenly noticed his employers' clothes. And he gazed in open-mouthed astonishment.

Both Virginia and Lounsbury were well gotten up according to their idea of proper garb for outdoor people. The man wore knickerbockers with gold stockings, riding habit and stock, the girl a beautifully tailored, fine-textured lady's riding habit. Both were immediately conscious of the guide's stare, and Virginia was aware of a distinct embarrassment. Something, somewhere, had evidently gone wrong. Lounsbury took refuge in hauteur.

"Well?" he demanded icily.

"Excuse me," Bill replied. "But those aren't—are those the clothes you're going to wear on the trip?"

"We're not parading for any one's benefit, I hope," was the sarcastic answer. "These are our rough clothes. Have you any objections to 'em?"

The guide's eyes puckered about the corners. "No, sir—not any objections—and they'd be all right for a day or two—until bad weather. But they are hardly the togs for the North. What you want is a good pair of slicker pants, both of you, and plenty of wool inside. Also a rubber coat of some kind, over sheepskin. In the first good snow those clothes would just melt away. If you'll come with me, I'll help you lay in some—and I'll pack 'em right on one of the horses for the time of need. There's a store adjoining the hotel——"

Virginia's confusion had departed, giving way to mirth, but Lounsbury was swollen and purple with wrath. "You—you——" he began. His face grew crafty. "I suppose you get a commission on every garment you sell."

Bill turned rather quiet eyes on the man; and for one little instant the craven that dwelt under Lounsbury's skin told him he had said one sentence too many; but he took heart when Bill looked away. "I'll keep what I've got on," he announced. "I'm not used to being told what kind of clothes to wear. Virginia, we'll start on."

"Wait just a minute, Uncle," the girl replied coolly. She turned to Bill. "You say these won't do at all?"

"They'll be torn off of you in the brush, Miss Tremont. And they won't turn the cold and the snow, either. This is the North, you know."

"Then I, for one, am going to take your advice. Please help me pick out the things, Bronson."

They left Lounsbury fuming in the road, and they had a rather enjoyable ten minutes searching through Fargo's stock for suitable garb. He selected a pair of slicker pants to wear over riding trousers, a coat lined with sheepskin, boy's size, and an awkwardly made but effective rubber coat for outside wear when the snow lay on the branches. It was not, Virginia decided, quite like choosing gowns at her modiste's; yet she was bright-eyed and laughing at the end.

Bill unhitched a pack, inserted the bundle of clothes, then bracing his boots against the horse's side pulled and tugged until the pack was right again. "You'll be glad you've got these things before the trip is done," he prophesied. He pointed to the North, an unlooked for sobriety upon his face.

Far against the horizon the clouds were beginning to spread, dark and gray and strange, over the northern hills. These were not the clouds of summer rains. They were the first banners of an enemy—a grim and dreadful foe who had his ramparts in the wilds, and his ambush laid for such feeble creatures as would dare to brave his fastness.

Bill Bronson gave his last directions, tightened the last cinch, and slipped his rifle into the saddle scabbard. "There's just one thing more—the choice of horses," he said. "Miss Tremont, of course you can take your pick." His tone was trustful. "Of course that will be all right with the other gentlemen—for you to have the best and safest horse."

Strangely, neither of the two men seemed to greet this suggestion with especial enthusiasm. "I want a good and a safe horse," Lounsbury said evenly. "Of course you must provide Miss Tremont with the same."

The woodsman sighed, ever so softly. He returned to Vosper, but if the latter had any suggestions to offer, the hard eyes of the guide caused him to think better of them. "I'm sorry to say that good horses—and safe horses—aren't to be found in the same animal up here," Bill explained. "If you have a good horse—one that'll take the mud and swim the river and stand up under the day's march—he'll likely have too much sense and spirit to be safe. He'll more than likely prance around when you get on and buck you off if he thinks he can get away with it. If you've got a safe horse, one that's scared to death of you, he won't be a good horse—a yellow cuss that has to be dragged through every mud-puddle. These are all Indian ponies, the best that can be got up here, but they're not old ladies' driving mares. Miss Tremont, the best horse in this bunch is my bay, Mulvaney—but nobody can ride him but me. I'd love to let you ride him if you could, and after a day or two I'd be willing for you to try it. But he doesn't know what fear is, and he doesn't know when to give up."

The man spoke soberly. It was wholly plain that Mulvaney was very dear to his heart. Men do not ride over the caribou trails without engendering strong feelings toward their mounts. Sometimes it is love. And not unusually it is detestation.

"That little black there—Buster, we call him—is the next best bet. It's an important choice you're making, and I'll tell you about him. He threw a man off once, and when I got him he was supposed to be the most vicious animal in the Northwest. The truth is, he hasn't got a vicious hair on his head. But he will try to get away, and he will dance a bit when you first get on and wheel in circles, and he's hard to catch in the morning. But he's sure-footed and courageous and strong; he'll take you up hills where the others can't go. The other two horses—Colt and Scotty—maybe seem safer, but they haven't got the life Buster has, nor the sense."

Bill reached to pet the black Buster, and the animal shied nervously. Virginia walked up to him and seized his bridle rein. In an instant she had vaulted into the saddle.

He wheeled and plunged at first, but soon she quieted him. In none too good humor, Lounsbury made his selection, and Vosper took what was left. Bill led his animal to Virginia's side.

"And are there any special instructions—before we start?" he asked.

"I can give you some special instructions," Lounsbury interrupted. "I didn't come up here to risk my life on a wild mustang in the mountains. I want you to pick easy trails—you can if you've just got energy enough to try."

A half-smile lingered a moment at the woodsman's lips. There was no choice of trails into Clearwater. He might have told Lounsbury that once they were out of sight of the roofs of the town they were venturing into the Unknown, a land where the caribou and the moose made trails through the forest but where men came not, a land of beasts rather than men, of primeval grandeur but savage might. "Have you any orders to give?" he asked the girl again.

"None. All I can do is tell you what I have already done—and then let you do the best you can. As you know, he left six years ago."

"I know. I saw him when he came through."

His eyes were fast upon her, and he saw her start. Her face seemed to flame. Stranger as he was to the hearts of women, Bill could understand. It was word of her lover, a message from the dead, and it moved her to the depths. But he couldn't understand the curious weight of depression that descended upon him.

"You did?" she answered quickly. "Was he all right—then?"

"All right, but that was just after he came to the North. I was camping on this side of Grizzly River, and he stayed to eat with me. He said his name was Lounsbury. I've never heard of him since."

The surface lights died in her eyes. "Then that doesn't help us much, except to know that he got that far, at least," she went on. "I'll tell you the whole thing, simply; maybe it will help you in deciding where to look for him. He was twenty-seven then—and he'd spent the fortune his father left him. He had to have more, and he came up here—to look for gold.

"Like many other men—before him," Bill interrupted gravely.

"He had some sort of definite plan—a vacation place to go—but he never told me what it was. He told me he was going into Clearwater. He had to have money—he was in debt and besides, he was engaged to marry me. The last word I ever heard of him was a note he wrote from Bradleyburg. I was just a girl then—and I've waited ever since. His friends, his aunt, sometimes even his uncle thought that he was dead. I've always felt, just as sure as I am here, that he was still alive—and in some trouble—and he couldn't come back. Mr. Lounsbury has hired detectives, but none of them have ever made a real search. He's financing this trip now—I've been able to persuade him at last to make one great try to find him. What's what we've hired you to do."

"It's a big order," Bill spoke softly. "There's just one thing we can do—to look into the country where he's gone and try to trace him. Every man who goes through Clearwater leaves his mark—there's not so many of them that their trails get crossed. My plan would be to watch for the camps he made—there'd be some sign of 'em yet—the trees he cut and the trails he blazed—and trace him clear to the Valley of the Yuga."

"And what is there?"

Bill's ears, trained to the silences of the woodland, caught the almost imperceptible tremor in her voice. "There are a few Indians who have their tents there—trappers and fishers—and I know how to get things out of 'em. If he's passed that way, they'd know about it. If he hasn't—something has happened to him—somewhere between here and there. He couldn't have remained out of sight so long."

"I want you to make every try. I can't bear—to give up."

Even this woodsman, knowing men to the heart but stranger to the world of women, knew that she meant what she said. She wasn't of the mold that gives up quickly. For all her cool exterior, her impersonal voice, the grace and breeding that went clear to her finger tips, he had some measure of understanding of an ardor and an intensity that might have been native to his own wilderness. Not often has girlhood love stood such a test as this,—six years of silence. He could not doubt its reality; no small or half-felt emotion could have propelled her forth into these desolate wastes. Her love had gone deep and it lived.

He answered very gravely and humbly, perhaps a even a little sadly: "I'll do everything I can to find him for you, Miss. I'll get your sweetheart for you if it can be done."

To Vosper and Lounsbury the two little sentences were just the assurances of a hired employee, half-felt and forgotten soon. But Virginia heard more clearly. She had a vague feeling that she was a witness to a vow. It seemed to her that there was the fire of a zealot in his dark eyes, and by token of some mystery she did not understand, this strong man had seen fit to give her his oath. She only knew that he spoke true, that by a secret law that only strong men know he would be as faithful to this promise as if he had given bond.

IV

It was one of the decrees of the forest gods that no human being shall ride for five miles through the spruce forests of the Selkirks and fail to glean at least some slight degree of wilderness knowledge. Both Virginia and Lounsbury had been on horseback before. Virginia had ridden in the parks of her native city: long ago and far away a barefoot, ragged boy—much to be preferred to the smug and petulant man who now tried to hard to forget those humble days—had bestrode an old plow horse nightly on the way to a watering trough. But this riding had qualities all its own. There was no open road winding before them. Nor was there any trail,—in general or particular.

It was true that the moose had passed that way, leaving their great footprints in the dying grass. They had chosen the easiest pathway over the hills, and Bill was enough of a woodsman to follow where they led. Traversing the Clearwater was simply a matter of knowing the country and going in a general direction. Almost at once the evergreen thickets closed around them.

Virginia found that safety depended upon constant watchfulness. The evergreen branches struck cruel blows at her face, the spruce needles cut like knives. Sometimes the horse in front would bend down a young tree, permitting it to whip back with a deadly blow; she had to watch her knees in the narrow passages between the trunks; and the vines reached and caught at her. Sometimes the long-hanging limbs of the young trees made an impassable barrier, and more than once she was nearly dragged from the saddle. Shortly they came to the first fallen log.

Mulvaney, Bill's horse, took it lightly; and the man turned to watch the girl. Her horse stepped gingerly, making it without trouble. Then the guide saw fit to give her a little good advice.

"Kick Buster in the ribs just before you come to a log," he said. "He'll jump 'em then. It's a whole lot safer—if he tries to step over 'em he's apt to get his foot caught and give you a bad fall."

Virginia looked up coldly. She wasn't accustomed to being spoken to in quite this tone of voice, particularly by an employee. But she saw his sober eyes and immediately forgot her resentment. And she found an actual delight in bounding over the next obstruction.

"And there's one more thing," the guide went on. "I've ridden plenty of horses, and I've found there's only one way to handle 'em. I'm going to try a new way to-day, because there's a lady in the party. But if I'm tried too heavy——"

"Go ahead," the girl replied, smiling. "I suppose you mean—to swear."

"Not just to swear. Call names. These horses won't think we're present if we don't swear at 'em. And the only name they know refers to them is one that casts slurs upon their ancestry, but I'll try to avoid it to-day. I suppose I can make a roaring sound that sounds enough like it to fool the horses."

Virginia was naturally alert and quick-witted, and she needed both of these traits now. The guide helped her all he could, warning her of approaching thickets; yet the first hour was a grim initiation to the woods. Lounsbury was having even a more difficult time. He was afraid of his horse, to start with—and this is never an auspicious beginning. A frightened rider means a nervous, excited animal—and nervousness and excitement are unhealthy qualities in the Selkirks. Neither put trust in the other, and Lounsbury's cruel, lashing blows with the long bridle ends only made matters worse. The horse leaped and plunged, slipped badly on the hills, progressed awkwardly over the fallen logs, and flew into wild panic when he came to the quagmires. The man's temper fell far below the danger point in the first hour, and he was savage and desperate before half of the afternoon's ride was done.

The thickets were merciless. They knew him, those silent evergreens: they gave no welcome to his breed; and it seemed to him they found a hundred ways to plague him. Their needles scratched his face, their branches whipped into his eyes, the limbs dealt cruel blows at his side and the tree trunks wrenched at his knees. Worse still, they soon came to a hill that Bill advised they take on foot.

"Not me," Lounsbury shrilled. "I'll swear I won't walk any hills. You've provided a vicious horse for me, and I'm going to ride him up if it kills him. I didn't come out here to break my wind on mountains—and this horse needs the devil taken out of him, anyway."

It was in Virginia's mind that none of the emphatic but genial oaths that Bill had let slip from time to time grated on her half so much as this frenzied complaint of her companion, but she kept her thoughts to herself. But Bill turned with something dangerously like a smile.

"Suit yourself, of course," he replied. "I'm not asking you to walk up to spare your horse. Only, from time to time a horse makes a misstep on this hill—just one little slip—and spins down in backward somersets a thousand feet. If you want to try it, of course it's all right with me."

He swung off his horse, took the bridle reins of both his own animal and Virginia's, and started the long climb. And it was to be noticed that at the first steep pitch Lounsbury found that he was tired of riding and followed after meekly, but with wretched spirit.

They stopped often to rest; and from the heights Virginia got her first real glimpse of Clearwater. Her first impression was simply vast and unmeasured amazement at the dimensions of the land. As far as she could see lay valley after valley, range upon range, great forests of spruce alternating with open glades, dim unnamed lakes glinting pale blue in the afternoon sun, whole valleys where the foot of white man had never trod. She felt somewhat awed, scarcely knowing why.

Rivers gleamed, marshes lay yellow and somber in the sun, the dark forests stretched until the eyes tired; but nowhere were there any homes, any villages or pastures, not a blaze upon a tree, not the smoke of a camp fire. Bradleyburg was already obliterated and lost in the depths of the woodland. The silence was incredible,—as vast and infinite as the wilderness itself. It startled her a little, when they paused in their climb, to hear the pronounced tick of her wrist watch, even the whisper of her own breath. It was as if she had gone to an enchanted land, a place that lay in a great sleep that began in the world's young days, and from which the last reaches of time it could never waken.

Bill, standing just above her, pointed to a dash of golden across the canyon. "That's quivering asp," he told her, "turned by the frost. It seems good to see a bit of color in this world of dark woods. It's just like a flash of sunshine in a storm."

She listened with some surprise. The same detail had held her gaze, the same thought—almost the same simile—had come into her mind; but she had hardly expected to find a love of the beautiful in this bronzed forester. In fact, she found that a number of her preconceived ideas were being turned topsy-turvy.

Heretofore, it seemed to her, her thought had always dwelt on the superficialities rather than the realities of life. Her income was pitifully small according to her standards, yet she had never had to consider the question of food and shelter. She had known social success, love of beauty and of art, gayety and luxury; she had had petty discouragements and triumphs, worries and fears, but of the simple and primitive basis of things she took no cognizance. She had never dealt with essentials. They had always seemed outside her life.

Virginia had never lived in the shadow of Fear,—that greatest and most potent of realities. In truth she didn't know the meaning of the word. She had been afraid in her bed at night, she had been apprehensive of a block's walk in the twilight, but Fear—in its true sense—was an alien and a stranger. She had never met him in the waste places, seen him skulking on her trail through the winter snows, listened to his voice in the wind's wail. She didn't know the fear of which the coyotes sang from this hill, the blind and groping dread of an immutable destiny, the ghastly realization of impotence against a cruel and omnipotent fate. She hadn't ever learned about it. Living a protected life she didn't know that it existed. Food and shelter and warmth and safety had always seemed her birthright; about her house marched the officers of the law protecting her from evildoers; she lived in sight of great hospitals that would open their doors to the sick and injured and of charitable institutions that would clothe and feed the needy: thus the world had kept its bitter truths from her. But she was beginning to learn them now. She was having her first glimpse of life, life stripped of all delusion, stark and naked, the relentless reality that it was.

Fear was no stranger to these forests. Its presence, in every turn of the trail, filled her with awe. A single misstep, a little instant of hesitation in a crisis, might precipitate her a thousand feet down the canyon to her death. Dead trees swayed, threatening to fall; snow slides roared and rumbled on the far steeps; the quagmire sucked with greedy lips, the trail wandered dimly,—as if it were trying to decoy her away into the fastnesses where the wilderness might claim her. No one had to tell her how easy it would be to lose the trail, never to find it again. The forests were endless; there were none to hear a wanderer's cry for help. Wet matches, an accident to the food supplies, a few nights without shelter in the dismal forest,—any of these might spell complete and irrevocable disaster.

What had she known of Death? It was a thing to claim old people, sometimes to take even her young friends from their games among the flowers, but never had it been an acquaintance to hers. It was as wholly apart from her as the beings of another planet. But here she had come to the home of Death,—cold and fearful obliteration dwelling in every thicket. She found herself wondering about it, now, and dreading it with a new dread that she had never dreamed of before. The only real emotions she had ever known were her love for Harold Lounsbury and her grief at his absence: in these autumn woods she might easily learn all the others. She had never known true loneliness; here, except for her fiance's uncle with whom she had never felt on common ground and two paid employees—the latter, she told herself, did not count—she was as much alone as if she had been cast upon an uninhabited sphere. Already she knew something of the great malevolence that is the eternal tone of the wilderness, the lurking peril that is the North.

This new view influenced her attitude toward Bill. At first she had felt no interest in him whatever. Of a class that does not enter into a basis of equality with personal employees, to her he had seemed in the same category with a new house servant or chauffeur. He had been hired to do her service; he was either a bad servant or a good one, and from her he would receive kindness and patronage, but never real feeling or friendship, never more than an impersonal interest. But now that she knew something of the real nature of this expedition, affairs had taken a new turn. She suddenly realized that her whole happiness, her comfort, perhaps even life itself depended upon him. He was their protector, their source of supplies, their refuge and their strength as well.

The change did not mean that she was willing to enter upon a basis of comradeship with him—yet. But she did find a singular satisfaction in the mere fact of his presence. Here was one who could build a fire in the snow if need be, whose strong arms could cut fuel, who could manage the horses and bring them safe to the journey's end. His rifle swung in his saddle scabbard, his pistol belt encircled his waist; he knew how to adjust the packs, to peg the tent fast in a storm, to find bread and meat in the wilderness. She began to notice his lithe, strong figure as he sat in his saddle, the ease with which he controlled his horse and avoided the pitfalls in the trail. When the moose tracks were too dim for her eyes to see, he followed them with ease. When the horses bolted from some unfamiliar smell in the thicket, he was quick to round them up. The animals were swift in obedience when he spoke to them, but they were only terrified by Lounsbury's shrill shouts. He was cool of nerve, self-possessed, wholly self-reliant. She listened with an eager gladness to his soft whistling: simple classics that she herself loved but which came strangely from the lips of this son of the forest.

His eyes were bright and music was in his heart,—in spite of the dark menace of these northern woodlands. He was not afraid: rather he seemed to be getting a keen enjoyment out of the afternoon's ride. And the great truth suddenly came to her that in his strength lay hers, that she had entrusted her welfare to him and for the present, at least, it was secure. And she put her own cares away.

She would not have admitted that she had simply followed the example of the uncounted millions of women that had preceded her through the long reaches of the centuries that had found strength and peace in the shelter of a strong man's arm. She only knew that her mind no longer dwelt on danger, but it had marvelously opened to receive the image of the grim but ineffable beauty of this wild land through which she rode. She felt secure, and she began to have an intangible but ever-increasing delight in the wonderland about her.

Her first impression of the wilderness was that of a far-stretching desert, forgotten and desolate and unpeopled as the fiery stars. Likewise this was Lounsbury's view, as in the case of every tenderfoot who had preceded him, but Lounsbury would likely grow old and perish without discovering his mistake. Clear eyes are needed to read the secrets of the wild: the dark glass through which he gazed at the world had never cleared. Vosper had lived months and years in the North, but he had only hatred in his heart of these waste places and thus received no glory from them. But Virginia soon found out the truth.

"There's an old bull been along here not twenty minutes ago," Bill told her after they reached the hilltop. "The mud hasn't begun to dry in his tracks."

"An old bull?" she repeated. "Do cattle run here——?"

"Good Lord, there isn't a cow this side of the shipping point. I mean a bull moose. And he's a lunker, too. Maybe we'll catch a glimpse of him."

In her time she had talked enough to big-game hunters to have considerable respect for the moose, the largest of all deer tribe, and she thrilled a little at the thought that she was in his own range. She didn't get a sight of the great creature, but she began to pay more attention to the trail. Seeing her interest the guide began to read to her the message in the tracks,—how here a pair of otters had raced along in the dawn, stopping at intervals to slide; how a cow caribou and calf had preceded them at midday; how a coyote had come skulking the previous night. Beside a marsh he showed her the grim evidence of a wilderness tragedy,—the skeleton and feathers of a goose that a stalking wolf had taken by surprise. And once he showed her a great tear in the bark of a tree, nearly as high as she could reach on horseback.

"What is it?" she inquired.

"That's the sign that the lord of the manor has been along. Miss Tremont, did you ever hear of an animal called the grizzly bear?"

"Good heavens! A bear couldn't reach that high——"

"Couldn't? Some of these bears could scoop the man out of the moon!"

He showed her gray, crinkling hairs that had caught in the bark, explaining that mysterious wilderness custom of the grizzly of measuring his length on the tree trunks and leaving a mark, as high as he can bite, for all to see. According to many naturalists any bear that cannot bite an equal height immediately seeks a new range, leaving the district to the larger bear. But Bill confessed that he took the legend with a grain of salt. "I've seen too many bear families running around the woods together," he explained. "Pa bears, ma bears, and baby bears, all different sizes."

Virginia noticed that he spoke with great respect for that huge forest king, the grizzly; but she needn't have wondered. The great creature was worthy of it.

Perhaps the most intelligent wild animal that roams the American continent—on the same intellectual plane with the dog and elephant—he was also the most terrible. The truth has been almost established among the big-game hunters that wild animals, with few exceptions, even when wounded practically never charge or attack the hunter. But his imperial majesty, the grizzly, was first on the list of exceptions. He couldn't be entirely trusted. His terrible strength, his ferocity, most of all his courage won him a wide berth through this mountain land.

She began to catch glimpses of bird life,—saucy jays and glorious-colored magpies and grossbeaks. She cried out in delight when a pine squirrel scampered up a little tree just over her head, pausing to look down at these strange forms that had disturbed the cathedral silence of the tree aisles. And all at once Bill drew up his horses.

"Miss Tremont, do you like chicken?" he asked.

She was somewhat startled by the abrupt question, and her horse nosed Mulvaney's flanks before she drew him to a halt. It occurred to her that such a query scarcely came under the title of small talk, and she found some difficulty in shaping her answer. "Why yes," she agreed. "I'm very fond of chicken."

"It's pretty good, boiled with rice," the man went on gravely. "We'll have some for supper."

Virginia stared at him in blank amazement as he slipped down from the saddle and drew his automatic, small-calibered pistol from the holster. He stole forward into the flaking shadows of late afternoon, and at once the brush obscured him. Then he shot,—four times in succession.

She was wholly unable to guess what manner of target he had. Chickens were one thing that she found it hard to believe ranged in these northern woods. She felt certain that he had missed the first three shots, but she waited with considerable interest the result of the fourth. And soon he pushed through the thickets to her side.

In his hand he held a queer, gray, shapeless bundle that at first she could not recognize. Then she saw that they were gray grouse, almost the color of a Plymouth Rock hen, and there was not one, but four! He started to stuff them into his saddlebag. "Pretty lucky that time," he explained. "Got 'em through the neck. That leaves the meat clean——"

He seemed wholly matter-of-fact about the incident, but Virginia continued to stare at him in open-mouthed astonishment. "Four of them?" she cried.

"One apiece. There was five in the flock, but the other looked like a tough old hen. But don't look so amazed, Miss Tremont. They are fool hens—Franklin's grouse—and that means that they'll set all day and let you pepper at 'em. And with a little practice it's easy to get them in the neck pretty near every time."

He swung into the saddle, and they started forth upon the last hour of their day's journey. And Vosper made the only remark worth recording.

"When I was in Saskatchewan last year," he began in a thin, far-carrying voice, "I must 'a shot a thousand grouse and didn't miss one."

Virginia felt that she'd like to go back and shake him.

V

Now that they were upon the last hour of the day's ride Virginia began to be aware of the full measure of her fatigue. She was strained and tired from the saddle, her knees ached, her face burned from the scratch of the spruce needles. Ever she found it more difficult to dodge the stinging blows of the boughs, she was less careful in the control of her horse. From sheer exhaustion Lounsbury had stopped his complaints.

The first grayness of twilight had come, like mist, over the distant hills; but the peaks were still bathed in the sunset's glow. She began to have a real and overwhelming longing for camp and rest. And in the midst of her dejection the dark man in front threw her a smile.

"It goes hard at first," he told her gently. "But we'll soon be in camp—with a good fire. You'll feel better right away."

It had not been Virginia's way—or the way of Virginia's class—to depend upon their menials for encouragement; but, strangely, the girl felt only grateful.

She was hungry, chilled through by the icy breath of the falling night, half-sick with fatigue. The last mile seemed endless. And she was almost too tired to drag herself off the horse when they came to camp.

Back among the dark spruce, by the edge of a fast-flowing trout stream, Bill had built a cabin,—one of the camps of his trap line. It was only a hut, perhaps ten feet long by eight wide; it had no floor and but slabs for a roof, no window and no paneled interior; only the great logs, lifted one upon another; yet no luxurious hotel that had been her lodging for the night on previous journeys had ever seemed to her such a haven; none had ever been such a comfort to her tired spirit. Her heart flooded with joy at the sight of it. Bill smiled and held the door open wide.

"Sit down on that busted old chair," he advised. "I'll have a fire for you in a minute."

A rusted camp stove had been erected in the cabin and she watched, fascinated, his quick actions as he built a fire. With astonishingly few strokes he cut down a pitch-laden spruce, trimmed the branches, and soon came staggering into camp with a four-foot length of the trunk across his brawny back, grunting like a buffalo the while. This he split and cut into lengths suitable for the stove. With his hunting knife he cut curling shavings, and in a moment a delicious warmth began to flood the cabin. The girl's body welcomed it, it stole into her tissues and buoyed up her spirits. She opened her hands to it as to a beloved friend.

It was only warmth,—the exhalation from a rusted stove in a crudely constructed cabin. Yet to Virginia it was dear beyond all naming. In one little day on that dreadful trail she had, in some measure at least, got down to essentials; the ancient love of the fire, implanted deeply in the germ plasm, was wakened and recalled. It was not a love that she had to learn. The warp and woof of her being was impregnated with it; only in her years of ease she had forgotten what an ancient friend and comfort it was.

In her past life Virginia had never known the real meaning of hunger. Her meals were inadvertent; she had them more from a matter of habit than a realization of bodily craving. But curiously, for the last hour her thought had dwelt on food,—the simple, material substance with no adornment. The dainty salads and ices and relishes that had been her greatest delight in her city home hadn't even come into her mind, but she did remember, with unlooked-for fondness, potatoes and meat. And now she watched Vosper's supper preparations with an eagerness never known before.

Although Vosper had been hired for cook, Virginia noticed that Bill kept a watchful eye over the preparation of the food; and she felt distinctly grateful. She saw the grouse in the process of cleaning, and the red stains on Vosper's hands did not repel her at all. She beheld the smooth cascade of the rice as Bill poured it into the boiling water, her own hand opened a can of dehydrated vegetables that was to give flavor to the dish. She gave no particular thought to the fact that the hour was revealing her not as an exquisite creature of a higher plane, but simply a human animal with an empty stomach. If the thought did come to her she didn't care. She only knew she was hungry,—hungry as she had never dreamed she could be in all her days.

The white flesh of the grouse was put with the rice, one bird after another, until it seemed impossible that four human beings could consume them all. In went the seasoning, spaghetti and the vegetables, and not even Lounsbury railed at the little handful of ashes that floated on top the mixture. And Virginia exulted from head to toes when Bill passed the tin plates.

It was well for Virginia's peace of mind that no one told her how much she ate. In her particular set it wasn't a mark of breeding to eat too heartily; and an entire grouse, at least two cups of the stew and several inch-thick slices of bread with marmalade would have been considered a generous meal even for a harvest-hand.

As soon as the meal was done she felt ready for bed. Bill ventured into the darkness with an ax over his shoulder, but not until his return did she understand his mission. His arms were heaped with fragrant spruce boughs. These he laid on the cot in the cabin, spreading the blankets he had provided for her over them. He placed the pillow and turned down the blanket corners.

"Any time you like," he told her gently. "Vosper is putting up the linen tent for we three men, and I'll build a fire in front of it to keep us warm while we smoke. You must be tired."

She smiled wanly. "I am tired, Bronson," she confessed. "And thank you, very much."

She didn't notice the wave of color that flowed into his bronzed cheeks and the strange, jubilant light in his eyes. She only knew that she was warm and full-fed, and the wind would bluster and threaten around her cabin walls in vain.

For a long hour after Virginia was asleep Bill sat by the fireside alone, his pipe glowing at his lips. Lounsbury had gone to his blankets, Vosper was splitting wood for the morning's fire. As often, late at night, he was held and intrigued by the mystery about him,—the little, rustling, whispered sounds of living things in the thicket, the silence and the darkness and the savagery.

He knew perfectly the tone and spirit of these waste places: their might, their malevolence, their sadness, their eternal beauty. He hated them and yet he loved them, too. He had felt their hospitality, yet he knew that often they rose in the still night and slew their guests. They crushed the weak, but they lent their own strength to the strong. And Bill felt that he was face to face with them as never before.

He was going to plumb their secret places,—not only for the missing man, but for the lost mine he had sought so long. He must not only fight his own battles, but he had in his charge a helpless, tender thing of whom his body must be a shield. Never, it seemed to him, had he met the wilderness night in just this mood,—threatening, vaguely sinister, tremulous and throbbing with impending drama.

"You've got something planned for me, haven't you?" he asked his forest gods. "You've got your trap all set, and you're going to test me as never before. And Heaven give me strength to meet that test!"

At that instant he started and looked up. The stars were obscured, the firelight died swiftly in unfathomable darkness, the tops of the spruce were lost in gloom. A flake of wet snow had fallen and struck his hand.

All night long the storm raged over the spruce forest; lashing rain that beat and roared on the cabin roof, then the unutterable silence of falling snow. The camp fire hissed and went out, the tent sagged with the load, the horses were wet and miserable in the glade below. Virginia slept fitfully, waking often to listen to the clamor of the storm, then falling into troubled dreams. Bill lay at the tent mouth for long hours, staring into the darkness.

In the morning the face of the wilderness was changed. Every bough, every spruce needle, every little grass blade had its load of snow. The streams were higher, a cold and terrible beauty dwelt in the forest. The sky was still full of snow, dark flakes against the gray sky, and the clouds were sullen and heavy. Bill rose before daylight to build the fire at the tent mouth.

This was no work for tenderfeet, striking a blaze in the snow-covered grass. But Bill knew the exact course to pursue. He knew just how to lay his kindling, to protect the blaze from the wind, to thrust a fragment of burning candle under the shavings. Soon the blaze was dancing feebly in the darkness. He piled on fuel, and with Vosper's aid started breakfast preparations.

When the meal was nearly ready he knocked at the cabin door. "Yes?" Virginia called.

Bill hesitated and stammered. He didn't exactly know whether or not he was stepping outside the bounds of propriety. "Would you like to have me come in and build a fire for you to dress by?" he asked.

Virginia considered. Few were the eyes, in her short days, that had beheld her in bed; but to save her she could not think of a reason why this kind offer should not be accepted. She was down to the realities; besides, the room was disagreeably chilly. She snuggled down and drew the blankets about her throat.

"Come ahead," she invited.

With scarcely a glance at her he entered and built a fire, and a few minutes later he brought in her steaming breakfast. The door was open then, and she saw the snow without.

Her face was a little pale and her voice was strained when she spoke again. "What does it mean?" she asked.

"What? The snow?"

"Yes. Does it mean that winter has come?"

"No. When winter does come, there never is any question about it—and it really isn't due for another month. If I thought it was real winter I'd advise going back. But I think it's just an early snowfall—to melt away the first warm day."

"But isn't there danger—that by going farther we'd be snowed in?"

"Even if winter should close down, and we find the snow deepening to the danger point, it wouldn't be too late to turn back then. Of course we've got to keep watch. A week or so of steady snow might make these mountains wholly impassable—the soft, wet snow of the Selkirks can't even be manipulated with snowshoes to any advantage. We'd simply have to wait till the snow packed—which might not be for months. But we can go on a few days, at least, and ride safely back through two feet of snow or more. Of course—it depends on how badly you want to go on."

"I want to go—more than anything in the world."

"Then we will go on. I've already sent Vosper to get the horses."

He turned to his work. Lounsbury, his mood still unassuaged, called from his bed. "Bring me my breakfast here, Bronson," he commanded. "Lord, I've had a rotten night. This bed was like stones. I can't compliment you on your accommodations."

Bill brought him his breakfast, quietly and gravely. "They're not my accommodations," Bill replied. "They're God Almighty's. And I made it just as comfortable for you as I can."

"I think you could have provided folding cots, anyway. I've a great mind to turn back." He looked into the snow-filled sky. "By George, I will turn back. There's no sense in going any farther in this wild goose chase. It's a death trip, that's all it is—going out in this snow. Tell Miss Tremont that we're starting back."

Bill stood straight and tall. "I've already talked that over with Miss Tremont," he answered quietly. "She has given the order to go on."

The fleshy sacks under Lounsbury's eyes swelled with wrath. "She has, has she? I think she's already told you that I'm financing this trip, not her, and I've told you so too. I'm doing the hiring and giving the orders."

"In that case, it's your privilege to order me to turn back, and of course I will obey. You will owe me, however, for the full thirty days."

For a moment a spectator would have eyed Lounsbury with apprehension; to all appearances he had swollen past the danger mark and was about to explode. "You'd hold me up, would you—you—you—I'd like to see you get it."

Bill eyed him long and grimly. There was a miniature flake of fire in each of his dark eyes and a curious little quiver, vaguely ominous, in his muscles. There was also a grim determination in the set of his features. "I'd get it all right," he assured him. Then his voice changed, friendly and soft again. "But you'd better talk it over with Miss Tremont, Mr. Lounsbury. The snow is likely only temporary. I'll see that you turn back before it gets too deep for safety."

They folded the tent and packed the horses, and shortly after eight Bill led the way deeper into the forest. The snow-swept trees, the white glades between, the long line of pack horses following in the wake of the impassive form of Bill made a picture that Virginia could never forget. And ever the snow sifted down upon them, ever heavier on the branches, ever deeper on the trail.

If the record of the wild things had been clear in yesterday's mud it was an open book to-day. Everywhere the trail was criss-crossed with tracks. In that first mile she saw signs of almost every kind of living creature that dwelt in this northern realm. Besides those of the larger mammals, such as bear and moose and caribou, she saw the tracks of those two savage hunters, the wolverine and lynx. The latter is nothing more nor less than an overgrown tomcat, except for a decorative tuft at his ears, and like all his brethren soft as flower petals in his step; but because he mews unpleasantly on the trail he has a worse reputation than he deserves. But not so with the wolverine. Many unkind remarks have been addressed to him, but no words have ever been invented—even the marvelous combinations of expletives known to the trapper—properly to describe him. The little people of the forest—the birds in the shrubbery and the squirrels in the trees and the little digging rodents in the ground—fear him and hate him for his stealth and his cunning. Even the cow caribou, remembering his way of leaping suddenly from ambush upon her calf, dreads him for his ferocity and his strength; and the trapper, finding his bait stolen from every trap on his line, calls down curses upon his head. But for all this unpopularity he continues to prosper and increase.

Virginia saw where a marten and a squirrel had come to death grips in the snow: the tracks and an ominous red stain told the story plainly. The squirrel had attempted to seek safety in flight, but the marten was even swifter in the tree limbs than the squirrel himself. The little animal had made a flying leap to the ground,—a small part of a second too late. The marten, Bill explained, were no longer numerous. Fur buyers all over the world were paying many times their weight in gold for the glossy skins.

"Marten can catch squirrel, but fisher can catch marten," is an old saying among the trappers; and as they rode Bill told her some of his adventures with these latter, beautiful fur bearers. The fisher, it seemed, hunted every kind of living creature that he could master except fish. When the names of the animals were passed around, Bill said, the otter and the fisher got their slips mixed, and the misnomer had followed them through the centuries. He showed her the tracks of the ermine and, now that they were reaching the high altitudes, the trail of the ptarmigan in the snow. Mink, fox, and coyote had hunted each other gayly through the drifts, and all three had hunted the snowshoe rabbit and field mouse; a half-blind gopher had emerged from his den to view the morning and had ducked quickly back at the sight of the snow; an owl had snatched a Canada jay from her perch and had left a few clotted feathers when the daylight had driven him from his feast.

The rigors of the day's travel were constantly increasing. The wet snow steaming on their sides sapped the vitality of the horses; to keep them at a fair pace required a constant stream of nervous energy on the part of their riders. Virginia found it almost impossible to dodge the snow-laden branches. They would slap snow into her face, down her neck and into her sleeves: it sifted into her eyes and hair and chilled her hands until they ached. The waterproof garments that she wore were priceless after the first mile.

Lounsbury had an even more trying time. His clothes soaked through at once, and the piercing, biting cold of the northern fall went into him. He was drenched, shivering, incoherent with wrath when they stopped for noon. He was not enough of a sportsman to take the consequences of his arrogance in good spirit. He didn't know the meaning of that ancient law,—that men must take the responsibility of their own deeds and with good spirit pay for their mistakes. He didn't know how to smile at the difficulties that confronted him. That ancient code of self-mastery, of taking the bitter medicine of life without complaint clear to the instant of death was far beyond his grasp. "You've made everything just as hard for us as you could," he stormed at Bill. "If I ever get back alive I'll get your guide's license snatched away from you if I never do another thing. You don't know how to guide or pick a trail. You brought us out here to bleed us. And you'll pay for it when I get back."

Bill scarcely seemed to hear. He went on with his work, but when the simple meal was over and the packing half done, he made his answer. He drew a cloth sack from one of the packs, swung it on his shoulder, and stepped over to Lounsbury's side.

"There's a couple of things I want to tell you," he began. He spoke in a quiet voice, so that Virginia could not hear.

Lounsbury looked up with a scowl. "I don't know that I want to hear them."

"I know you don't want to hear 'em, but you are going to hear 'em just the same. I want to tell you that first I'm doing everything any human being can to make you more comfortable. You can't take Morris chairs along on a pack train. You can't take electric stoves, and you can't boss the weather. It's your own fault you didn't provide yourself with proper clothes. And I'm tired of hearing you yelp."

Lounsbury tried to find some crushing remark in reply. He only sputtered.

"I can only stand so much, and then it makes me nervous," the guide went on, in a matter-of-fact tone. "I don't care what you do when you get back to town. I just don't want you pestering me any more with your complaints. I've stood a lot for Miss Tremont's sake—she probably wouldn't like to see anything happen to you. But just a few more little remarks like you made before lunch, and you're apt to find yourself standing in mud up to your knees in one of these mud holes—wrong end up! And that wouldn't be becoming at all for an American millionaire."

Lounsbury opened his mouth several times. The same number of times he shut it again. "I see," he said at last, clearly.

"Good. And here's some clothes of mine. They're not handsome, and they'll not fit, but they'll keep you dry."

He dumped the larger portion of his own waterproofs on the ground at Lounsbury's feet.

VI

In the two days that followed, the pack train crossed the divide into Clearwater. From now on the little rivers, gathering headway as they coursed down into the ravines, flowed into the Grizzly and from thence into the great Yuga, far below. The party had crossed ridge on ridge, hill on hill that were a bewilderment to Virginia; they had gained the high places where the marmots whistled shrill and clear at the mouth of their rocky burrows and the caribou paced, white manes gleaming, in the snow; they had seen a grizzly on the far-away slide rock; they had lost their way and found it again; walked abrupt hillsides where the horses could scarcely carry their packs, descended into mysterious, still gullies, forded creeks and picked their way through treacherous marshes; and made their noon camp on the very summit of a high ridge. The snow was deeper here—nearly eighteen inches—but the gray clouds were breaking apart in the sky. Apparently the storm was over, for the time being at least.

They had trouble with slipping packs on the steep pitches of the morning's march and made slow progress. Bill glanced at his watch with displeasure. He rushed through the noon meal and cut their usual rest short by a full half-hour.

"We're behind schedule," he explained, "and we've got a bad half-day before us. I was counting on making Gray Lake cabin to-night, and we've got to hurry to do it."

"That is beyond Grizzly River," Lounsbury remarked.

Bill turned in some wonder. He hadn't know that Lounsbury was so well acquainted with the topography of the region. Stranger still, the man started at his glance, flushing nervously. "I heard some one say that Gray Lake was beyond Grizzly River," he explained lamely. "By all means make it if we can."

There was no possible deduction to make from the incident, so Bill turned his thought to other matters. "It's almost necessary—that we make it," he said. "There's no horse feed nor decent camp site between here and there. Besides, I don't like to put Miss Tremont up in a tent to-night. The best cabin in my whole string is at Gray Lake—a really snug little place, with a floor and a stove. Keep most of my trapping supplies there. If we can make the ford by dark, we'll run in there easy, it's only a mile or so over a well-run moose trail."

"And you think we're entirely safe in going on?" the girl asked.

"As far as I can see. I'm a little bit worried about Grizzly River—I'm afraid it's up pretty high—but I'll try it first and see if it's safe to ford. The snow-storm has quit—I think we'll have nice weather in a few days. If it should begin again we could turn back and make it through before the drifts got too deep to cross—that is, if we didn't delay. And besides, when we get across Grizzly River we're in favorable country for your search. We can put up at the cabin a few days and make a thorough hunt for any sign of the missing man. If the weather will permit—and I believe it will—we can follow down the river to the Yuga and make inquiries of the Indians."

His words heartened the party. Even Lounsbury had begun to show some eagerness; Vosper, flinching before the hard work of the trail, was jubilant at the thought of a few days' rest. They pushed on into the snow-swept waste.

The clouds knit again overhead, but as yet the air was clear of snow. The temperature, however, seemed steadily falling. The breath of the horses was a steam cloud; the potholes in the marsh were gray and lifeless with ice. And it seemed to Virginia that the wild things that they passed were curiously restless and uneasy; the jays flew from tree to tree with raucous cries, the waterfowl circled endlessly over the gray lakes.

This impression grew more vivid as the hours passed; and there was an elusive but sinister significance about it that engrossed her, but which she couldn't name or understand. She didn't mention the matter to Bill. She couldn't have told why, for the plain reason that in her simplicity she was not aware of her own virtues. A sportswoman to the last hair, she simply did not wish to depress him with her fears. There was a suspense, a strange hush and breathlessness in the air that depressed her.

The same restlessness that she observed in the wild creatures began to be noticeable in the horses. Time after time they bolted from the trail, and the efforts of all the party were needed to round them up again. Their morale—a high degree of which is as essential in a pack train as in an army—was breaking before her eyes. They seemed to have no spirit to leap the logs and battle the quagmire. They would try to encircle the hills rather than attempt to climb them.

She wondered if the animals had a sixth sense. She was a wide-awake, observing girl, and throughout the trip she had noticed instances of a forewarning instinct that she herself did not possess. On each occasion where the horses were more or less unmanageable she found, on progressing farther, some dangerous obstacle to their progress,—a steep hill or a treacherous marsh. Could it be that they were forewarned now?

Fatigue came quickly this afternoon, and by four o'clock she was longing for food and rest. She was cold, the snow had wet the sleeves and throat of her undergarments, the control of her horse had cost her much nervous strength. The next hour dragged interminably.

But they were descending now, a steep grade to the river. Twilight, like some gray-draped ghost of a shepherdess whom Apollo had wronged and who still shadowed his steps, gathered swiftly about them.

Bill urged his horse to a faster walk; tired as the animal was he responded nobly. Because Virginia's horse was likewise courageous he kept pace, and the distance widened between the two of them and the remainder of the pack train. Lounsbury's shrill complaints and Vosper's shouts could not urge their tired mounts to a faster gait. The shadows deepened in the tree aisles; the trail dimmed; the tree trunks faded in the growing gloom.

"We won't be able to see our way at all in five minutes more," Virginia told herself.

Yet five minutes passed, and then, and still the twilight lingered. The simple explanation was that her eyes gradually adjusted themselves to the soft light. And all at once the thickets divided and revealed the river.

She didn't know why her breath suddenly caught in awe. Some way the scene before her eyes scarcely seemed real. The thickets hid the stream to the right and left, and all she could see was the stretch of gray water immediately in front. It was wide and fretful, and in the half-light someway vague and ominous. It had reached up about the trunks of some of the young spruces on the river bank, and the little trees trembled and bent, stirred by the waters; and they seemed like drowning things dumbly signaling for help. Because the farther bank was almost lost in the dusk the breadth of the stream appeared interminable. In reality it was a full ninety yards at the shallower head of the rapids where the moose trail led down to the water.

The roar of the river had come so gradually to her ear that now she was hardly aware of it; indeed the wilderness seemed weighted with silence. But it was true that she heard a terrifying roar farther down the stream. Yet just beyond, perhaps a mile from the opposite bank, lay camp and rest,—a comfortable cabin, warmth and food. She hoped they would hurry and make the crossing.

But Bill halted at the water's edge, and she rode up beside him. He seemed to be studying the currents. The pack train caught up, and Lounsbury's horse nudged at the flank of her own animal. "Well?" Lounsbury questioned. "What's the delay? We're in a hurry to get to camp."

"It's pretty high," Bill replied softly. "I've never tried to cross when it was so high as this." It was true. The rains and the snow had made the stream a torrent.

"But, man, we can't camp here. No horse feed—no cabin. We've got to go on."

"Wait just a minute. Time is precious, but we've got to think this thing out. We can put up a tent here, and cold as it is, make through the night someway. I'm not so sure that we hadn't ought to do it. The river looks high, and it may be higher than it looks—it's hard to tell in the twilight. Ordinarily I cross at the head of the rapids—water less than three feet deep. But it isn't the depth that counts—it's the swiftness. If the river is much over three feet, a horse simply can't keep his feet—and Death Canyon is just below. To be carried down into that torrent below means to die—two or three parties, trying to ship furs down to the Yuga, have already lost their lives in that very place. The shallows jump right off into ten feet of water. It'll be tough to sleep out in this snow, but it's safer. But if you say the word we'll make the try. At least I can ride in and see how it goes—whether it's safe for you to come."

Lounsbury didn't halt to ask him by what justice he should take this risk—why he should put his own life up as a pawn for their comfort and safety. Nor did Bill ask himself. Such a thought did not even come to him. He was their guide, they were in his charge, and he followed his own law.

"Try it, anyway," Lounsbury urged.

Bill spoke to his horse. The animal still stood with lowered head. For one of the few times in his life Bill had to speak twice,—not sharply, if anything more quietly than at first. The the brave Mulvaney headed into the stream.

As Bill rode into those gray and terrible waters, Virginia's first instinct was to call him back. The word was in her throat, her lips parted, but for a single second she hesitated. It was part of the creed and teachings of the circle in which she moved to put small trust in instinct. By a false doctrine she had been taught that the deepest impulses of her heart and soul were to be set aside before the mandates of convention and society; that she must act a part rather than be herself. She remembered just in time that this man was not only an employee, a lowly guide to whom she must not plead in personal appeal. She had been taught to stifle her natural impulses, and she watched in silence the water rise about the horse's knees.

But only for a second the silence endured. The the reaction swept her in a great flood. The generous, kindly warmth of her heart surged through her in one pulse of the blood; and all those frozen enemies of her being—caste and pride of place and indifference—were scattered in an instant. "Oh, come back!" she cried. "Bronson—Bill—come back. Oh, why did I ever let you go!"

For Bill did not look around. Already the sound of the waters had obscured the voices on the shore. Again she called, unheard. Then she lashed her horse with the bridle rein.

The animal strode down into the water. Vosper, his craven soul whimpering within him, had fallen to the last place in the line, but Lounsbury tried to seize her saddle as she pushed forward.

"Where are you going, you little fool?" he cried. "Come back."

The girl turned her head. Her face was white. "You told him to go in," she replied. "Now—it's the sporting thing—to follow him."

The water splashed about her horse's knees. Lounsbury called again, commandingly, but she didn't seem to hear. She lifted her feet from the stirrups as Bill had done before her, and the angry waters surged higher.

Already she knew the strength of the river. She felt its sweeping force against the animal's frame: the brave Buster struggling hard to keep his feet. Ahead of her, a dim ghost in the half-light, Bill still rode on toward the opposite shore. And now—full halfway across—he was in the full force of the current.

It was all too plain that his horse was battling for its life. The stream had risen higher than Bill had dreamed, and the waters beat halfway at the animal's side. He knew what fate awaited him if he should lose his foothold. Snorting, he threw all of his magnificent strength against the current.

It was such a test as the animal had never been obliged to endure before. He gave all that he had of might and courage. He crept forward inch by inch, feeling his way, bracing against the current, nose close to the water. In animals, just the same as in men, there are those that flinch and those that stand straight, the courageous and the cowardly, the steadfast and the false,—and Mulvaney was of the true breed. Besides, perhaps some of his rider's strength went into his thews and sustained him. Slowly the water dropped lower. He was almost to safety.

At that instant Bill glanced around, intending to warn his party not to attempt the crossing. He saw the dim shape of Virginia close behind him, riding into the full strength of the current.

All color swept in an instant from his face, leaving it gray and ashen as the twilight itself. Icy horror, groping and ghastly, flooded his veins as he saw that he was powerless to aid her. Yet his mind worked clear and sure, fast as lightning itself. Even yet it was safer for her to turn back than attempt to make the crossing. He knew that Buster's strength was not that of Mulvaney, and he couldn't live in the deepest, swiftest part of the river that lay before her.

"Turn back," he said. "Turn your horse, Virginia—easy as you can."

At the same instant he turned his own horse back into the full fury of the torrent. It had been his plan to camp alone on the other side of the river, returning to the party in the better light of the morning; but there was not an instant's hesitation in turning to battle it again. His brave horse, obedient yet to his will, ventured once more into that torrent of peril. Virginia, cool and alert, pressed the bridle rein against her horse's neck to turn him.

On the bank Lounsbury and Vosper gazed in fascinated terror. Buster wheeled, struggling to keep his feet. Mulvaney pushed on, clear to the deepest, wildest portion of the stream. And then Virginia's horse pitched forward into the wild waters.

Perhaps the animal had simply made a misstep, possibly an irregularity in the river bottom had upset his balance. The waters seemed to pounce with merciless fury, and struck with all their power.

In the half-light it was impossible even for Bill to follow the lightning events of the next second. He saw the horse struggle, flounder, then roll on his back from the force of the current. It swept him down as the wind sweeps a straw. And he saw Virginia shake loose from the saddle.

He had but an instant's glimpse of a white face in the gray water, of hair that streamed; an instant's realization of a faint cry that the waters obscured. And then he sprang to her aid.

He could do nothing else. When the soul of the man was made it was given a certain strength, and certain basic laws were laid down by which his life was to be governed. That strength sustained him now, those laws held him in bondage. He could be false to neither.

He knew the terror of that gray whirlpool below. He had every reason to believe that by no possible effort of his could he save the girl; he would only throw away his own life too. The waters were icy cold: swiftly would they draw the life-giving heat from their bodies. Soaked through, the cold of the night and the forest would be swift to claim them if by any miracle they were able to struggle out of the river. Yet there was not an instant's delay. The full sweep of his thoughts was like a flash of lightning in the sky; he was out of the saddle almost the instant that the waters engulfed her. He sprang with his full strength into the stream.

On the bank the two men saw it as in a dream: the horse's fall, the upheaval of the water as the animal struggled, a flash of the girl's face, and then Bill's leap. They called out in their impotence, and they gazed with horror-widened eyes. But almost at once the drama was hidden from them. The twilight dropped its gray curtains between; besides, the waters had swept their struggling figures down the stream and out of their sight.

Already the river looked just the same. Mulvaney, riderless, was battling toward them through the torrent, but the stress and struggle of the second before had been instantly cut short. There was no spreading ripples, no break in the gray surface of the stream to show where the two had fallen. The stream swept on, infinite, passionless for all its tumult, unconquerable,—like the River of Death that takes within its depths the souls of men, never to yield them, never to show whence they have gone.

The storm recommenced, the wind wailed in the spruce tops, and the snow sifted down into the gray waters.

VII

Bill Bronson had no realization of the full might of the stream until he felt it around his body. The waters were fed from the snowfields on the dark peaks, and every nerve in his system seemed to snap and break in the first shock of immersion. But he quickly rallied, battling the stream with mighty strokes.

He knew that if the rescue were accomplished, it would have to be soon. The torrent grew ever wilder as it sped down the canyon: no human being could live in the great, black whirlpool at its mouth. Besides, the cold would claim him soon. Just a few little instants of struggle, and then exhaustion, if indeed the icy waters did not paralyze his muscles.

He swam with his eyes open, full in the current, and with a really incredible speed. And by the mercy of the forest gods almost at once he caught a glimpse of Virginia's dark tresses in the water.

She was ten feet to one side, toward the Gray Lake shore of the river, and several feet in front. The man seemed simply to leap through the water. And in an instant more his arm went about her.

"Give yourself to the current," he shouted. "And hang on to me."

He knew this river. They were just entering upon a stretch of water dreaded of old by the rivermen that had sometimes plied down the stream in their fur-laden canoes,—a place of jagged rocks and crags and bowlders that were all but submerged by the waters. To be hurled against their sharp edges meant death, certain and speedily. He knew that his mortal strength couldn't avail against them. But by yielding to the current he thought that he might swing between them into the open waters below. His arm tightened about the girl's form.

He had not come an instant too soon. Already she had given up. A fair swimmer, she had been powerless in the rapids. She had not dreamed but that the trail of her life was at an end. She was cold and afraid and alone, and she had been ready to yield. But the sight of the guide's strong body beside her had thrilled her with renewed hope.

Even in the shadow of death she was aware of the strong wrench of his muscles as he swam, the saving might of his powerful frame. She knew that he was not afraid for himself, but only for her. Even death, with all its shadow and mystery, had not broken his spirit or bowed his head: he faced it as he faced the wilderness and the whole dreadful battle of life,—strongly, quietly, with never-faltering courage. And the girl found herself partaking of his own strength.

Up to now she had not entered into comradeship with this man. But had held herself on a different plane. But he was a comrade now; no matter the outcome, even if they should find the inhospitable Death at the end of their trial, this relationship could never be destroyed. They fought the same fight, in the same shadow. Now she would not have to enter the dark gates of Eternity alone and afraid. Here was a comrade; she knew the truth at the first touch of his arm. He could buoy up her spirit with his own.

"If I let go of you, can you hang on to my shoulder?" he asked her.

"Yes——"

He tried to look into her face, to see if she spoke the truth. But the shadows were almost impenetrable now, and the air was choked with falling snow.

"Then put your hand on my shoulder. I can't make progress the way I'm holding you now. I'll try to work in to the nearest shore."

She seized his shoulder, but nearly lost her grasp in a channel of swift water. Her fingers locked in the cloth of his shirt. And he began, a little at a time, to cross the sixty feet of wild water between them and the shore.

He had never been put to a greater test. Every ounce of his strength was needed. The tendency of the stream was to carry him into the center of the current, he was heavily clothed and shod, and the girl, exhausted, was scarcely able to give aid at all. More than once he felt himself weakening. Once a sharp pain, keen as a knife wound, smote his thigh, and he was shaken with despair at the thought that swimmer's cramps—dreaded by all men who know the water—were about to put an end to the struggle. In the icy depths his bodily heat was flowing from him in a frightfully rapid stream.

Closer and closer he swam, and at last only thirty feet of fast, deep water stretched between. But it seemed wholly impossible to make this last stretch. The sharp pain stabbed him again, and it seemed to him that his right leg only half responded to the command of his nerves. In a moment more they would be flung again into the cascades.

"I'm afraid I can't make it," he said, too softly for Virginia to hear. He wrenched once more toward the shore.

But the river gods were merciful, after all. A jack pine had fallen on the shore, struck down by a dead tree that had fallen beyond, and its green spire, still clothed with needles, lay half-submerged, forty feet out into the stream. Bill's arm encountered it, then snatched at it in a final, spasmodic impulse of his muscles. And his grip held fast.

For an instant they were tossed like straws in the water, but gradually he strengthened his grip. He caught a branch with his free hand, then slowly pulled up on it. "Hang on," he breathed. "Only a moment more."

He drew himself and the girl up on the slender trunk, then crawled along it toward the shore. Now they were half out of the water. And in a moment later they both felt the river bottom against their knees.

He drew her to the bank, staggered and fell, and for a moment both of them lay lifeless to the soft caress of the snow. But Bill did not dare lose consciousness. He was fully aware that the fight was only half won. And despair swept the girl when her clear thought returned to tell her they had emerged upon the opposite shore from the party, and that they were drenched through and lost in the night and storm,—endless, weary paces from warmth and shelter.

Before the thought had gone fully home she saw that Bill was on his feet. The twilight had all but yielded to the darkness, yet she saw that he still stood straight and strong. It was not that he had already recovered from the desperate battle in the river. Strong as he was, for himself he had only one desire—to lie still and rest and let the terrible cold take its toll. But he was the guide, the forester, and the girl's life was in his care.

"Get off your clothes," he commanded. "All of them—the darkness hides you—and I'll wring 'em out. If I don't you can't live to get to the cabin. Your stockings first."

The thought of disobedience did not even come to her. He was fighting for her life; no other issue remained.

"Rub your skin all over with your hands," he went on, "and keep moving. Above all things keep the blood going in your veins. Rub as hard as you can—I can't make a fire here—with no ax—in the snow."

Already she had tossed him her drenched stockings, and he was wringing them in his strong hands. She rubbed her legs dry with her palms, and put the stockings back on. Then she drew off her coats and outing suit, and he wrung them as dry as he could. Then quickly she dressed again.

"Now—fast as you can walk toward the cabin."

He was not sure that he could find it in the darkness. He hoped to encounter the moose trail where it left the ford; beyond that he had to rely on his woodsman's instincts. He was soaked through and exhausted and he knew from the strange numbness of his body that he was slowly being chilled to death. It was a test of his own might and endurance against the cruel elements and a power beyond mere physical strength came to his aid.

They forced their way through the evergreen thickets of the river bank, walking up the stream toward the ford. He broke through the brushy barriers with the might of his body; he made a trail for her in the snow. The darkness deepened around them. The snow fell ever heavier, and the winds soughed in the tree tops.

After the first half-mile all consciousness of effort was gone from the girl. She seemed to move from a will beyond her own, one step after another over that terrible trail. She lost all sense of time, almost of identity. Strange figures, only for such eyes as might see in the darkness, they fought their way on through the drifts.

But they conquered at last. Partly by the feel of the snow under his feet, partly by his woodsman's instincts, but mostly because the forest gods were merciful, Bill kept to the moose trail that led from the ford to the cabin. And the man was swaying, drunkenly, when he reached the door.

His cold hands could scarcely draw out the rusted file that acted as a brace for the chain. Yet his voice was quiet and steady when he spoke.

"There are blankets in there, plenty of 'em," he told her. "It's my main supply cabin. Spread some of them out and take off your clothes—all of 'em—and get between them. I'll build a fire as fast as I can."

She turned to obey. She heard him take down an ax that had been left hanging on the cabin walls and heard his step in the snow as he began to cut into kindling some of the pieces of cordwood that were heaped outside the door. She undressed quickly, then lay shivering between the warm, heavy blankets.

In a moment the man faltered in, his arms heavy with wood. She heard him fumbling back of the little stove, then a match gleamed in the gloom. She had never seen such a face as this before her now. Its lines were deep and incredibly dark: utter fatigue was inscribed upon the drawn features and in the dark, dull eyes. She was suddenly shaken with horror at the thought that perhaps she was looking upon the first shadow of death itself.

He had cut the kindling with his knife, inserted the candle end, and a little blaze danced up. She watched him feed the fire with strange, heavy motions. He took a pan down from the wall, then went out into the darkness.

Haunted by fears, it seemed to her she waited endless hours for him to return again. When he came the pan was filled with water from a little stream that flowed behind the cabin. He put it on the stove to heat.

She dozed off, then wakened to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, holding a cup of some steaming liquid. Vaguely she noticed that he had taken off his wet clothes and had put on a worn overcoat that had been hanging back of the stove, wrapping two thick blankets over this. He put his left arm behind her and lifted her up, then fed her spoonfuls of the hot liquid. She didn't know what it was, other than it contained whisky.

"Take some of it yourself," she told him at last.

He shook his head and smiled,—a wistful yet manly smile that almost brought tears to her eyes. That smile was the last thing that she remembered. The warm, kindly liquor stole through her veins, and she dropped into heavy slumber.

In the stress of that first hour after the disaster of the river, Lounsbury and Vosper had a chance to test the steel of which they were made. This was the time for inner strength, and courage, and beyond all things else, for self-discipline. But only the forest creatures, such little folk as watch with beady eyes from the coverts all the drama of the wilderness, beheld how they stood that test.

For the first few seconds Lounsbury sat upon his horse and simply stared in mute horror. Then he half-climbed, half-fell from the saddle, and followed by Vosper, started running down the river bank. Immediately he lost sight of Virginia and Bill. Almost at once thereafter the cold and the darkness got into his spirit and appalled him.

"They're lost, they're lost," he cried. "There's not a chance on earth to get 'em out."

The branches tripped him and he fell sprawling in the snow. He got up and hastened on. Vosper, his thews turning to mushroom stalks within him, could only follow, swearing hoarsely. At each break of the trees they would clamber down to the water's edge and look over the tumultuous wastes, and each time the twilight was deeper, the snow flurries heavier. And soon they came to a steep bank which they could not descend.

"It's a death trip. I knew it was a death trip," Lounsbury moaned. "And what's the use of going farther. They haven't a chance on earth."

They did, however, push on a short distance down the river. Lounsbury was of the opinion it was very far indeed. In reality it was not two hundred yards in all. And they halted once more to stare with frightened eyes at the stream.

"It ain't the first this river's taken," Vosper told him. "And they never even found their bodies."

"And we won't find these, now," Lounsbury replied. They waited a little while in silence, trying to pierce the shadows. "What do you suppose we'd better do?" he questioned.

"I don't know. What can we do?"

"There's no chance of saving them. They're gone already. No swimmer could live in that stream. Why did we ever come—it was a wild-goose chase at best. If they did get out they'd be lost—and couldn't find their way. It seems to me the wisest thing for us to do is to go back—and build a big fire—so they can find their way in if they did get out."

It was a worthy suggestion! The voice of cowardice that had been speaking in Lounsbury's craven soul had found expression in words at last. He was frightened by the storm and the darkness, and he was cold and tired, and a beacon light for the two wanderers in the storm was only a subterfuge whereby he might justify their return to camp. The understrapper understood, but he didn't disagree. They were two of a kind.

It was not that they did not know their rightful course. Both were fully aware that such a fire as they could build could only gleam a few yards through the heavy spruce thicket. They knew that braver men would keep watch over that dreadful river for half the night at least, calling and searching, ready to give aid in the feeble hope that the two exhausted swimmers might come ashore.

"Sure thing," Vosper agreed. "It'll be hard to make a good fire in the snow, and we can't build one at all if them pack horses has got away by now."

"You mean—we'd die?" Lounsbury's eyes protruded.

"The ax is in the pack. We wouldn't have a chance."

Lounsbury turned abruptly, scarcely able to refrain from running. The pack horses, however, hadn't left their tracks. And now the brave Mulvaney had gained the shore and was standing motionless, gazing out over the troubled waters. No man might guess the substance of his thoughts. He scarcely glanced at the two men.

They unpacked the animals, and by scraping off the snow and by the aid of the keen ax and a candle-stub soon lighted a fire. To satisfy the feeble voice of his conscience Lounsbury himself cut wood to make it blaze high. They made their coffee and cooked an abundant meal.

They stretched the tent in the evergreen thicket, and after supper they sat in its mouth in the glow of the fire. Its crackle drowned out the voices of the wilderness about them,—such accusations as the Red Gods pour out upon the unworthy. And for all their shelter they were wretched and terrified, crushed by the might of the wilderness about them,—futile things that were the scorn of even the beasts.

"Of course we'll never find the bodies," Lounsbury suggested at last.

"No chance, that I can see. The winter's come to stay. We won't be able to get any men from Bradleyburg to help us look for 'em. They couldn't get through the snow."

"You think—" Lounsbury's voice wavered, "you think—we can get back all right ourselves?"

"Sure. That is, if we start first thing to-morrow. There's a clear trail through the snow most of the way—our own trail, comin' out. But it will be hard goin' and not safe to wait."

"Then I suppose—the horses will be sent down below, because of the snow. That's another reason why they can't even search for the bodies."

"Yes. Of course they may float down to the Yuga and be seen somewhere by the Indians. But not much chance."

They lighted their pipes, and the horror of the tragedy began slowly to pass from them. The blinding snow and the cold and their own discomfort occupied all their thoughts. There was only one ray of light,—that in the morning they could turn back out of the terrible wilderness, down toward the cities of men.

They didn't try to sleep. The snow and the cold and the shrieking wind made rest an impossibility. They did doze, however, between times that they rose to cut more fuel for the fire. The hours seemed endless.

Darkness still lay over the river when they went again to their toil. Lounsbury, himself offered to cook breakfast and tried to convince himself the act entitled him to praise. In reality, he was only impatient to hasten their departure. Vosper packed the hungry horses, slyly depositing portions of their supplies and equipment in the evergreen thickets to lighten his own work. He further lightened the packs by putting a load on Mulvaney. And they climbed down to the water's edge to glance once more at the turbulent stream.

"No use of waiting any more," Lounsbury said at last.

"Of course not. Get on your horse." Then they rode away, these two worthy men, back toward the settlements. Some of the pack horses—particularly the yellow Baldy and his kind—moved eagerly when they saw that their masters had changed directions. But Vosper had to urge Mulvaney on with oaths and blows.

VIII

In Virginia's first moment of wakening she could not distinguish realities from dreams. All the experiences of the night before seemed for the moment only the adventures of a nightmare. But disillusionment came quickly. She opened her eyes to view the cabin walls, and the full dreadfulness of her situation swept her in an instant.

Her tears came first. She couldn't restrain them, and they were simply the natural expression of her fear and her loneliness and her distress. For long moments she sobbed bitterly, yet softly as she could. But Virginia was of good metal, and in the past few days she had acquired a certain measure of self-discipline. She began to struggle with her tears. They would waken Bill, she thought—and she had not forgotten his bravery and his toil of the night before. She conquered them at last, and, miserable and sick of heart, tried to go back to sleep.

Her muscles pained her, her throat was raw from the water, and when she tried to make herself comfortable her limbs were stiff and aching. But she knew she had to look her position in the face. She turned, pains shooting through her frame, and gazed about her.

The cabin, she could see, was rather larger than any of those in which they had camped on their journey. It was well-chinked and sturdy, and even had the luxury of a window. For the moment she didn't see Bill at all. She wondered if he had gone out. Then, moving nearer to the edge of her cot, she looked over intending to locate the clothes she had taken off the night before. Then she saw him, stretched on the floor in the farthest corner of the room.

He gave the impression of having dropped with exhaustion and fallen to sleep where he lay. She could see that he still wore the tattered overcoat he had found hanging on the wall, and the two blankets were still wrapped about him. He was paying for his magnificent efforts of the night before. Morning was vivid and full at the window, but he still lay in heavy slumber.

She resolved not to call him; and in spite of her own misery, her lips curled in a half-smile. She was vaguely touched; someway the sight of this strong forester, lying so helpless and exhausted in sleep, went straight to some buried instinct within her and found a tenderness, a sweet graciousness that had not in her past life manifested itself too often.

But the tenderness was supplanted by a wave of icy terror. She was a woman, and the thought suddenly came to her that she was wholly in this man's power, naked except for the blankets around her, unarmed and helpless and lost in the forest depths. What did she know of him? He had been the soul of respect heretofore, but now—with her uncle on the other side of the river—; but she checked herself with a revulsion of feeling. The strength that had saved her life would save him against himself. They would find a way to get out to-day; and she thought that this, at least, she need not fear.

He had been busy before he slept. His clothes and hers were hung on nails back of the little stove to dry. He had cut fresh wood, piling it behind the stove. She guessed that he had intended to keep the fire burning the whole night, but sleep had claimed him and disarranged his plans.

His next thought was of supplies. The simple matter of food and warmth is the first issue in the wilderness; already she had learned this lesson. Her eyes glanced about the walls. There were two or three sacks, perhaps filled with provisions, hanging from the ceiling, safely out of the reach of the omnivorous pack-rats that often wreak such havoc in unoccupied cabins. But further than this the place seemed bare of food.

Blankets were in plenty; there were a few kitchen utensils hanging back of the stove, and some sort of an ancient rifle lay across a pair of deer horns. Whether or not there were any cartridges for this latter article she could not say. Strangest of all, a small and battered phonograph, evidently packed with difficulty into the hills, and a small stack of records sat on the crude, wooden table. Evidently a real and fervent love of music had not been omitted from Bill's make-up.

Then Bill stirred in his sleep. She lay still, watching. She saw his eyes open. And his first glance was toward her.

He flashed her a smile, and she tried pitifully to answer it. "How are you?" he asked.

"Awfully lame and sore and tired. Maybe I'll be better soon. And you——?"

"A little stiff, not much. I'm hard to damage, Miss Tremont. I've seen too much of hardship. But I've overslept—and there isn't another second to be lost. I've got to dress and go and locate Vosper and Lounsbury."

"I suppose you'd better—right away. They'll be terribly distressed—thinking we're drowned." She turned her back to him, without nonsense or embarrassment, and he started to dress. She didn't see the slow smile, half-sardonic, that was on his lips.

"I'm not worrying about their distress," he told her. "I only want to be sure and catch them before they give us up for lost—and turn back. I can never forgive myself for failing to waken. It was just that I was so tired——"

"I won't let you blame yourself for that," the girl replied, slowly but earnestly. "Besides, Uncle Kenly won't go away for two or three days at least. He's been my guardian—I'm his ward—and I'm sure he'll make every effort to learn what happened to us."

"I suppose you're right. You know whether or not you can trust Lounsbury. I only know—that I can't trust Vosper."

"They'll be waiting for us, don't fear for that," the girl went on. She tried to put all the assurance she could into her tone. "But how can we get across?"

"That remains to be seen. If they're there to help, with the horses, we might find a way." The man finished dressing, then turned to go. "I'm sorry I can't even take time to light your fire. You must stay in bed, anyway—all day."

He left hurriedly, and as the door opened the wind blew a handful of snow in upon her. The snow had deepened during the night, and fall was heavier than ever. Shivering with cold and aching in every muscle, she got up and put on her underclothing. It was almost dry already. Then, wholly miserable and dejected, she lay down again between her blankets, waiting for Bill's return. And his step was heavy and slow on the threshold when he came.

She couldn't interpret the expression on his face when she saw him in the doorway. He was curiously sober and intent, perhaps even a little pale. "Go to sleep, Miss Tremont," he advised. "I'll make a fire for breakfast."

He bent to prepare kindling. The girl swallowed painfully, but shaken with dread shaped her question at last. "What—what did you find out?"

He looked squarely into her eyes. "Nothing that you'll want to hear, Miss Tremont," he told her soberly. "I went to the river bank and looked across. They—they——"

"They are gone?" the girl cried.

"They've pulled freight. I could see the smoke of their fire—it was just about out. Not a horse in sight, or a man. There's no chance for a mistake, I'm afraid. I called and called, but no one answered."

The tears rushed to the girl's eyes, but she fought them back. There was an instant of strained silence. "And what does it mean?"

"I don't know. We'll get out someway——"

"Tell me the truth, Bill," the girl suddenly urged. "I can stand it. I will stand it—don't be afraid to tell me."

The man looked down at her in infinite compassion. "Poor little girl," he said. "What do you want to know?"

She didn't resent the words. She only felt speechlessly grateful and someway comforted,—as a baby girl might feel in her father's arms.

"Does it mean—that we've lost, after all?"

"Our lives? Not at all." She read in his face that this, at least, was the truth. "I'll tell you, Miss Tremont, just what I think it means. If we were on the other side of the river, and we had horses, we could push through and get out—easy enough. But we haven't got horses—even Buster is drowned—and it would be a hard fight to carry supplies and blankets on our backs, for the long hike down into Bradleyburg. It would likely be too much for you. Besides, the river lays between. In time we might go down to quieter waters and build a raft—out of logs—but the snow's coming thicker all the time. Before we could get it done and get across, we couldn't mush out—for the snows have come to stay and we haven't got snowshoes. We could rig up some kind of snowshoes, I suppose, but until the snow packs we couldn't make it into town. It's too long a way and too cold. In soft snow even a strong man can only go a little way—you sink a foot and have to lift a load of snow with every step. Every way we look there's a block. We're like birds, caught in a cage."

"But won't men—come to look for us?"

"I've been thinking about that. Miss Tremont, they won't come till spring, and then they'll likely only half look for us. I know this northern country. Death is too common a thing to cause much stir. Lounsbury will tell them we are drowned—no one will believe we could have gotten out of the canyon, dressed like we were and on a night like last night. If they thought we were alive and suffering, the whole male population would take a search party and come to our aid. Instead they know—or rather, they think they know—that we're dead. There won't be any horses, it will be a fool's errand, and mushing through those feet of soft snow is a job they won't undertake."

"But the river will freeze soon."

"Yes. Even this cataract freezes, but it likely won't be safe to cross for some weeks—maybe clear into January or February. That depends on the weather. You see, Miss Tremont, we don't have the awful low temperatures early in the winter they get further east and north. We're on the wet side of the mountains. But we do get the snow, week after week of it when you simply can't travel, and plenty of thirty and forty, sometimes more, below zero. But the river will freeze if we give it time. And the snow will pack and crust late in the winter. And then, in those clear, cold days, we can make a sled and mush out."

"And it means—we're tied up here for weeks—and maybe months?"

"That's it. Just as sure as if we had iron chains around our ankles."

Then the girl's tears flowed again, unchecked. Bill stood beside her, his shoulders drooping, but in no situation of his life had he ever felt more helpless, more incapable of aid. "Don't cry," he pleaded. "Don't cry, Miss Tremont. I'll take care of you. Don't you know I will?"

Her grief rent him to the depths, but there was nothing he could say or do. He drew the blankets higher about her.

"Perhaps you can get some more sleep," he urged. "Your body's torn to pieces, of course."

Fearful and lonely and miserable, the girl cried herself to sleep. Bill sat beside her a long time, and the snow sifted down in the forest and the silence lay over the land. He left her at last, and for a while was busy among the supplies that he found on a shelf behind the stove. And she wakened to find him bending over her.

His face was anxious and his eyes gentle as a woman's. "Do you think you can eat?" he asked. "I've warmed up soup—and I've got coffee, too."

He had put the liquids in cups and had drawn the little table beside her bed. She shook her head, but she softened at the swift look of disappointment in his face. "I'll take some coffee," she told him.

He held the cup for her, and she drank a little of the bracing liquid. Then she pushed the cup away.

He waited beside a moment, curiously anxious. "Give me your hand," he said.

"Why?"

Cold was her voice, and cold the expression on her face. It seemed to her that the lines of Bill's face deepened, and his dark eyes grew stern. But in a moment the expression passed, and she knew she had wounded him. "Why do you think? I want to test your pulse."

He had seen that she was flushed, and he was in deadly fear that the plunge into the cold waters had worked an organic injury. He took her soft, slender wrist in his hand, and she felt the pressure of his little finger against her pulsing arteries. Then she saw the dark features light up.

"You haven't any fever," he told her joyfully. "You're just used up from the experience. And God knows I can't blame you. Go to sleep again if you like."

She dozed off again, and for a little while he was busy outside the cabin, cutting fuel for the night's blaze. He stole in once to look at her and then turned again down the moose trail to the river. He had been certain before that the others had gone; now he only wanted to make sure.

The long afternoon was at an end when he returned. He had gazed across the gray waters and called again and again, but except for the echo of his shout, the wilderness silence had been inviolate. Virginia was awake, but still miserable and dejected in her blankets. They talked a little, softly and quietly, about their chances, but he saw that she was not yet in a frame of mind to look the situation squarely in the face. Then he cooked the last meal of the day.

"I don't want anything," she told him, when again he proffered food. "I only want to die. I wish I had died—in the river last night. Months and months—in these awful woods and this awful cabin—and nothing but death in the end."

He did not condemn her for the utterance, even in his thoughts. He was imaginative enough to understand her despair and sympathize with it. He remembered the sheltered life she had always lived. Besides, she was his goddess; he could only humble himself before her.

"But I won't let you die, Miss Tremont. I'll care for you. You won't even have to lift your hand, if you don't want to. You'll be happier, though, if you do; it would break some of the monotony. There's a little old phonograph on the stand, and some old magazines under your cot. The weeks will pass someway. And I promise this." He paused, and his face was gray as ashes. "I won't impose—any more of my company upon you—than you wish."

The response was instantaneous. The girl's heart warmed; then she flashed him a smile of sympathy and understanding. "Forgive me," she said. "I'll try to be brave. I'll try to stiffen up. I know you'll do everything you can to get me out. You're so good to me—so kind. And now—I only want to go to sleep."

He watched her, standing by her bed. After all, sleep was the best thing for her—to knit her torn nerves and mend her tired body. Besides, the wilderness night was falling. He could see it already, gray against the window pane. The first day of their exile was gone.

"I'll be all right in the morning," she told him sleepily. "And maybe it's for the best—after all. At least—it gives you a better chance to find Harold—and bring him back to me."

Bill nodded, but he didn't trust himself to speak.

IX

There is a certain capacity in young and sturdy human beings for accepting the inevitable. When Virginia wakened the next morning, her physical distress was largely past and she was in a much better frame of mind. She pulled herself together, stiffened her young spine, and prepared to make the best of a deplorable situation. She had come up here to find her lost beloved, and she wasn't defeated yet. This very development might bring success.

She realized that the fact that she had thus found a measure of compensation for the disaster would have been largely unintelligible to most of the girls of her class,—the girls she knew in the circle in which she had moved. It was not the accustomed thing to remain faithful to a fiance who had been silent an missing for six years, or to seek him in the dreary spaces of the North. The matter got down to the simple fact that these girls were of a different breed. Culture and sophistication and caste had never destroyed an intensity and depths of elemental passion that might have been native to these very wildernesses in which she was imprisoned. Cool an self-restrained to the finger tips, she knew the full meaning of fidelity. Orphaned almost in babyhood, she had lived a lonely life: this girlhood love affair of hers had been her single, great adventure. She had been sure that her lover still lived when all her friends had judged him dead. Months and years she had dreamed of finding him, of sheltering again in his arms, and proving to all the world that her faith was justified.

Bill was already up, and the room warmed from the fire. The noise of his ax blows had wakened her. And she took advantage of his absence to dress.

"You up?" he cried in delight when she entered. His arms were heaped with wood. "I'm not sure that you hadn't ought to rest another day. How do you feel?"

"As good as ever, as far as I can tell. And pretty well ashamed of being such a baby yesterday."

But his smile told her that he held no resentment. "I trust you'll be able to eat to-day?"

"Eat? Bill, I am famished. But first"—and her face grew instantly sober—"I want to know just how we stand, and what our chances are. I remember what you told me yesterday about getting out. But we can't live here on nothing. What about supplies?"

"That's what we've got to see about right now. It's an important matter, true enough. For a certain very good reason I couldn't make a real investigation till you got up. You'll see why in a minute. Well, we have a gun at least; you can see it behind the stove. It's an old thing, but it will still shoot. And we've got at least one box of shells for it—and not one of them must be wasted. They mean our meat supply. I'm still wearing my pistol, and I've got two boxes of shells for it in my pocket—it's a small caliber, and there's fifty in each box. There are plenty of blankets and cooking utensils, magazines for idle hours and, Heaven bless us, an old and battered phonograph on the table. Don't scorn it—anything that has to be packed on a horse this far mustn't be scorned. We can have music with our meals, if we like." He stopped and smiled.

"There's a cake of soap on the shelf," he went on, after the gorgeous fact of the phonograph had time to sink home, "and another among the supplies—but I'm afraid cold cream and toilet water are lacking. I don't even know how you'll comb your hair."

The girl smiled—really with happiness now—and fished in the pockets of a great slicker coat she had worn the night of the disaster. She produced a little white roll, and with the high glee opened it for him to see. Wrapped in a miniature face towel was her comb, a small brush, and a toothbrush!

They laughed with delight over the find. "But no mirror?" the man said solemnly.

"No. I won't be able to see how I look for weeks—and that's terrible. But where are your food supplies? I see those sacks hanging from the ceiling—but they certainly haven't enough to keep us alive. And there's nothing else that I can see."

"We'd have a hard time, if we had to depend on the contents of those sacks. Miss Tremont, can you cook?"

"Cook? Good Heavens—I never have. But I can learn, I suppose."

"You'd better learn. It will help pass away the time. I'll be busy getting meat and keeping the fires high, among other things."

"But what is there to cook?"

He walked, with some triumph, to the bunk on which she had slept the night before, and lifting it up, revealed a great box beneath. She understood, now, why he had not been able to make a previous investigation. They danced with joy at its contents,—bags of rice and beans, dried apples, marmalade and canned goods, enough for some weeks at least. Best of all, from Bill's point of view, there were a few aged and ripened plugs of tobacco, for cutting up for his pipe.

"The one thing we haven't got is meat," Bill told her, "except a little jerky; but there's plenty of that in the woods if we can just find it. And I don't intend to delay about that. If the snow gets much deeper, we'd have to have snowshoes to hunt at all."

"You mean—to go hunting to-day?"

"As soon as we can stir up a meal. How would pancakes taste?"

"Glorious! I'll cook breakfast myself."

"Not breakfast—lunch," he corrected. "It's already about noon. But it would be very nice if you'd do the cooking while I cut the night's fuel. You know how—dilute a little canned milk, and a little baking powder, stir in your flour—and it's wheat mixed with rye, and bully flour for flapjacks—and fry 'em thick. Set water to boil and we'll have coffee, too."

They went to their respective tasks. And the pancakes and coffee, when at last they were steaming on the little, crude board-table, were really a very creditable effort. They were thick and rich as befits wilderness flapjacks, but covered with syrup they slid easily down the throat. Bill consumed three of them, full skillet size, and smacked his lips over the coffee. Virginia managed two herself.

He helped her wash the scanty dishes, then prepared for the hunt. "Do you want to come?" he asked. "It's a cool, raw day. You'll be more comfortable here."

"Do you think I'd stay here?" she demanded.

She didn't attempt to analyze her feelings. She only knew that this cabin, lost in the winter forest, would be a bleak and unhappy place to endure alone. The storm and the snow-swept marshes, with Bill beside her, were infinitely preferable to the haunting fear and loneliness of solitude. The change in her attitude toward him had been complete.

Dressing warmly, they ventured out into the snowy wastes. The storm had neither heightened nor decreased. The snow still sifted down steadily, with a relentlessness that was someway dreadful to the spirit. The drifts were about their knees by now; and the mere effort of walking was a serious business. The winter silence lay deep over the wilderness.

It was a curious thing not to hear the rustle of a branch, the crack of a twig; only the muffled sound of their footsteps in the snow. Bill walked in front, breaking trail. He carried the ancient rifle ready in his hands.

The truth was that Bill did not wish to overlook any possible chance for game. Each hour traveling was more difficult, the snow encroached higher, and soon he could not hunt at all without snowshoes. It was not good for their spirits or their bodies to try to live without meat in the long snowshoe-making process. This was no realm for vegetarians. The readily assimilated animal flesh was essential to keep their tissues strong.

Fortune had not been particularly kind so far on this trip—at least from Virginia's point of view—but he did earnestly hope that they might run into game at once. Later the moose would go to their winter feeding grounds, far down the heights. Every day they hunted, their chance of procuring meat was less.

He led her over the ridge to the marshy shores of Gray Lake,—a dismal body of water over which the waterfowl circled endlessly and the loons shrieked their maniacal cries. He noticed, with some apprehension, that many sea birds had taken to the lake for refuge,—gulls and their fellows. This fact meant to the woodsman that great storms were raging at sea, and they themselves would soon feel the lash of them. They waited in the shadow of the spruce.

"Don't make any needless motions," he cautioned, "and don't speak aloud. They've got eyes and ears like hawks."

It was not easy to stand still, in the snow and the cold, waiting for game to appear. Virginia was uncomfortable within half an hour, shivering and tired. In an hour the cold had gripped her; her hands were lifeless, her toes ached. Yet she stood motionless, uncomplaining.

It was a long wait that they had beside the lake. The short, snow-darkened afternoon had not much longer to last. Bill began to be discouraged; he knew that for the girl's sake he must leave his watch. He waited a few minutes more.

Then the girl felt his hand on her arm. "Be still," he whispered. "Here he comes."

They were both staring in the same directions, but at first Virginia could not see the game. Her eyes were not yet trained to these wintry forests. It was a strange fact, however, that the announcement was like a hot stimulant in her blood. The sense of cold and fatigue left her in an instant. And soon she made out a black form on the far side of the lake.

"He's coming toward us," the man whispered.

Although she had never seen such an animal before, at once she recognized its kind. The spreading horns, the great frame, the long, grotesque nose belonged only to the moose,—the greatest of American wild animals. Her blood began to race through her veins.

The animal was still out of range, but the distance between them rapidly shortened. He was following the lake shore, tossing his horns in arrogance. Once he paused and gazed a long time straight toward them, legs braced and head lifted; but evidently reassured he ventured on. Now he was within three hundred yards.

"Why don't you shoot?" the girl whispered.

"I'm afraid to trust this old gun at that range. I could get him with my thirty-five. Now don't make a motion—or a sound."

Now the creature was near enough so that she could receive some idea of his size and power. She knew something of the quagmires such as lay on the lake shore. She had passed some of them on the journey. But the bull moose took them with an ease and a composure that was thrilling to see. Where a strong horse would have floundered at the first step, he stretched out his hind quarters, and, striking with his long, powerful front legs, pulled through. Then she was aware that Bill was aiming.

At the roar of the rifle she cried out in excitement. The old bull had traversed the marches for the last time: he had fought the last fight with his fellow bulls in the rutting season. He rocked down easily, and Bill's racing fingers ejected the shell and threw another into the barrel, ready to fire again if need be. But no second bullet was required. The man's aim had been straight and true, and the bullet had pierced his heart.

The two of them danced and shouted in the snow. And Virginia did not stop to think that the stress of the moment had swept her back a thousand—thousand years, and that her joy was simply the rapture of the cave woman, mad with blood lust, beside her mate.

X

The shoulder of a bull moose was never a load for a weak back. The piece of meat weighed nearly one hundred pounds and was of awkward shape to carry. Bill, secure in his strength, would never have attempted it except for the fact that after one small ridge was climbed, the way was downhill clear to the cabin.

He skinned out the quarter with great care; then, stooping, worked it on his back. Virginia took his gun and led the way back over their snow trail.

By resting often, they soon made the hilltop. From thence on they dragged the meat in the immaculate snow. Twilight had fallen again when they made the cabin.

Already Virginia thought of it as home. She returned to it with a thrill in her veins and a joy in her heart. She was tired out and cold; this humble log hut meant shelter from the storm and warmth and food. Bill hung the meat; then with his knife cut off thick steaks for their supper. In a few moments their fire was cracking.

Bill showed her how to broil the steak in its own fat, and he cooked hot biscuits and macaroni to go with it. No meal of her life had ever given her greater pleasure. They made their plans for the morrow; first to construct a crude sled and then to bring in the remainder of the meat. "If the wolves don't claim it to-night," Bill added, as he lighted his pipe.

"It's strange that I don't want to smoke myself," the girl told him.

"You? Why should you?"

"I smoke at home. I mean I did. It's getting to be the thing to do among the girls I know. Someway, the thought of it doesn't seem interesting any more."

"Did you—really enjoy it then? If you did, I'll split my store with you. You've got as much right to it as I." The man spoke rather heavily.

"I didn't think I did enjoy it. I did it—I suppose because it seemed sporting. It never made me feel peaceful—only nervous. I don't believe tobacco is a temperamental need with women as it is with some men—otherwise it wouldn't have taken so many centuries to establish the custom. It would only—seem silly, up here."

He had an impression that she was speaking very softly. The quality of absolute and omnipresent silence had passed from the wilderness. There was a low stir, a faint murmur that at first was so far off and vague that neither of them could name it.

But slowly the sound grew. The tree tops, silent before with snow, gave utterance; the thickets cracked, stirred, and moved as if some dread spirit were coming to life within them. The candle flickered. A low moan reached them from the chimney. Bill strode to the door and threw it wide.

He did not have to peer out into that unfathomable darkness to know the enemy that was at his gates. It spoke in a sudden fury, and the snow flurries swept past, like strange and wandering spirits, in the dim candle light. No longer the flakes drifted easily and silently down. They seemed to be coming from all directions, whirling, eddying, borne swiftly through the night and hurled into drifts. And a dread voice spoke across the snow.

"The north wind," Bill said simply.

Virginia's eyes grew wide. She sensed the awe and the dread in his tones; even she, fresh from cities, knew that this foe was not to be despised. She felt the sharp pinch of the cold as the heat escaped through the open door. The temperature was falling steadily; already it was far below freezing. Bill shut the door and walked back to her.

"What does it mean?" she asked breathlessly.

"Winter. The northern winter. I've seen it break too many times. Perhaps we can drown out the sound of it—with music."

He walked toward the battered instrument. Her heart was cold within her, and she nodded eagerly. "Yes—a little ragtime. It will be frightfully loud in the cabin, but it's better than the sound of the storm."

She didn't dream that this wilderness man would choose any other kind of music than ragtime. She was but new to the North, otherwise she would have made no such mistake. Superficiality was no part of these northern men. They knew life in the raw, the travail of existence, the pinch of cold and the fury of the storm; and the music that they felt in their hearts was never the light-hearted dance music of the South. Music is the articulation of the soul, and the souls of these men were darkened and sad. It could not be otherwise, sons of the wilderness as they were.

The pack song, on the hilltop in the winter moon, was never a melody of laughter. Rather it was the song of life itself, life in the raw, and the sadness and pain and the hopeless war of existence find their echo in the wailing notes. None of the wilderness voices were joyous. When Bill had chosen his records he took those that answered his own mood and expressed his own being.

Not all of them were sad music, in the strictest sense. But they were all intense, poignant and tremulous with the deepest longings of the human soul.

"I haven't any ragtime," the man explained humbly. "I could only bring up a few records, and so I took just the ones I liked best. They're simple things—I'm sorry I haven't any more."

She looked at this man with growing wonder. Of course he would like the simple things. No man of her acquaintance had ever possessed truer standards: no sophistication or cultural growth such as she herself had know could have given him a truer gentility. What was this thing that men could learn in the woods and in the North that gave them such poise, such standards, and brought out such qualities of manhood? Yet she knew that the forests did not treat all men alike. Those of intrinsic virtue were made better, their strength was supplemented by the strength of the wilderness itself, but the weaklings perished quickly. This was not a land for soft men, for the weak and the cowardly and the vicious. The wild soon found them out, harried them by storms and broke their hearts and their spirits, and kept from them its gracious secrets. Perhaps in this latter thing lay the explanation. It seemed to her that Bill was always straining, listening for the faintest, whispered voices of the forest about him. He was always watching, always studying—his soul and his heart open—and Nature poured forth upon him her incalculable rewards.

He put on a record, closed the doors of the instrument tight to muffle the sound, and set the needle. She recognized the melody at once. It was Drdla's "Souvenir"—and the first notes seemed to sweep her into infinity.

It was a beautiful, haunting thing, sweet as love, warm as a maiden's heart, tender as motherhood; and all at once Virginia was aware of a heart-stirring and incredible contrast. The melody did not drown out the sound of the storm. It rose above it, infinitely sweet and entreating, and all the time the wild strains of the storm outside made a strange and dreadful background. Yet the two songs mingled with such harmony as only old masters, devotees to music, can sometimes hear in their inmost souls but never express in notes.

She felt the tears start in her eyes. Her cheeks flamed. Her heart raced and thrilled. For all the exquisite beauty of the song, a vague dread and an incomprehensible fear seemed to come upon her. For all the stir and impulse of the melody, a strange but exquisite sadness engulfed her spirit. In that single instant the North drew aside its curtains of mystery and showed her its secret altar. For a breath at least she knew its soul,—its travail, its dreadful beauty, its infinite sadness, its merciless strength.

In her time Virginia had now and then known the fear of Death. Two nights previous, as the waters had engulfed her, she had known it very well. But never before had she known fear of life. That's what it was—fear of life—life that could only cost and could not pay, that could take and could not give, that could pain but could not heal. She knew now the dreadful persecution of the elements, cold and storm and the snow fields stretching ever from range to range. She knew the fear of hunger, of struggle to break the spirit and rend the body, of disaster that could not be turned aside, of cruel and immutable destiny. She knew now why the waterfowl had circled all day so restlessly: they too had known the age-old fear of the northern winter. They had sensed, in secret ways, the swift approach of the storm.

Winter was at hand. It would lock the streams and sweep the land with snow, the sun would grow feeble in the sky, and the spirit of Cold would descend with its age-old terrors. And the creepy fear, the haunting terror known to all northern creatures, man or beast, crept into her like a subtle poison.

It was a moment of enchantment. The music rose high, fell in soaring leaps, trembled in infinite appeal, and slowly died away. Outside the storm increased in fury. The wind sobbed over the cabin roof, the trees complained, the snow beat against the window pane. And still the spell lingered. Her lustrous eyes gazed out through the darkened pane, but her thoughts carried far beyond it.

And it was well for her peace of mind that she did not glance at Bill. The music had moved him too: besides the fear of the North he had been torn by even a deeper emotion, and for the instant it was written all to clearly upon his rugged features. He was watching the girl's face, his eyes yearning and wistful as no human being had ever seen them.

The soaring notes, with the dreadful accompaniment of the storm, had brought home a truth to him that for days on the trail he had tried to deny. "I love you, Virginia," cried the inaudible voice of his soul. "Oh, Virginia—I love you, I love you."

XI

It was one of Bill Bronson's basic creeds to look his situations squarely in the face. It was part of the training of the wilderness, and up till now he had always abided by it. But for the past few days he had found himself trying to look aside. He had tried to avoid and deny a truth that ever grew clearer and more manifest,—his love for Virginia.

He had told himself he wouldn't give his love to her. He would hold back, at least. He had reminded himself of the bridgeless gap that separated them, that they were of different spheres and that it only meant tragedy, stark and deep, for him to let himself go. He had fought with himself, had tried to shut his eyes to her beauty and his heart to her appeal. But there was no use of trying further. In the stress and passion of the melody he had found out the truth.

And this was no moment's passion,—the love that he had for her. Bill was not given to fluency of emotion. He was a northern man, intense as fire but slow to emotional response. He had known the great discipline of the forest; he was not one to lose himself in infatuation or sentimentality. He only knew that he loved her, and no event of life could make him change.

He had had dreams, this man; but they were never so concrete, so fond as these dreams that swept him now. In the soft candlelight the girl's beauty moved him and glorified him, the very fact of her presence thrilled him to the depths, the wistfulness and appeal in her face seemed to burn him like fire. This northern land was never the home of weak or half-felt emotions. The fine shades and subtle gradations of feelings were unknown to the northern people, but they had full knowledge of the primordial passions. They could hate as the she-wolf hates the foe that menaces her cubs, and they could love to the moment of death. He knew that whatever fate life had in store for him it could not change his attitude toward her. She would leave the North and go back to her own people, and still he would be true.

Even in the first instant he knew enough not to hope. They would have their northern adventure together, and then she would leave him to his snows and his trackless forests. She would go to her own land, a place of mirth and joy and warmth, to leave him brooding and silent in his waste places. He knew that all his days this same dream would be before his eyes, this wistful-eyed, tender girl, this lovely flower of the South. Nothing could change him. The years would come and go—spring and summer flowering in the forest, dancing once and tripping on to a softer, gentler land; fall would touch the shrubs with color, whisk off the golden leaves of the quivering aspen, and speed way; and winter, drear and cheerless, would shroud the land in snow—and find his love unswerving. The forest folk would mate in fall, the caribou calves would open their wondering eyes in spring, the moose would bathe and wallow in the lakes in summer, and in winter the venerable grizzly would seek his lair, and still his dreams, in his lonely cabin, would be unchanged. His love would never lessen or increase. He had held none of it back; no more could be given or taken away. He had given his all.

But if he couldn't keep this knowledge from himself, at least he could hold it from the girl. It would only bring her unhappiness. It would destroy the feeling of comradeship for him that he had begun to observe in her. It would put an insurmountable wall between them. Besides, he didn't believe that she could understand. Perhaps it would only offend her,—that this son of the forests should give her his love. She had never dealt with men of his breed before, and she had no inkling of the smoldering, devouring fires within the man. He would not invite her pity and her distrust by letting her know.

Strangest of all, he felt no bitterness or resentment. This development was only a fitting part of the tragedy of his life: first his father's murder, his dreams that had never come true, his lost boyhood, his exile in the waste places, and now the lonely years that stretched before him with nothing to atone or redeem. He knew that there could be no other woman in his life. It was well enough for the men of cities to give and take back their love; for them it was only wisdom and good sense, but such a course was impossible to such sons of the forest as he. Life gives but one dream to the forest folk, and they follow it till they die. He knew that the yearning in his heart and the void in his life could never be filled.

Yet he didn't rail at fate. He had learned what fate could do to him, and he had learned to take its blows with a strange fatalism and composure. Besides, would he not have the joy of her presence for many days to come? Their adventure had just begun: weeks would pass before she could go home. In those days he could serve her, toil for her, devote himself wholly to her happiness. He could see her face and know her beauty, and it was all worth the price he paid. For life in the North is life in its simplest phases; and the northern men have had a chance to learn that strangest truth of all,—that he who counts the cost of his hour of pleasure shall be crushed in the jaws of Destiny, and that a day of joy may be worth, in the immutable balance of being, a whole life of sorrow.

Virginia had no suspicion of his thoughts. She was still enthralled by the after-image of the music, and her own thoughts were soaring far away. But soon the noise of the storm began to force itself into her consciousness. It caused her to consider her own prospects for the night.

Vaguely she knew that this night was different from the others. The two previous nights she had been ill and half-unconscious: her very helplessness appealed to Bill's chivalry. To-night she stood on her own feet. Matters were down to a normal basis again, and for the first time she began to experience a certain embarrassment in her position. She was suddenly face to face with the fact that the night stretched before her,—and she in a snowswept cabin in the full power of a strange man. She felt more than a little uneasy.

Already she was tired and longed to go to sleep, but she was afraid to speak her wish. As the silence of the cabin deepened, and the noise of the storm grew louder—blustering at the roof, shaking the door, and beating on the window pane—her uneasiness gave way to stark fear.

But all at once she looked up to find Bill's eyes upon her, full of sympathy and understanding. "You'll want to turn in now," he told her. "You take the bunk again, of course—I'll sleep on the floor. I'm comfortable there—I could sleep on rocks if need be."

"Can't you get some fir boughs—to-morrow?" The girl spoke nervously.

"They'd be in the way, but maybe I can arrange it. And now I've got to fix your boidoir."

He took one of the boxes that served as a chair and stood it up on the floor, just in front of her bunk. Then, holding one of the blankets in his arm and a few nails in his hand, he climbed upon the box. She understood in an instant. He was curtaining off the entire end of the cabin where Virginia slept.

The girl's relief showed in her face. Her eyes lighted, her apprehension was largely dispelled. She wasn't blind to his thoughtfulness, his quick sympathy; and she felt deeply and speechlessly grateful. And she was also vaguely touched with wonder.

"You can go in there now," he told her. "But there's one thing—I want to show you—before you turn in."

"Yes?"

"I want to show you this little pistol." He took a light arm of blue steel from his belt,—the small-calibered and automatic weapon with which he had gilled the grouse. "It's only a twenty-two," Bill went on, "but it shoots a long cartridge, and it shoots ten of 'em, fast as you pull the trigger. You could kill a caribou with it, if you hit him right."

"Yes?" And she wondered at this curious interlude in their moment of parting.

"You see this little catch behind the trigger guard?" The girl nodded. "When you want to fire it, all you have to do is to push up the little catch with your thumb and pull the trigger. To-morrow I'm going to teach you how to shoot with it—I mean shoot straight enough to take the head off a grouse at twenty feet. And so it will bring you luck, I want you to sleep with it,—under your pillow."

Understanding flashed through her, and a slow, grateful smile played at her lips. "I don't want it, Bill," she told him.

"You'd feel safer with it," the man urged. He slipped it under her pillow. "And even before you learn to shoot it well—you could—if you had to—shoot and kill a man."

He smiled again and drew her curtain.

Bill was true to his promise to teach Virginia to shoot. The next day he put up an empty can out from the door of the cabin and they had target practice.

First he showed her how to hold the weapon and to stand. "See the can just over the sights and press back gradually," he urged.

The first shot went wide of its mark. The second and third were no better. But by watching her closely, Bill found out her mistake.

"You flinch," he told her. "It's an old mistake among hunters—and the only way you can avoid it is by deepest concentration. Skill in hunting—as well as in everything else—depends upon throwing the whole energy of your mind and body into that one little part of an instant when you pull the trigger. It's all right to be excited before. You're not human if, the game knocked over, you're not excited after. But unless you can hold like iron for that fraction of a second, you can't shoot and you never can shoot."

"But I'm not excited now," she objected.

"You haven't got full discipline of your nerves, just the same. You're a little afraid of the sound and the explosion, and you flinch back—just a little movement of your hand—when you pull the trigger. If it is only an eighth of an inch here, it's quite a miss by the time the bullet gets out there. Try again, but convince yourself first that you won't flinch. You won't jerk or throw off your aim."

She lowered the weapon and rested her nerves. Then she quietly lifted the gun again. And the fourth bullet knocked the can spinning from the log.

The man shouted his approval, and her flushed face showed what a real triumph it was to her. Few of her lifelong accomplishments she had valued more. Yet it caused no self-wonder; she only knew that she respected and prized the good opinion of this stalwart woodsman, and by this one little act she had proved to him the cool, strong quality of her nerves.

And it was no little triumph. She had really learned the basic concept of good shooting,—to throw the whole force of the nervous system into the second firing. It was the same precept that makes toward all achievement. The fact that she had grasped it so quickly was a guaranty of her own metal. She felt something of that satisfaction that strong men feel when they prove, for their own eyes alone, their self-worth. It was the instinct that sends the self-indulgent business man, riding to his work in a limousine, into the depths of the dreadful wilderness to hunt, and that urges the tenderfoot to climb to the crest of the highest peaks.

It did not mean that she was a dead shot already. Months and years of practice are necessary to obtain full mastery of pistol or rifle. She had simply made a most creditable start. There would be plenty of misses thereafter; in fact, the next six shots she missed the can four times. She had to learn sight control, how to gauge distance and wind and the speed of moving objects; but she was on the straight road to success.

While Virginia cooked lunch, Bill cut young spruce trees and made a sled: and after the meal pushed out through the whirling snow to being in the remainder of the moose meat. It was the work of the whole afternoon to urge the sled up the ridge and then draw it home through the drifts. The snow mantle had deepened alarmingly during the night, and he came none too soon. It was only a matter of days, perhaps of hours, before the snow would be impassable except with snowshoes. Until at last the snowfall ceased and packed, traveling even with their aid would be a heart-breaking business.

Virginia was lonely and depressed all the time Bill was absent, and she had a moment of self-amazement at the rapidity with which she brightened up at his return. But it was a natural development: the snow-swept wilds were dreary indeed for a lonely soul. He was a fellow human being; that alone was relationship enough.

"You can call me Virginia, if you want to," she told him. "Last names are silly out here—Heaven knows we can't keep them up in these weeks to come. I've called you Bill ever since the night we crossed the river."

Bill looked his gratitude, and she helped him prepare the meat. Some of it he hung just outside the cabin door; one of the great hams suspended in a spruce tree, fifty feet in front of the cabin. The skin was fleshed and hung up behind the stove to dry.

"It's going to furnish the web of our snowshoes," he explained.

That night their talk took a philosophical trend, and in the candlelight he told her some of his most secret views. She found that the North, the untamed land that had been his home, had colored all his ideas, yet she was amazed at his scientific knowledge of some subjects.

Far from the influence of any church, she was surprised to find that he was a religious man. In fact, she found that his religion went deeper than her own. She belonged to one of the Protestant churches of Christianity, attended church regularly, and the church had given her fine ideals and moral precepts; but religion itself was not a reality to her. It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound passion as it was with him. She prayed in church, she had always prayed—half automatically—at bedtime; but actual, entreating prayer to a literal God had been outside her born of thought. In her sheltered life she had never felt the need of a literal God. The spirit of All Being was not close to her, as it was to him.

Bill had found his religion in the wilderness, and it was real. He had listened to the voices of the wind and the stir of the waters in the fretful lake; he had caught dim messages, yet profound enough to flood his heart with passion, in the rustling of the leaves, the utter silence of the night, the unearthly beauty of the far ranges, stretching one upon another. His was an austere God, infinitely just and wise, but His great aims were far beyond the power of men's finite minds to grasp. Most of all, his was a God of strength, of mighty passions and moods, but aloof, watchful, secluded.

In this night, and the nights that followed, she absorbed—a little at a time—his most harboured ideas of life and nature. He did not speak freely, but she drew him out with sympathetic interest. But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist.

None of his views surprised her as much as this. He knew the snows and the cold, this man; the persecution of the elements and the endless struggle and pain of life, yet he held no rancor. "It's all part of the game," he explained. "It's some sort of a test, a preparation—and there's some sort of a scheme, too big for human beings to see, behind it."

He believed in a hereafter. He thought that the very hardship of life made it necessary. Earthly existence could not be an end in itself, he thought: rather the tumult and stress shaped and strengthened the soul for some stress to come. "And some of us conquer and go on," he told her earnestly. "And some of us fall—and stop."

"But life isn't so hard," she answered. "I've never known hardship or trial. I know many men and girls that don't know what it means."

"So much to their loss. Virginia, those people will go out of life as soft, as unprepared, as when they came in. They will be as helpless as when they left their mother's wombs. They haven't been disciplined. They haven't known pain and work and battle—and the strengthening they entail. They don't live a natural life. Nature meant for all creatures to struggle. Because of man's civilization they are having an artificial existence, and they pay for it in the end. Nature's way is one of hardship."

This man did not know a gentle, kindly Nature. She was no friend of his. He knew her as a siren, a murderess and a torturer, yet with great secret aims that no man could name or discern. Even the kindly summer moon lighted the way for hunting creatures to find and rend their prey. The snow trapped the deer in the valleys where the wolf pack might find easy killing; the cold killed the young grouse in the shrubbery; the wind sang a song of death. He pointed out that all the wilderness voices expressed the pain of living,—the sobbing utterance of the coyotes, the song of the wolves in the winter snow, the wail of the geese in their southern migrations.

In these talks she was surprised to learn how full had been his reading. All through her girlhood she had gone to private schools and had been tutored by high-paid intellectual aristocrats, yet she found this man better educated than herself. He had read philosophy and had browsed, at least, among all the literature of the past; he knew history and a certain measure of science, and most of all, the association of areas of his brain were highly developed so that he could see into the motives and hearts of things much more clearly than she.

In the nights he told her Nature lore, the ways of the living-creatures that he observed, and in the daytime he illustrated his points from life. They would take little tramps together through the storm and snow, going slowly because of the depth of the drifts, and under his tutelage, the wild life began to reveal to her its most hidden secrets. Sometimes she shot grouse with her pistol; once a great long-pinioned goose, resting on the shore of frozen Gray Lake, fell to her aim. She saw the animals in the marshes, the herds of caribou that are, above all creatures, natives and habitants of the snow-swept mountains, the little, lesser hunters such as marten and mink and otter. One night they heard the wolf pack chanting as they ran along the ridge.

Life was real up here. The superficialities with which she had dealt before were revealed in their true light. Of all the past material requisites, only three remained,—food and warmth and shelter. Others that she did not think she needed—protection, and strength and discipline—were shown as vitally necessary. Comradeship was needed, too, the touch of a helping hand in a moment of fear or danger; and love—the one thing she lacked now—was most necessary of all. It was not enough just to give love. For years she had poured her adoration upon Harold, lost it too, reciprocally; and this she might find strength for the war of life, even a tremulous joy in meeting and surmounting difficulties.

The snow fell almost incessantly and the tree limbs could hold no more. The drifts deepened in the still aisles between trunk and trunk. When the clouds broke through and the stars were like great precious diamonds in the sky, the cold would drop down like a curse and a scourge, and the ice began to gather on Grizzly River.

On such nights the Northern Lights flashed and gleamed and danced in the sky and swept the forest world with mystery.

XII

Virginia found the days much happier than she had hoped. She took a real interest in caring for their little cabin, cooking the meals, even mending Bill's torn clothes. She had a natural fine sense of flavors, and out of the simple materials that they had in store she prepared meals that in Bill's opinion outclassed the finest efforts of a French chef. He would exult over them boyishly, and she found an unlooked-for joy in pleasing him. She had made delicious puddings out of rice and canned milk and raisins, she knew just the identical number of minutes it required to broil a moose porterhouse just to his taste, and she could fry a grouse to surpass the most succulent fried chicken ever served in a southern home. All these things pleased her and occupied the barren hours. She learned to sew on buttons, wash her own clothes, and keep the cabin clean and neat as a hospital ward.

She liked the hours of sober talk in the evenings. Sometimes they would play through the records, and so well had Bill made his selections that she never tired of them. His preference tended toward melodies in the minor, wailing things that to him vaguely reflected the voices of the wild things and the plaintive utterances of the forest: she liked the soul-stirring, emotional melodies. They worked up a rare comradeship before the first week was done. She had never known a human being to whom she opened her thoughts more freely.

She had her lonesome hours, but not so many as she had expected. When time hung heavy on her hands she would take out one of the old magazines that Bill had brought up to read on the winter nights, and devour it from cover to cover. She had abundant health. The experience seemed to build her up, rather than injure her. Her muscles developed, she breathed deep of the cold, mountain air, and she had more energy than she could easily spend.

She fought away the tendency to grow careless in dress or appearance. She kept her few clothes clean and mended, she dressed her hair as carefully as in her city house. Her skin was clear and soft, but she didn't know how the wilderness life was affecting her beauty. What Bill observed he did not tell her. Often the words were at his lips, but he repressed them. In the first place he was afraid of speaking too feelingly and giving away his heart's secret; in the second he had a ridiculous fear that such a personal remark might tend to destroy the fine balance of their relationship. She had no mirror, but soon she became used to going without one. But one day, on one of their tramps, she caught a perfect image of herself in a clear spring.

She had stopped to drink, but for a few seconds she only regarded herself with speechless delight. She had had her share of beauty before; now perfect health had brought its marvelous and indescribable charm. Her hair was burnished and shimmering with life, her skin clear and transparent, her throat had filled out, and her eyes were bright and clear as she had never seen them. She felt no further need of cosmetics. Her lips were red, and Nature had brought a glow to her cheeks that no human skill could equal.

"Good Heavens, Bill!" she cried. "Why didn't you tell me that I was getting prettier every day?"

"I didn't know you wanted me to," he replied. "But you are. I've been noticing it a long time."

"You're a cold, impersonal person!" But at once her talk tripped on to less dangerous subjects.

Their cabin life was redeemed by their frequent excursions into the wild. The study of Nature was constantly more absorbing to the girl. Although the birds had all gone south—except such hardy fowl as the ptarmigan, that seemed to spend most of their time buried in the snow—there was still mammalian life in plenty in the forest. The little furred creatures still plied, nervous and scurrying as ever, their occupations; and the caribou still wandered now and then through their valley as they moved from ridge to ridge. The moose, however, had mostly pushed down to the lower levels.

The grizzlies had gone into hibernation, and their tracks were no longer to be seen in the snow; but the wolf pack still ran the ridges. And one day they had a miniature adventure that concerned the gray band.

They were climbing a ridge one wintry day, unappalled by the three feet or more of snow, when the girl suddenly touched his arm.

"First blood on caribou," she cried.

His eyes lighted, and he followed her gaze. Lately they had been having a friendly contest as to who would get the first glimpse of any living creature that they encountered in their tramps, and Bill was pleased to admit that he had been barely holding his own. The girl's eyes were practically as quick as his and better at long distances, and always there was high celebration when she saw the game first. But to-day they were fated for more exciting business.

The caribou were plunging as fast as they could through the snow. They came, in caribou fashion, in a long file, each stepping into the tracks of the other, and it was a good woodsman, coming along behind them, that could tell whether there were two or ten in the band. An old bull with sweeping horns led the file.

When going is at all easy, the caribou can travel at an incredible pace. Even their swinging trot can carry them from range to range in a single day; but when they choose to run their fastest, they seem to have wings. To-day, however, the soft snow impeded their speed. They seemed to be running freely enough, in great bounds, but Bill could tell that they were hard pressed. He would have liked to have taken one of the young cows to add to his larder, but they were too far to risk a shot. Then he seized the girl by the hand.

"Plow fast as you can up hill," he urged. "I think we'll see some action."

For he had guessed the impulse behind the wild race. They plunged through the snow as fast as they could, then sank almost out of sight in the drifts. And in a moment Bill pointed to a gray, shadowy band that came loping toward them out of the haze.

It was the wolf pack, and they were deep in the hunt. They were great, shaggy creatures, lean and savage, and Virginia felt glad that this stalwart form was beside her. The wolves of the North, when the starvation time is on, are not always to be trusted. They looked ghostly and incredibly large through the flurries.

They came within a hundred yards, then their keen senses whispered a warning. Just for an instant they stood motionless in the snow, heads raised and fierce eyes grazing.

Bill raised his rifle. He took quick aim at the great leader, and the report rang far through the silences. But the entire pack sprang away as one.

"I can't believe that I missed," Bill cried. He started to take aim again.

But no second shot was needed. Suddenly the pack leader leaped high in the air and fell almost buried in the snow. His brethren halted, seemingly about to attack the fallen, but Bill's shout frightened them on. The great, gaunt creature would sing no more to the winter stars.

He was a magnificent specimen of the black wolf, head as large as that of a black bear, and a pelt already rich and heavy. "We'll add a few more from time to time," Bill told her, "and then you can have a coat."

In these excursions Virginia learned to use her pistol with remarkable accuracy. Her strength increased: she could follow wherever Bill led. Sometimes they climbed snowy mountains where the gales shrieked like demons, sometimes they dipped into still, mysterious glens; they tracked the little folk in the snow, and they called the moose from the thickets beside the lake.

They did not forget their graver business. Ever Virginia kept watch for a track that was not an animal track, a blaze on a tree that was not made by the teeth of a porcupine or grizzly, a charred cook rack over the ashes of a fire. But as yet they had found no sign of human wayfarers other than themselves. There were no cut trees, no blazed trails, no sign of a habitation. Yet she didn't despair. She had begun to have some knowledge of the great distances of the region: she knew there were plenty of valleys yet unsearched.

Bill never ceased to search for his mine. He looked for blazes too, for a sign of an old camp or a pile of washings beside a stream. When he found an open stream he would wash the gravel, and it seemed to him he combed the entire region between the two little tributaries of Grizzly River indicated on his map. But with the deepening snow search was ever more difficult. Unlike Virginia, he was almost ready to give up.

The spirit of autumn had never shown her face again: winter had come to stay. Every day the snow deepened, the cold in the long nights was more intense. Travel was no longer possible without snowshoes, but the hide stretched in the cabin was almost dry and ready to cut into thongs for the webs. The less turbulent stretches of Grizzly River were frozen fast: the actual crossing of the stream was no longer a problem. Beyond it, however, lay only wintry mountains, covered to a depth of five feet or more with soft and impassable snow; and until the snow crusted, the journey to Bradleyburg was as impossible as if they had been cast away on another sphere.

Even the rapids of the river had begun to freeze. Often the clouds broke away at nightfall and let the cold come in,—stabbing, incredible cold that meant death to any human being that was caught without shelter in its grasp. The land locked tight: no more could Bill hunt for his mine in the creek beds. The last of the moose went down to their yarding grounds, and even the far-off glimpse of a caribou was a rarity. The marmots had descended into their burros, the snowshoe rabbit hopped, a lonely figure in the desolation, through the drifts. Such of the other little people that remained—the weasel and the ptarmigan—had turned to the hue of the snow itself.

But now the snowshoe frames were done, wrought from tough spruce, and the moose hide cut into thongs and stretched across to make the webs. For a few days Bill and Virginia had been captives in the cabin, and they held high revels in celebration of their completion. Now they could go forth into the drifts again.

It did not mean, however, that the time was ripe for them to take their sled and mush into Bradleyburg. The snow was still too soft for long jaunts. They had no tent or pack animals, and they simply would have to wait for the most favorable circumstances to attempt the journey with any safety whatever. In the soft snow they could only make, at the most, ten miles a day; the sled was hard to drag; and the bitter cold of the nights would claim them quickly. It was not merely an alternative or a convenience with them to wait for the crust. It was simply unavoidable. Worst of all, the early winter storms were not done; and a severe blizzard on the trail would put a swift end to their journey.

But once more Virginia could search the snow for traces of her lover. And after the jubilant evening meal—held in celebration of the completion of the snowshoes—the girl stood in the cabin doorway, looking a long time into the snow-swept waste.

It was a clear, icy night, and the Northern Lights were more vivid and beautiful than she had ever seen them. Bill thought that she was watching their display; if he had known the real subject of her thoughts, he would not have come and stood in the doorway with her. He would have left her to her dreams.

The whole forest world was wan and ghostly in the mysterious light. The trees looked strange and dark, perspective was destroyed, the far mountain gleamed. The streamers seemed to come from all directions, met with the effect of collision in the sky, and filled the great dome with uncanny light. Sometimes the flood of radiance would spread and flutter in waves, like a great, gorgeous canopy stirred by the wind, and fragments and balls of fire would spatter the breadth of the heavens. As always, in the face of the great phenomena of nature, Bill was deeply awed.

"We're not the only ones to see it," Virginia told him softly. "Somewhere I think—I feel—that Harold is watching it too. Somewhere over this snow."

Bill did not answer, and the girl turned to him in tremulous appeal.

"Won't you find him for me, Bill?" she cried. "You are so strong, so capable—you can do anything, anything you try. Won't you find him and bring him back to me?"

The man looked down at her, and his face was ashen. Perhaps it was only the effect of the Northern Lights that made his eyes seem so dark and strange.

XIII

One clear, icy night a gale sprang up in the east, and Virginia and Bill fell to sleep to the sound of its complaint. It swept like a mad thing through the forest, shattering down the dead snags, shaking the snow from the limbs of the spruce, roaring and soughing in the tree tops, and blustering, like an arrogant foe, around the cabin walls. And when Bill went forth for his morning's woodcutting he found that his snowshoes did not break through the crust.

The wind had blown and crusted the drifts during the night. But it did not mean that he and his companion could start at once down the settlements. The crust was treacherous and possibly only temporary. The clouds had overspread again, and any moment the snowfall might recommence. The fact remained, however, that it was the beginning of the end. Probably in a few more weeks, perhaps days, it would be safe to start their journey. Bill was desolated by the thought.

The morning, however, could not be wasted. It permitted him to make a dash over to a certain stream further down toward the Yuga River in search of any sign of the lost mine. The stream itself was frozen to blue steel, and the snow had covered it to the depth of several feet, but there might be blazes on the trees or the remnants of a broken cabin to indicate the location of the lost claim. He had searched this particular stream once before, but it was one of the few remaining places that he hadn't literally combed from the springs out of which it flowed to its mouth. He started out immediately after breakfast.

It was not to be, however, that Bill should make the search that day. When about two miles from the cabin he saw, through a rift in the distant trees, a distinct trail in the snow.

It was too far to determine what it was. Likely it was only the track of a wild animal,—a leaping caribou that cut deep into the drifts, or perhaps a bear, tardy in hibernating. No one could blame him, he thought, if he didn't go to investigate. It was a matter he would not even have to mention to Virginia. He stood a moment in the drifts, torn by an inner struggle.

Bill was an extremely sensitive man and his senses were trained even to the half-psychic, mysterious vibrations of the forest life, and he had a distant premonition of disaster. All of his fondest hopes, his dreams, all of the inner guardians of his own happiness told him to keep to his search, to journey on his way and forget he had seen the tracks. Every desire of Self spoke in warning to him. But Bill Bronson had a higher law than self. Long ago, in front of the ramshackle hotel in Bradleyburg, he had given a promise; and he had reaffirmed it in the gleam of the Northern Lights not many nights before. There was no one to hold him to his pledged word. There were none that need know; no one to whom he must answer but his own soul. Yet even while he stood, seemingly hesitating between the two courses, he already knew what he must do.

It was impossible for Bill to be false to himself. He could not disobey the laws of his own being. He would be steadfast. He turned and went over to investigate the tracks.

He was not in the least surprised at their nature. Those that had ordained his destiny had never written that he should know the good fortune of finding them merely the tracks of animals. The trail was distinctly that of snowshoes, and it led away toward the Yuga River.

Bill glanced once, then turned back toward his cabin. He mushed the distance quickly. Virginia met him with a look of surprise.

"I'm planning a longer dash than I had in mind at first," he told her. "It's important——" he hesitated, and a lie came to his lips. But it was not such a falsehood as would be marked, in ineffaceable letters, against him on the Book of Judgement. He spoke to save the girl any false hopes. "It's about my mine," he said, "and I'll not likely be back before to-morrow night. It might take even longer than that. Would you be afraid to stay alone?"

"There's nothing to be afraid of here," the girl replied. "But it will be awfully lonesome without you. But if you think you've got a real clew, I wouldn't ask you to stay."

"It's a real clew." The man spoke softly, rather painfully. She wondered why he did not show more jubilation or excitement. "You've got your pistol and you can bolt the door. I've got plenty of wood cut. There's kindling too—and you can light a fire in the morning. If you put a big log on to-night you'll have glowing coals in the morning. It will be cold getting up, and I wish I could be here to build your fire. But I don't think I can."

She gave him a smile and was startled sober in the middle of it. All at once she saw that the man was pale. He had, then, found a clew of real importance. "Go ahead, of course," she told him. "We'll fix some lunch for you right away."

He took a piece of dried moose meat, a can of beans and another of marmalade, and these, with a number of dried biscuits, would comprise his lunch. "Be careful of yourself," he told her at parting. "If I don't get back to-morrow, don't worry. And pray for me."

She told him she would, but she did not guess the context of the prayer his own heart asked. His prayer was for failure, rather than success.

Following his own tracks, he went directly back to the mysterious snowshoe trail. He followed swiftly down it, anxious to know his fate at the first possible instant. He saw that the trail was fresh, made that morning; he had every reason to think that he could overtake the man who had made it within a few hours.

He was not camped on the Yuga,—whoever had come mushing through the silences that morning. From the river to that point where he had found the tracks was too great a distance for any musher to cover in the few hours since dawn. There was nothing to believe but that the stranger's camp lay within a few miles of his own. He decided, from his frequent stops, that the man had been hunting; there was nothing to indicate that he was following a trap line. The frequent tracks in the snow, however, indicated an unusually good tracking country. He wondered if strangers—Indians, most likely—had come to poach on his domain.

He did not catch up with the traveler in the snow. The man had mushed swiftly. But shortly after the noon hour his keen eyes saw a wisp of smoke drifting through the trees, and his heart leaped in his breast. He pushed on, emerging all at once upon a human habitation.

It was a lean-to, rather than a cabin. Some logs had been used in its construction, but mostly its walls were merely frames, thatched heavily with spruce boughs. A fire smoldered in front. And his heart leaped with indescribable relief when he saw that neither of the two men that were squatted in the lean-to mouth was the stranger that had passed his camp six years before.

Bill had old acquaintance with the type of man that confronted him now. One of them was Joe Robinson,—an Indian who had wintered in Bradleyburg a few years before. Bill recognized him at once; he came of a breed that outwardly, at least, changes little before the march of time. There was nothing about him to indicate his age. He might be thirty—perhaps ten years older. Bill felt fairly certain, however, that he was not greatly older. In spite of legend to the contrary, a forty-year old Indian is among the patriarchs, and pneumonia or some other evil child of the northern winter, claims him quickly.

Joe's blood, he remembered, was about three-fourths pure. His mother had been a full-blooded squaw, his father a breed from the lake region to the east. He was slovenly as were most of his kind; unclean; and the most distinguished traits about him were not to his credit,—a certain quality of craft and treachery in his lupine face. His yellow eyes were too close together; his mouth was brutal. His companion, a half-breed with a dangerous mixture of French, was a man unknown to Bill,—but the latter did not desire a closer acquaintance. He was a boon companion and a mate for Joe.

Yet both of them possessed something of that strange aloofness and dignity that is a quality of all their people. They showed no surprise at Bill's appearance. In these mighty forests human beings were as rare a sight as would be an aeroplane to African savages, yet they glanced at him seemingly with little interest. It was true, however, that these men knew of his residence in this immediate section of Clearwater. The loss of his father's mine was a legend known all over that particular part of the province; they knew that he sought it yearly, clear up to the trapping season. When the snows were deep, they were well aware that he ran trap lines down the Grizzly River. Human inhabitants of the North are not so many but that they keep good track of one another's business.

But they had a better reason still for knowing that he was near. The prevailing winds blew down toward them from Bill's camp, and sometimes, through the unfathomable silence of the snowy forest, they had heard the faint report of his loud-mouthed gun.

It is doubtful that a white man—even a resident of the forest such as Bill—could ever have heard as much. He was a woodsman, but he did not inherit, straight from a thousand woodsman ancestors, perceptions almost as keen as those of the animals themselves. As it was, he hadn't had a chance to guess their presence. The wind always carried the sound of their rifles away from him rather than toward him; besides, their guns were of smaller caliber and had a less violent report.

Last of all, they had been careful about shooting. For a certain very good reason they had no desire for Bill to discover their presence. There are certain laws, among the northern men, as to trapping rights. Nothing can be learned in the provincial statute books concerning these laws. Mostly they are unwritten; but their influence is felt clear beyond the Arctic Circle. They state quite clearly that when a man lays down a line of traps, for a certain distance on each side of him the district is his, and no one shall poach on his preserves. And these Indians had lately been partners in an undertaking to clear the whole region of its furs.

They had no idea but that Bill had discovered their trap lines and had come to make trouble. For all that they sat so still and aloof, Joe's mind had flashed to his rifle in the corner of the lean-to, six feet away. He rather wished it was nearer. His friend Pete the Breed was considerably reassured by the feel of his long, keen-bladed knife against his thigh. Knives, after all, were very effective at close work. The two of them could really afford to be insolent.

And they were considerably amazed at Bill's first question. He had left the snowshoe trail that evidently passed in front of the shelter and had crossed the snow crust to the mouth of the lean-to. "Did one of you make those tracks out there?" he asked. He felt certain that one of them had. He only asked to make sure.

There was a quality in Bill's voice that usually, even from such gentry as this, won him a quick response. Joe's mind gave over the insolence it had planned. But for all that Bill's inner triumph was doomed to be short-lived.

"No," Joe grunted. "Our partner made it. Follow it down—pretty soon find another cabin."

XIV

Bill only had to turn to see the snowy roof of the cabin, two hundred yards away down the glade. Ordinarily his sharp eyes would have discerned it long before: perhaps the same inner spirit, encountered before this eventful day, was trying to protect him still. He turned without a word, and no man could have read the expression on his wind-tanned face. He mushed slowly on to his journey's end.

It was a new cabin, just erected, and smoke drifted faintly from its chimney. Bill rapped on the door.

"Come along in," some one answered gruffly. Bill removed his snowshoes, and the door opened before his hand.

He did not have to glance twice at the bearded face to know in whose presence he stood. His inner senses told him all too plainly. Changed as he was, there was no chance in heaven or earth for a mistake. This was Harold Lounsbury, the same man who had passed his camp years before, the same lost lover that Virginia had come to find.

Even now, Bill thought, it was not too late to withdraw. He could pretend that he had came to quarrel in regard to his trapping rights. After one glance he knew that, from the standard of good sense, there was a full reason for withdrawal. In the years he might even reconcile his own conscience to the act. Harold leaned forward, but he didn't get up to meet him.

Bill scarcely noticed the man's furtive preparations for self-defense. His rifle lay across his knees, and ostensibly he was in the act of cleaning it, but in reality he was holding it ready for Bill's first offensive move. He had known of Bill of old; in the circle in which he moved—lost utterly to the sight of the men of Bradleyburg—there were stories in plenty about this stalwart woodsman. For days—ever since he had come here with his Indians and laid down his trap line—he had dreaded just such a visit. The real reason for Bill's coming did not even occur to him.

Bill saw that the man was frightened. His lips were loose, his eyes nervous and bright, his hands did not hold quite steady. But all these observations were at once obliterated and forgotten in the face of a greater, more profound discovery. In one scrutinizing glance the truth swept him like a flood. Here was one that the wilderness had crushed in its brutal grasp. As far as Bill's standards were concerned, it had broken and destroyed him.

This did not mean that his health was wasted. His body was strong and trim: except for a suspicious network of red lines in his cheeks and a yellow tinge to the whites of his eyes, he would have seemed in superb physical condition. The evidence lay rather in the expression of his face, and most of all in the surroundings in which he lived.

He had been, to some extent at least, a man of refinement and culture when he had passed through Bill's camp so long ago. He had been clean-shaven except for a small mustache; courteous, rather patronizing but still friendly. Now he was like a surly beast. His eyes were narrow and greedy,—weasel eyes that at once Bill mistrusted and disliked. A scowl was at his lips, no more were they in a firm, straight line. The light and glory of upright manhood, if indeed he had ever possessed it, had gone from him now. He was a friend and a companion of Joe and Pete: in a measure at least he was of their own kind.

When the white man chooses to descend, even the savages of the forest cannot keep pace with him. Bill knew now why Harold had never written home. The wilderness had seized him body and soul, but not in the embrace of love with which it held Bill. Obviously he had taken the line of least resistance to perdition. He had forgotten the world of men; in reality he was no longer of it. Bill read the truth—a familiar truth in the North—in his crafty, stealthy, yet savage face.

He was utterly unkempt and slovenly. His coarse beard covered his lips, his matted hair was dull with dirt, his skin was scarcely less dark than that of the Indians themselves. The nails on his hands were foul; the floor of the house was cluttered with rubbish and filth. It was a worthy place, this new-built cabin! Even the desolate wastes outside were not comparable with this.

Yet leering through his degeneracy, his identity could not be mistaken. Here was the man Virginia had pierced the North to seek.

Harold removed his pipe. "What do you want?" he asked.

For a moment Bill did not answer. His thoughts were wandering afar. He remembered, when Harold had passed his camp, there had been something vaguely familiar, a haunting resemblance to a face seen long before. The same familiarity recurred to him now. But he pushed it away and bent his mind to the subject in hand. "You're Lounsbury, of course," he said.

"Sure." This man had not forgotten his name, in the years that he was lost to men. "I ask you again—what do you want?"

"You've been living on the Yuga. You came up here to trap in my territory."

The man's hands stirred, ever so little, and the rifle moved on his knees. "You don't own this whole country." Then he seemed to take courage from Bill's impassive face. He remembered his stanch allies—Pete and Joe. "And what if I did?"

"You knew I trapped here. You brought up Joe Robinson and a breed with you. You meant to clean up this winter—all the furs in the country."

Harold's face drew in a scowl. "And what are you goin' to do about it?"

"The queer thing is——" and Bill spoke quietly, slowly, "I'm not going to do anything about it—now."

Harold's crafty eyes searched his face. He wondered if Bill was afraid—some way it didn't fit into the stories that he had heard of him that this woodsman should be afraid. But he might as well go on that supposition as any other. "Maybe it's a good thing," he said. And for an instant, something of his lost suavity of speech came back to him. "Then to what—do I owe the honor of this visit?"

Bill sighed and straightened. The struggle within himself had, an instant before, waged more furiously than ever. Why should he not leave this man to his filthy cabin and his degeneracy and never let Virginia know of their meeting? He wondered if such had been his secret plan, concealed in the further recesses of his mind, when he had told her to-day's expedition concerned his mine,—so that he could withdraw if he wished. In this course most likely lay the girl's ultimate happiness, certainly his own. He could steal back; no one would ever know the truth. The man had sunk beneath her; even he, Bill, was more worthy of her than this degenerate son of cities and culture.

Yet who was he to dare to take into his own hands the question of Virginia's destiny? He had promised to bring her lost lover back to her; the fact that he was no longer the man she had known could be only a subterfuge to quiet his own conscience. Besides, the last sentence that the man had spoken had been singularly portentous. For the instant he had fallen into his own native speech, and the fact offered tremendous possibilities. Could it be that the old days were not entirely forgotten, that some of the virtues that Virginia had loved in him still dwelt in his degenerate hulk, ready to be wakened again? He had heard of men being redeemed. And all at once he knew his course.

So intent was he upon his thoughts that he scarcely heard the sound of steps in the snow outside the cabin door, then the noise of some one on the threshold in the act of removing snowshoes.

The task that confronted him now was that, no more and no less, to which he had consecrated his life,—to bring happiness to the girl he loved. There was work to do with this man. But even yet he might be redeemed; with Bill's aid his manhood might return to him. His own love for the girl tore at his heart, the image of his life stretched lonely and drear before him, yet he could not turn aside.

"I didn't come to see you about trapping. I came—about Virginia Tremont."

His eyes were on Harold's face, and he saw the man start. He had not forgotten the name. Just for an instant his face was stark pale and devoid of expression. "Virginia!" he cried. "My God, what do you know about her?"

But he didn't wait the answer. All at once he looked, with an annoyance and anxiety that at first Bill could not understand, toward the door of the cabin. The door knob slightly turned.

Bill wheeled, with a sense of vast and impending drama. Harold swore, a single brutal oath, then laughed nervously. An Indian squaw—for all her filth an untidiness a fair representative of her breed—pushed through the door and came stolidly inside. She walked to the back of the cabin and began upon some household task.

Bill's face was stern as the gray cliffs of the Selkirks when he turned again to Harold. "Is that your woman?" he asked simply.

Harold did not reply. He had not wished this man, emissary from his old acquaintances of his native city, to know about Sindy. He retained that much pride, at least. But the answer to Bill's question was too self-evident for him to attempt denial. He nodded, shrugging his shoulders.

Bill waited an instant; and his voice when he spoke again was singularly low and flat. "Did you marry her?"

Harold shrugged again. "One doesn't marry squaws," he replied.

Once more the silence was poignant in the wretched cabin. "I came to find Harold Lounsbury, a gentleman," Bill went on in the same strange, flat voice, "and I find—a squaw man."

Bill realized at once that this new development did not in the least affect his own duty. His job had been to find Harold and return him to Virginia's arms. It was not for him to settle the girl's destiny. For all he had spent his days in the great solitudes of nature he knew enough of life to know that women do not give their love to angels. Rather they love their men as much for their weaknesses as for their virtues. This smirch in Harold's life was a question for the two of them to settle between them.

It did, however, complicate the work of regeneration. Bill had known squaw men before, and few of them had ever regenerated. Usually they were men that could not stand the test of existence by their own toil: either from failure or weakness they took this sordid line of least resistance. From thence on they did not struggle down the trap line in the bitter winter days. They laid comfortably in their cabins and their squaws tended to such small matters. It was true that the squaws wore out quickly; sometimes they needed beating, and at about forty they withered and died, or else the blizzard caught them unprotected in the forest,—and then it became necessary to select another. This was an annoyance, but not a tragedy. One was usually as faithful and as industrious as another.

It was perfectly evident that Sindy had been at work setting out traps. Bill stared at the woman and for the moment he did not see the little sparks growing to flame in Harold's eyes.

"What did you say?" he asked, menacing. He had caught a word that has come to be an epithet in the North.

But by taking it up Harold made a severe strategical error. Bill had never hesitated, by the light of an ancient idiom, to call a spade a spade. Also he always had good reasons before he took back his words. "I said," he repeated clearly, "that I'd found—a squaw man."

Harold's muscles set but immediately relaxed again. He shrugged once. "And is it anybody's business but my own?" he asked.

"It hadn't ought to be, but it is," was the answer. "It's my business, and somebody else's too." he turned to the woman. "Listen, Sindy, and give me a polite answer. You're Joe Robinson's sister, aren't you?"

The Indian looked up, nodded, then went back to her work.

"Then you left Buckshot Dan—to come here and live with this white man?"

Harold turned to her with a snarl. "Don't answer him, Sindy. It's none of his business." Then his smoldering eyes met Bill's. "Now we've talked enough. You can go."

"Wait!" Something in the grave face and set features silenced the squaw man. "But it's true—we have talked just about enough. I've got one question. Lounsbury—do you think, by any chance—you've got any manhood left? Do you think you're rotten clear through?"

Harold leaped then, savage as a wolf, and his rifle swung in his arms. Instantly Bill's form, impassive before, seemed simply to waken with life. There was no rage in his face, only determination; but his arm drove out fast as a serpent's head. Seemingly with one motion he wrenched the gun from the man's hand and sent him spinning against the wall.

Before even his body crashed against the logs, Bill had whirled to face the squaw. He knew these savage women. It would be wholly in character for her whip a gleaming knife from her dress and spring to her man's aid. But she looked up as if with indifference, and once more went back to her work.

Bill was considerably heartened. At least he didn't have to deal with the savage love that sometimes the Indian women bore the whites. Sindy was evidently wholly indifferent to Harold's fate. The match obviously had not been a great success.

For an instant Harold lay still, crumpled on the floor; then his bleeding hands fumbled at his belt. Once more Bill sprang and snatched him to his feet. The holster, however, was empty.

"No more of that," Bill cautioned. The man's eyes smoldered with resentment, but for the moment he was cowed. "Before you start anything more, hear what I've got to offer you." His voice lowered, and the words came rather painfully. "It's your one chance, Lounsbury—to come back. Virginia Tremont has come into the North, looking for you. She's at my camp. She wants to take you back with her."

Lounsbury's breath caught with a strange, sobbing sound. "Virginia—up here?" he cried. "Does she know about—this——" He indicated the cabin interior, and all it meant, with one sweep of his arm.

"Of course not. How could she? Whether you tell her or not is a matter for you and she to decide. She's come to find you—and bring you back."

"My God! To the States?"

"Of course."

For the instant the black wrath had left his face, and his thought swung backward to his own youth,—to the days he had known Virginia in a far-off city. He was more than a little awed at this manifestation of her love. He supposed that she had forgotten him long since and had never dreamed that she would search for him here.

Once more the expression of his face changed, and Bill couldn't have explained the wave of revulsion that surged through him. He only knew a blind desire to tear with his strong fingers those leering lips before him. Harold was lost in insidious speculations. He remembered the girl's beauty, the grace and litheness of her form, the holy miracle of her kisses. Opposite him sat his squaw,—swarthy, unclean, shapeless, comely as squaws go but as far from Virginia as night was from day. Perhaps it wasn't too late yet——

But at that instant he heard the East Wind on the roof, and he recalled that the old problem of existence faced him still. He had solved it up here. His cabin was warm, he was full-fed; the squaw grubbed his living for him out of the frozen forests. He did not want to be forced to face the competition of civilized existence again. He was dirty, care-free; his furs supplied food and clothes for him and certain rags for her, and filled his cupboard with strong drink. He remembered that the girl had had no money, and that he had come first to the North to find gold. If he had succeeded, if his poke were heavy with the yellow metal, he could go back to his city and take up his old life anew, but he couldn't begin at the bottom. With wealth at his command he might even find a more desirable woman than Virginia: perhaps the years had changed her even as himself. There was no need of dreaming further about the matter. Only one course, considering the circumstances, lay before him.

"You're very kind," he said at last. "But I won't go. Tell her you didn't find me."

Bill straightened and sighed. "Make no mistake about that, Lounsbury," he answered. "You're going with me—" and then he spoke softly, a pause between each word—"if I have to drag you there through the snow. I was told to bring you back, and I'm going to do it."

"You are, eh?" Harold scowled and tried to find courage to attack this man again. Yet his muscles hung limp, and he couldn't even raise his eyes to meet those that looked so steadfastly at him now.

"Sindy can go home to Buckshot Dan. He'll take her back—you stole her from him. And you, Lounsbury, rotten as you are, are coming with me. God knows I hope she'll drive you from her door; but I'm going to bring you, just the same."

Harold's eyes glowed, and for the moment his brain was too busy with other considerations openly to resent the words. Then his face grew cunning. It was all plain enough: Bill loved Virginia himself. Through some code of ethics that was almost incredible to Harold, he was willing to sacrifice his own happiness for hers. And the way to pay for the rough treatment he had just had, treatment that he couldn't, at present at least, avenge in kind, was to win the girl away from him. The thing was already done. She loved him enough to search even the frozen realms of the North for him: simply by a little tenderness, a little care, he could command her to love to the full again. The fact that Bill wanted her made her infinitely more desirable to him.

"You won't tell her—about Sindy?"

"Not as long as you're decent. That's for you to settle for yourself—whether she finds out about her."

Harold believed him. While he himself would have used the smirch as a weapon against his rival, he knew that Bill meant what he said. "I'll go," he announced. "If she's at the Gray Lake cabin, we've got plenty of time to make it before dark."

XV

Harold Lounsbury found to his surprise that they were not to start at once. It soon became evident that Bill had certain other matters on his mind.

"Build a fire and put on some water to heat—fill up every pan you have," he instructed Sindy. He himself began to cram their little stove with wood. Harold watched with ill-concealed anxiety.

"What's that for?" he asked at last.

Bill straightened up and faced him. "You didn't think I was going to take you looking like you do, do you—into Virginia's presence? The first thing on the program is—a bath."

Harold flushed: the red glow was evident even through the sooty accumulation on his face. "It seems to me you're going a little outside your authority as Miss Tremont's representative. I don't know that I need to have any hillbilly tell me when I need a bath."

"Yes?" Bill's eyes twinkled—for the first time during their talk. "Hillbilly is right—in contrast to a cultured gentleman of cities. But let me correct you. You may not know it, but I do. And you need one now." He turned once more to Sindy. "And see what you can do about this gentleman's clothes, too; if he's got any clean underwear or any other togs, load 'em out."

"Anything else?" Harold asked sarcastically.

"Several things. Have you got any kind of a razor?"

"No. I don't want one either."

"Better look around and find one. If you don't, I'll be obliged to shave you with my jackknife—and it will be inclined to pull. It's sharp enough for skinning grizzlies but not for that growth of yours. And I'll try to trim your hair up for you a little, too. When you bathe, bathe all over—don't spare your face or your hair. Water may seem strange at first, but you'll get used to it. And I'll go over and sit with Joe Robinson and his friend until you are ready. The surroundings are more appetizing. If you can polish yourself well in an hour, we'll make it through to-night."

Harold's heart burned, but he acquiesced. Then Bill turned and left him to his ablutions.

Less than an hour later Harold came mushing up the lean-to where Bill waited. And the hour had wrought a profound and amazing change in the man's appearance. He had conscientiously gone to work to cleanse himself, and he had succeeded. His hair, dull before, was a glossy dark-brown now; he had shaved off the matted growth about his lips, leaving only a small, neat mustache; his hair was trimmed and carefully parted. The man's skin had also resumed its natural shade.

For the first time Bill realized that Harold was really a rather handsome man. His features were much more regular than Bill's own. The lips were fine,—just a little too fine, in fact, giving an intangible but unmistakable hint of cruelty. The only thing that had not changed was his eyes. They were as smoldering and wolfish as ever.

By Bill's instructions he had loaded his back with blankets, his pistol was at his belt, and he carried a thirty-five rifle in the hollow of his arm.

"I'm ready," he said gruffly.

"I'm glad to hear it." Bill glanced at his watch. "It's late, but by mushing fast we can make it in by dark. I told Virginia that I'd likely need an extra day at least—she'll think I've worked fast. She'd know it—if she had seen how you looked an hour ago. I was counting on finding you somewhere along the Yuga."

"We moved up—a few weeks ago."

"There's one other thing, before we start. I want you to tell these understrappers of yours to take that squaw and clear out of Clearwater. Tell 'em to take her back where she belongs—to Buckshot Dan. He'll take her in, all right. I've been working in Miss Tremont's interests until now—now I'm working in my own. This happens to be my trapping country. If I come back in a few weeks and find them still here there's apt to be some considerable shedding of a bad mixture of bad blood. In other words—skin out while you yet can."

The half-breeds, understanding perfectly, looked to Harold for confirmation. The latter had already learned several lessons of importance this day, and he didn't really care to learn any more. His answer was swift.

"Go, as he says," Harold directed.

Their dark faces grew sullen. The idea was evidently not to their favor. Then one asked a question in the Indian vernacular.

Bill was alert at once. Here was a situation that he couldn't handle. Harold glanced once at his face, saw by his expression that he was baffled, and answered in the same language. From the tone of his voice Bill would have said that he uttered a promise.

Once more the Indian questioned, and Harold hesitated an instant, as if seeking an answer. It seemed to the other white man that his eye fell to the rifle that Bill carried. Then he spoke again, gesturing. The gesture that he made was four fingers, as if in an instinctive motion, held before the Indian's eyes. Then he announced that he was ready to go.

The afternoon was almost done when they started out. The distant trees were already dim; phantoms were gathered in the spaces between the trunks. The two mushed swiftly through the snow.

Bill had enough memory of that glance to his rifle to prefer to walk behind, keeping a close eye on Harold. Yet he could see no reason on earth why the man should make any attempt upon his life. The trip was to Harold's own advantage.

He had plenty of time to think in the long walk to his cabin. Only the snowy forest lay about him: the only sound was the crunch of their shoes in the snow, and there was nothing to distract him. Now that it was evident that Harold had no designs upon his life, he walked with bowed head, a dark luster in his eyes.

He had fulfilled his contract and found the missing man. Even now he was showing him the way to Virginia. He wondered if he had been a fool to have sacrificed his own happiness for an unworthy rival. The world grew dreary and dark about him.

He had tried to hide his own tragedy by a mask of brusqueness, even a grim humor when he had given his orders to Harold. But he hadn't deceived himself. His heart had been leading within him. Now he even felt the beginnings of bitterness, but he crushed them down with all the power of his will. He mustn't let himself grow bitter, at least,—black and hating and jealous. Rather he must follow his star, believe yet in its beauty and its fidelity, and never look at it through glasses darkly. He must take what fate had given him and be content,—a few wonderful weeks that could never come again. He had had his fling of happiness; the day was at an end.

It was true. As if by a grim symbolism, darkness fell over Clearwater. The form in front of him grew dim, ghostly, yet well he knew its reality. The distant trunks blurred, faded, and were obliterated; the trees, swept and hidden by the snow, were like silent ghosts that faded; the whole vista was like a scene in a strange and tragic dream.

The silence seemed to press him down like a malignant weight. The mysterious and eerie sorrow of the northern night went home to him as never before.

He knew all too well the outcome of this day's work. There would be a few little moments of gratitude from Virginia; perhaps in the joy of the reunion she would even forget to give him this. He would try to smile at her, to wish her happiness; he would fight to make his voice sound like his own. She would take Harold to her heart the same as ever. He had not the least hope of any other consummation. Now that Harold was shaved and clean he was a handsome youth, and all the full sweep of her old love would go to him in an instant. In fact, her love had already gone to him—across thousands of miles of weary wasteland—and through that love she had come clear up to these terrible wilds to find him.

His speech, his bearing seemed already changed. He was remembering that he was a gentleman, one of Virginia's own kind. He already looked the part. Perhaps he was already on the way toward true regeneration. It was better that he should be, for Virginia's happiness. Her happiness—this had been the motive and the theme of Bill's work clear through: it was his one consolation now. In a few days the snow crust would be firm enough to trust, and hand in hand they would go down toward Bradleyburg. He would see the joy in their faces, the old luster of which he himself had dreamed in Virginia's eyes. But it would not flow out to him. The holy miracle would not raise him from the dead. He would serve her to the last, and when at length they saw the roofs and tottering chimneys of Bradleyburg she would go out of his work and out of his life, never to return. In their native city Harold Lounsbury would take his old place. He's have his uncle's fortune to aid him in is struggle for success. The test of existence was not so hard down there; he might be wholly able to hold Virginia's respect and love, and make her happy. Such was Bill's last prayer.

They were nearing the cabin now. They saw the candlelight, like a pale ghost, in the window. Virginia was still up, reading, perhaps, before the fire. She didn't guess what happiness Bill was bringing her across the snow.

Bill could fancy her, bright eyes intent, face a little thoughtful, perhaps, but tender as the eyes of angels. He could see her hair burnished in the candlelight, the soft, gracious beauty of her face. Her lips, too,—he couldn't forget those lips of hers. A shudder of cold passed over his frame.

He strode forward and put his hand on Harold's arm. "Wait," he commanded. "There's one thing more."

Harold paused, and the darkness was not so dense but that this face was vaguely revealed, sullen and questioning.

"There's one thing more," Bill repeated again. "I've brought you here. I've given you your chance—for redemption. God knows if I had my choice I'd have killed you first. She's not going to know about the squaw, unless you tell her. These matters are all for you to decide, I won't interfere."

He paused, and Harold waited. And his eager ears caught the faint throb of feeling in the low, almost muttered notes.

"But don't forget I'm there," he went on. "I work for her—until she goes out of my charge and I'm her guide, her protector, the guardian of her happiness. That's all I care about—her happiness. I don't know whether or not I did wrong to bring a squaw man to her—but if you're man enough to hold her love and make her happy, it doesn't matter. But I give—one warning."

His voice changed. It took on a quality of infinite and immutable prophecy In the darkness and the silence, the voice might have come from some higher realm, speaking the irrevocable will of the forest gods.

"She'll be more or less in your power at times, up here. I won't be with you every minute. But if you take one jot of advantage of that fact—either in word or deed—I'll break you and smash you and kill you in my hands!"

He waited an instant for the words to go home. Harold shivered as if with cold. And because in his mind already lay the vision of their meeting, he uttered one more sentence of instructions. He was a strong man, this son of the forest—and no man dared deny the trait—but he could not steel himself to see that first kiss. The sight of the girl, fluttering and enraptured in Harold's arms, the soft loveliness of her lips on his, was more than he could bear.

"Go on in," he said. "She's waiting for you."

And she was. She had waited six years, dreaming all the while of his return. Harold went in, and left his savior to the doubtful mercy of the winter forest, the darkness that had crept into his heart, and the hush that might have been the utter silence of death itself had it not been for the image of a faint, enraptured cry, the utterance of dreams come true, within the cabin door.

XVI

When Virginia heard the tramp of feet on her threshold she didn't dream but that Bill had returned a day earlier than he had planned. Her heart gave a queer little flutter of relief. The cabin had been lonely to-night, the silence had oppressed her; most of all she had dreaded the long night without the comforting reassurance of his presence. She wouldn't have admitted, even to herself, that her comfort was so dependent upon this man. And she sprang up, joyously as a bird springing from a bough, to welcome him.

The next instant she stopped, appalled. The door did not open, the steps did not cross her threshold. Instead, knuckles rapped feebly on the door.

Even in a city, it is a rather discomforting experience for a girl, alone in a home at night, to answer a tap on the door. Here in this awful silence and solitude she was simply and wholly terrified. She hadn't dreamed that there was a stranger within many miles of the cabin. For an instant she didn't know what to do. The knock sounded again.

But Virginia had acquired a certain measure of self-discipline in these weary weeks, and her mind at once flashed to her pistol. Fortunately she had not taken it from her belt, and she had full confidence in her ability to shoot it quickly and well. Besides, she remembered that her door was securely bolted.

"Who's there?" she asked. "Is it you, Bill?"

"It's not Bill," the answer came. "But he's here."

The first thought that came to her was that Bill had been injured, hurt in some adventure in the snow, and men had brought him back to the cabin. Something that was like a sickness surged through her frame. But an instant more she knew that, had he been injured, there would have been no wayfarers to find him and bring him in. There was only one remaining possibility: that this man was one whom Bill had gone out to find and who had returned with him.

The thought was so startling, so fraught with tremendous possibilities that for a moment she seemed to lose all power of speech or action.

"Who is it?" she asked again, steadily as she could.

And the answer came strange and stirring through the heavy door. "It's I—Harold Lounsbury. Bill told me to come."

Virginia was oppressed and baffled as if in a mysterious dream. For the moment she stood still, trying to quiet her leaping heart and her fluttering nerves. Yet she knew she had to make answer. She knew that she must find out whether this voice spoke true—whether or not it was her lost lover, returned to her at last.

Yet there could be no mistake. The voice was the same that she remembered of old. It was as if it had spoken out of the dead years. Her hands clasped at her breast, then she walked to the threshold and opened the door.

Harold Lounsbury stepped through, blinking in the candlelight. Instinctively the girl flung back, giving him full right of way and staring as if he were a ghost. He turned to her, half apologetic. "Bill told me to come," he said.

The man stood with arms limp at his side, and a great surge of mingled emotions swept the girl as in a flood. She was pale as a ghost, and her hands trembled when she stretched them out. "Harold," she murmured unsteadily. She tried to smile. "Is it really you, Harold?"

"It's I," he answered. "We've come together—at last."

The words seemed to rally her scattered faculties. The dreamlike quality of the scene at once dissolved. Utter and bewildering surprise is never an emotion that can long endure; its very quality makes for brevity. Already some leveling, cool sense within her had begun to accept the fact of his presence.

Instinctively her eyes swept his face and form. All doubt was past: this man was unquestionably Harold. Yet she was secretly and vaguely shocked. Her first impression was one of change: that the years had some way altered him,—other than the natural changes that no living creature may escape.

In reality his face had aged but little. He had worn just such a mustache when he went away. Perhaps his eyes were changed: for the moment she thought that they were, and the change repelled her and estranged her. His mouth was not quite right, either; his form, though powerful, had lost some of its youthful trimness.

It seemed to her, for one fleeting instant, that there was a brutality in his expression that she had never seen before. But at once the reaction came. Of course these northern forests had changed him. He had fought with the cold and the snow, with all the primeval forces of nature: he had simply hardened and matured. It was true that the calm strength of Bill's face was not to be seen in his. Nevertheless he was clean, stalwart, and his embarrassment was a credit to him rather than a discredit.

This thought was the beginning of the reaction that in a moment grasped her and held her. The truth suddenly flamed clear and bright: that Harold Lounsbury had returned to her arms. Her search was over. She had won. He stood before her, alive and well. He had come back to her. Her effort had been crowned with success.

He was her old lover, in the flesh. Of course she would experience some shock on first meeting him, see some changes; but they were nothing that should keep her from him. He seized her hands in both of his. "Virginia," he cried. "My God, I can't believe it's you!"

She remained singularly cool in the ardor of this cry. "Why didn't you write?" she asked. "Why didn't you come home?"

The questions, instead of embarrassing him further, put Harold at his ease. He was on safe grounds now. He had prepared for just these queries, on the long walk to the cabin.

"I did write," he cried. "Why didn't you answer?"

The words came glib to his lips. She stared at him in amazement. "You did—you say you wrote to me?" she asked him, deeply moved.

"Wrote? I wrote a dozen times. And I never received a word—except from Jules Nathan."

"But Jules Nathan—Jules Nathan is dead!"

"He is?" But Harold's surprise was feigned. This was one piece of news that had trickled through the wastes to him,—of the death of Jules Nathan, a man known to them both. It was safe to have heard from him. The contents of the letter could never be verified. "He told me—after I'd written many times, and never got an answer—that you were engaged to be married—to a Chicago man. I thought you'd forgotten me. I thought you'd been untrue."

Virginia held hard on her faculties and balanced his words. She had known Chicago men during the six years that she had moved in the most exalted social circles of her own city. The story held water, even if she had been inclined to doubt it. She knew it was always easy for an engagement rumor to start and be carried far, when a prominent girl was involved. "I didn't get your letters," she told him. "Are you sure you addressed them right——"

"I thought so——"

"And you didn't get mine——"

"No—not after the first few days. I changed my address—but I told you of the change in a letter. I never heard from you after that."

"Then it's all been a misunderstanding—a cruel mistake. And you thought I had forgotten——"

"I thought you'd married some one else. I couldn't believe it when Bill came to my cabin to-day and told me you were here—I've been trapping over toward the Yuga. And now—we're together at last."

But curiously these last words cost her her self-possession. Instantly she was ill at ease. The reestablishment of their old relation could only come gradually: although she had not anticipated it, the six years of separation had wrought their changes. She felt that she needed time to become adjusted to him—just as a man who has been blind needs time to become adjusted to his vision. And at once their proximity, in this lonely cabin, was oddly embarrassing.

"Where's Bill?" she asked. She turned to the door and called. "Bill, where are you?"

His voice seemed quite his own when he answered from the stillness of the night. "I'll be in in a moment—I was just getting a load of wood."

It wasn't true. He had been standing dumb and inert in the darkness, his thoughts wandering afar. But he began hastily to fill his arms with fuel. Virginia turned back to her new-found lover.

She was a little frightened by the expression on his face. His eyes were glowing, the color had risen in his cheeks, he was curiously eager and breathless. "Before he comes," he urged. "We've been apart so long——"

His hands reached out and seized hers. He drew her toward him. She didn't resist: she felt a deep self-annoyance that she didn't crave his kiss. She fought away her unwonted fear; perhaps when his lips met hers everything would be the same again, and her long-awaited happiness would be complete. He crushed her to him, and his kiss was greedy.

Yet it was cold upon her lips. She struggled from his arms, and he looked at her in startled amazement. In fact, she was amazed at herself. When she had time to think it over, alone in her bed at night, she decided that her desperate struggle had been merely an attempt to free herself from his arms before Bill came in and saw them. She only knew that she didn't want this comrade of hers, this stalwart forester, to see her in Harold's embrace. But in the second of the act she had known a blind fear, almost a repulsion, and an overwhelming desire to escape.

She turned with a radiant smile to welcome the tall form that strode in, looking neither to the right nor left, arms heaped with wood. She found, much to her surprise, that she felt more at ease after Bill came in. She asked him how he had happened to get trace of the missing man; he answered in an even, almost expressionless tone that someway puzzled her. Then she launched desperately into that old life-saver in moments of embarrassment,—a discussion of the fates and fortunes of mutual acquaintances.

"But I'm tired, Harold," she told him in an hour. "The surprise of seeing you has been—well, too much for me. I believe I'll go to my room. It's behind that curtain."

Harold rose eagerly as if something was due him in the moment of parting; Bill got up in respect to her. But her glance was impartial. A moment later she was gone.

The first night Bill and Harold made bunks on the floor of the cabin, but health and propriety decreed that such an arrangement could only be temporary. They could not put their trust in an immediate deliverance. They might be imprisoned for weeks to come. And Bill solved the problem with a single suggestion.

They would build a small cabin for the two men to sleep in. Many times he had erected such a structure by his own efforts; the two of them could push it up in a few hours' work.

Harold had no fondness for toil of this kind, but he couldn't see how he could well avoid it. His indifference to his own fate was quite past by now. The single moment before Bill had entered the cabin door had thoroughly wakened his keenest interests and desires; already, he thought, he had entirely re-established his relations with Virginia. He was as anxious to make good now as she was to have him. Already he thought himself once more a man and a gentleman of the great outside world. His vanity was heightened; the girl's beauty had increased, if anything, since his departure; and he was more than ready to go through the adventure to its end. And he didn't dare run the risk of displeasing Virginia so soon after their meeting.

He knew how she stood on the matter. He had ventured to make one protest,—and one had been quite enough. "I'm really not much good at cabin building," he had said. "But I don't see why Bill shouldn't go work at it. I suppose you hired him for all camp work."

For an instant Virginia had stared at him in utter wonder, and then a swift look of grave displeasure had come into her face. "You forget, Harold, that it was Bill that brought you back. The thirty days he was hired for were gone long ago." But she had softened at once. "It's your duty to help him, and I'll help him too, if I can."

They had cut short logs, cleaned away the snow, and with the strength of their shoulders lifted the logs one upon another. With his ax Bill cunningly cut the saddles, carving them down so that the rainfall would drain down the corners rather than lie in the cavities and thus rot the timbers. Planks were cut for the roof, and tree boughs laid down for the floor.

The floor space was only seven feet long by eight wide—just enough for two bunks—and the walls were about as high as a sleeping-car berth. The work was done at the day's end.

In the next few days Bill mostly left the two together, trying to find his consolation in the wild life of the forest world outside the cabin. Harold had taken advantage of his absence and had made good progress: Virginia's period of readjustment was almost complete. She was prepared to make the joys of the future atone for the sorrows of the past.

Harold was still good-looking, she thought; his speech, though breaking careless at times, was attractive and charming; and most of all his love-making was more arduous than ever. In the city life that they planned he would fit in well; his uncle would help him to get on his feet. Fortunately for their peace of mind, they did not know the real truth,—that Kenly Lounsbury himself was at that moment struggling with financial problems that were about to overwhelm him. She told herself, again and again, that her life would be all that she had dreamed, that her fondest hopes had come true. A few weeks more of the snow and the waste places,—and then they could start life anew.

Yet there was something vaguely sinister, something amiss in the fact that she found herself repeating the thought so many times. It was almost as if she were trying to reassure herself, to drown out some whispering inner voice of doubt and fear. She couldn't get away from a haunting feeling that, in an indescribable way, her relations with Harold had changed.

His ardent speeches didn't seem to waken sufficient response in her own breast. She lacked the ecstasy, the wonder that she had known when, as a girl, she had first become engaged to Harold. They embarrassed her rather than thrilled her; they didn't seem quite real. Perhaps she had simply grown older. That was it: some of her girlish romance had died a natural death. She would give his man her love, would take his in return, and they would have the usual, normal happiness of marriage. All would come out well, once they got away from the silence and the snows.

Perhaps his large and extravagant speeches were merely out of place in the stark reality of the wilderness; they could thrill her as ever when she returned to her native city. Likely he could dance, after a little practice, as well as ever; fill his niche in society and give her all the happiness that woman has a right to expect upon this imperfect earth. There was certainly nothing to be distressed over now. They had been brought together as if by a miracle; any haunting doubt and fear, too subtle and intangible to put into words or even concrete thought, would quickly pass away.

She did not, however, go frequently into his arms. Someway, an embarrassment, a sense of inappropriateness and unrest always assailed her when he tried to claim the caresses that he felt were his due. And at first she could not find a plausible explanation for her reserve. Perhaps these tendernesses were also out of place in the grim reality of the North; more likely, she decided, it was a subtle sense, the guardian angel of her own integrity, warning her that too intimate relations with that man must be avoided, isolated and exiled as they were. "Not now, Harold," she would tell him. "Not until we're established again—at home."

Finally his habits and his actions did not quite meet with her approval. The first of these was only a little thing,—a failure to keep shaved. Shaving in these surroundings, without a mirror, with a battered old razor that had lain long in the cabin and had to be sharpened on a whetstone, where every drop of hot water used had to be laboriously heated on the stove, was an annoying chore at best: besides, there was no one to see him except Virginia and the guide. The stubble matted and grew on his lips and jowls. Bill, in contrast, shaved with greatest care every evening. A more important point was that his avoidance of his proper share of Bill's daily toil. He neither hewed wood nor drew water, nor made any apologies for the omission. Rather he gave the idea that Bill's services were due him by rights.

There was a little explosion, one afternoon, when he ventured to advise her in regard to her relations with Bill. The forester himself was cutting wood outside the cabin: they heard the mighty ring of his ax against the tough spruce. Virginia was at work preparing their simple evening meal; Harold was stretched on her own cot, the curtain drawn back, his arms under his head, his unshaven face curiously dark and unprepossessing.

"You must begin to keep on your own ground—with Bill, Virginia," he began in the silence.

Virginia turned to him, a wave of hot resentment flowing clear to her finger tips. If he had seen her flushed, intent face he would have backed ground quickly. Unfortunately he was gazing quietly out the window.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Wholly aware of her own displeasure, wondering at it and anxious to hide it, she was able to control her voice. Its tone gave no key to her thoughts. Harold answered her, still unwarned:

"I mean—keep him at his distance. He's a different sort from you and I. I don't mean he isn't all right, as far as his kind goes—but he hasn't had the advantages." Harold spoke tolerantly, patronizingly. "Those fellows are apt to take advantage of any familiarity. They're all right if you keep 'em in their place—but they're mighty likely to break lose from it any minute. I'm sorry you ever let him call you Virginia."

Virginia's eyes blazed. If it is one of the precepts of good breeding ever to let anger control the spirit, Virginia had made a breach indeed. Her little hands clenched, and she had a fierce and insane desire to beat those babbling lips with her fists. Then she struggled to regain her composure.

"Listen, Harold," she began at last coldly. "I don't care to hear any more such talk as that."

The man looked up then. He saw the righteous indignation in her face. He felt the rising tide of his own anger. "I'm only trying to warn you——" he began weakly.

"And I don't need or want any such warnings. I don't care what you think of Bill—for that matter, you can be sure that Bill doesn't care at all either—but I'll ask you to keep your thoughts to yourself. Oh, if you only knew—how good, how strong, how true he has been—how tender he has been to me——"

Harold was torn with jealous rage, and in his fury and malice he made the worst mistake of all. "I hope he hasn't been too tender——" he suggested viciously.

But at once he was on his feet, begging her pardon. He knew that he had made a dangerous and regrettable mistake. She forgave him—forgiveness was as much a part of her as her graciousness or her loyalty—but she didn't immediately forget. And Harold sat long hours with smoldering eyes and clenched hands, a climbing fire and fury in his brain, while the malice and resentment and jealousy that he held toward Bill grew to hatred, bitter and black.

XVII

The addition of Harold to their number did not influence, for long, Virginia's old relations with Bill. They were comrades as ever; they talked and chatted around the little stove in the hushed nights; they played their favorite melodies on the battered phonograph, and they took the same joyous, exciting expeditions into the wild. These latter diversions were looked upon with no favor by Harold, but he couldn't see how he could reasonably interfere. Nor did he care, at first, to accompany them. He had no love for the snow-swept wastes.

The crust on the snow was steadily strengthening; most the days were clear and excessively cold. The journey could be undertaken soon. Only a few more days of the adventure remained.

Their excursions at first were a matter of pleasure only, but by one unexpected stroke from the sinister powers of the wild they were suddenly made necessary. Her first knowledge of the blow came when Bill entered her cabin to build the morning fire.

She had not yet risen. It had always been her practice to wait till the room was snug and warm before she dressed. She was asleep when Bill came in, and aroused by his footsteps, she was aware of the fleeting memory of unhappy dreams. She couldn't have told just what they were. It seemed to her that some unseen danger had been menacing her security,—that evil and dangerous forces were conspiring and making war against her. Hidden foes were in ambush, ready to pounce forth.

The danger seemed different and beyond that which she had faced every day: snow and cold and the other inanimate forces of the wild. And she was vastly relieved to hear Bill's voice calling her from sleep.

But the next instant her fears returned—not the ghastly fear of evil dreams but of actual and real disaster. It wasn't Bill's usual custom to waken her. He wanted her to spend as many as possible of the monotonous hours in sleep. There was a subdued quality in his voice, too, that once or twice she had heard before. She drew aside the curtain, far enough to see his face. There was no paleness, however, nor no fear, for all that his eyes were sober.

"You'd better get up as soon as you can, Virginia," he said. "We've got to take a real hunt to-day."

"Hunt? After meat?"

"Yes. We're face to face with a new problem. The pack came by last night—the wolf pack. As usual, when men are near, they didn't make a sound. I didn't hear them at all. And they got away with the big moose ham, hanging on the spruce. Stripped the bone clean."

"Then we're out of meat?"

"All except the little piece outside the door. We've been going through it pretty fast."

Bill spoke true. Their meat consumption had practically doubled since Harold had come. For all his lack of physical exercise, the latter was an unusually heavy eater.

"But we won't be able to find any now. The moose are gone——"

"We're not very likely to, that's certain; but it won't be a tragedy if we don't. It would only be an annoyance. It's true that we've got to have more supplies to start down—I don't believe we could make it through with what we have, considering the loss of this ham—but if it's necessary I can mush over to me Twenty-three Mile cabin and get the supplies I left over there. Harold tells me he hasn't a thing in his old place. However, I can do it, if we don't happen to pick up some meat to-day."

"We might track down the wolves, and get one of those——"

"Wolf meat hasn't a flavor you'd care for, I'm afraid. The Indians have been known to eat it, but they can but away beaver and tough old grizzly bear. Those things are starvation meats only. But if you care to, we can dash out and see if we can pick up a young caribou or a left-over moose. It's pleasant out to-day, anyway. It's rather warm—I believe there's going to be a change of weather."

"Good or bad?" the girl asked.

"Haven't had any government bulletins on that point, this morning. Probably bad. The weather in the North, Virginia, goes along the way it is a while, and then it gets worse."

She dressed, and at breakfast their exultation over their trip grew painful to Harold's ears. He announced his intention of going along.

Curiously, even Virginia did not receive this announcement with particular enthusiasm. It was not that her regard for Bill was any kin to that she held for Harold. Rather, it was a fear that Harold's presence might blunt the edge of the fine companionship she enjoyed with the woodsman. It would throw a personal element into an otherwise care-free and adventurous day. But she smiled at him, rather fondly.

"Just as you like, Harold."

They put on their snowshoes, their warmest wraps, and started gayly forth. Bill took rather a new course to-day. He bent his steps toward a stream that he called Creek Despair,—named for the fact that he had once held high hopes of finding his lost mine along its waters, only to meet an utter and hopeless failure. From the map he had judged that the lost claim lay somewhere along its course, but he had washed it from its mother springs clear to its mouth, finding scarcely the faintest traces in the pan. Because he had made such a tireless search in this particular section in previous years he had completely avoided it in the present adventure. Even on his pleasure trips with Virginia he had never forgotten his search: thus he had led her into more favorable regions where he might reasonably keep his eyes over for clews. Now that he had given up finding the claim—for this season, at least, and perhaps forever—one way was as good as another. And he remembered that an old caribou trail lay just beyond the stream on the steep hillside.

Bill led the way, mushing quietly an swiftly, and Virginia sped after him. The cold had brought a high color to her cheeks and a luster to her eyes; her nerves and muscles tingled with life. She was in wonderful spirits. Never she took a hundred paces without experiencing some sort of a little, heart-gladdening adventure.

Every manifestation of the forest life about her filled her with delight. The beauty of the winter woods, the absorbing record that the wild creatures had left in the snow, the long sweep of range and valley that she could glimpse from a still hilltop, all had their joy for her. With Bill she found something to delight her, something to make her laugh and quicken her blood, in every hundred yards of their course. Sometimes when the snow record was obscure, Bill stopped and explained, usually with a graphic story and unconscious humor that made the woods tingle and ring with her joyous, rippling laughter. More than often, however, she was able to piece our the mystery by herself.

Bill had a long and highly fanciful conversation with a little, black-tailed ermine that tried to run under his feet; he imitated—to Virginia's delight, the spectacle of a large and stiff cow moose pulling herself through the mud; he repeated for her the demented cries of the loons that they had sometimes heard from the still waters of Gray Lake. But he didn't forget that the main purpose of their expedition was to hunt. When at last they reached the caribou range he commanded silence.

Harold, silent in the others' gayety, immediately evinced a decided inclination to talk. He had not particularly enjoyed the excursion so far. In the first place he had no love either for the winter forest or the creatures that inhabited it; he would have been much more comfortable and at ease beside the cabin stove. He couldn't much with comfort at Bill's regular pace: he was rather out of breath and irritated after the first two hundred rods. Most of all, he was savagely conscious of the fact that Virginia was not giving him a rightful share of her attention. For the time being she seemed to have forgotten his presence. He was resentful, wishing disaster upon the hunt, eager to turn back.

"The rule is silence, from now on," Virginia answered his first remark. "Bill says we're in a game country."

The answer didn't satisfy him. But his heart suddenly leaped when Bill glanced back in warning and pointed to an entrancing wilderness picture, a hundred yards in front.

In a little glade and framed by the forest stood a large bull caribou, flashing and incredibly vivid against the snow. There is no animal in all North American fauna, even the bull elk, that presents a more splendid figure than that huge member of the deer family, Osburn's caribou. His mane is snow white, his back and sides a glossy brown, his eye flashes, and his antlers—in the season that he carries them—stream back like young trees. The bull did not stir out of his tracks, yet he gave the impression of infinite movement and pulsing, quivering vitality. He shook and threw his head, he lifted his fore foot nervously, and framed by the winter forest he was a sight never to forget. Incidentally he made a first-class target,—one that seemed impossible to miss.

"I'll take him," Harold shouted. "Let me take him."

In a flash Harold realized that here was his opportunity: in one stroke, one easy shot, he could turn the day's ignominy into triumph. He could focus Virginia's admiration upon himself. But the impulse had even deeper significances. It was not the way of sportsmen, wandering in file on mountain trails, to clamor for the first shot at game. Whatever is said is usually in solicitation to a companion to shoot; and Virginia felt oddly embarrassed. Harold's gun leaped to his shoulder.

But in the fields of sport there is always a penalty for extreme eagerness. There is a retributive justice for those that attempt to grasp opportunities. Harold was afraid that Bill might raise and shoot, thus rubbing him of his triumph, and he pressed back against the trigger just a fifth of a second too soon. The target looked too big to miss, but his bullet flung up the snow behind the animal.

The caribou's powerful limbs pushed out a mighty leap. Frenzied, Harold shot again; but his nerve was broken and his self-control blown to the four winds. The animal had gained the shelter of the thickets by now, and Harold's third and fourth shots went wild. Then he lowered his weapon with a curse.

It is part of the creed of a certain type of hunter to never admit a clean miss. "My sights are off," Harold shouted. "They didn't shoot within three feet of where I aimed. Damn such a gun—but I think I wounded him the third shot. You'll find him dead if you follow him long enough."

Bill answered nothing, but went to see. In the firing he hadn't even raised his own gun to his shoulder. There is a certain code among hunters in regard to shooting another's game: an unwritten law that, except in a case of life and death, one hunter does not interfere with another's shooting. It was through no desire to embarrass Harold that he didn't assist him in putting down his trophy. He was simply giving the man full play. Bill stared at the caribou tracks in the snow, followed them a hundred feet, and then came mushing back.

"You didn't seem to have put one in," he reported simply.

"I didn't, eh?" Harold answered angrily. "How could you tell, so soon? I suppose you're woodsman enough to know that a wounded animal doesn't always show blood. I'd be ready to bet that if we followed him far enough we'd find him dead."

"We'd have to follow him till he died naturally of old age," was the good-humored reply. "We can't always hit, Lounsbury. He began to trot when he got into the trees—a perfectly normal gait. I think we'd better look for something else."

"Then I want you to carry my gun awhile, and let me take yours. The sights are off a mile. It's all ready, and here's a handful of extra shells. You ought to be willing to do that, at least."

Harold had forgotten that this man was not his personal guide, subject to his every wish. He held out gun and shells; and, smiling, Bill received them, giving his own weapon in exchange. They mushed on down the trail.

But Harold's miss had not been his greater sin. To miss is human; no true sportsman holds it against his fellow. The omission that followed, however, was by all the codes of the hunting trails unpardonable. He supposed that he had refilled his rifle magazine with shells before he put it in Bill's hands. In his confusion and anger, he had forgotten to do so; and the only load that the gun contained was that in the barrel, thrown in automatically when the last empty shell was ejected.

XVIII

Several seasons before there had been a fatality on the hillside above Creek Despair. An ancient spruce tree, one that had watched the forest drama for uncounted years, whose tall head lifted above all the surrounding forest and who had known the silence and the snow of a hundred winters, had languished, withered and died from sheer old age. For some seasons it had stood in its place, silent and grim and majestic in death. On the day that the three hunters emerged on their snowshoes in search of meat for their depleted larder, the wind pressed gently against it. Because its trunk was rotted away it swayed and fell heavily.

There was nothing particularly memorable in this. All trees die; all of them fall at last. Its particular significance lay in the fact that as it shattered down, sliding a distance on the steep hillside, it scraped the snow from the mouth of a winter lair of a scarcely less venerable forest inhabitant,—a savage, long-clawed, gray-furred grizzly bear.

The creature had gone into hibernation weeks before: he was deep in the cold-trance—that mysterious coma of which the wisest naturalists have no real knowledge—when the tree fell. He hadn't in the least counted on being disturbed until the leaves budded out in spring. He had filled his belly well, crawled into a long, narrow cavern in the rock, the snow had sifted down and sealed him in, his bodily heat had warmed to a sufficient degree the little alcove in the cavern that he occupied, his blood temperature had dropped down and his breathing had almost ceased, and he had lain in a deep, strange stupor, oblivious to the passage of time. And he felt the rage known to all sleepy men on being awakened.

The grizzly is a particularly crafty, intelligent animal—on the intellectual plane of the dog and elephant—and he had chosen his winter lair with special purpose in mind of a long and uninterrupted sleep. The cavern mouth was so well concealed that even the sharp eyes of the wild creatures, passing up and down the creek hardly a hundred feet away, never guessed its existence. The cavern maw had been large once, for all to see, but an avalanche had passed over it. Tons of snow, picking up a great cargo of rocks and dirt that no stream dredge in the world could lift, had roared and bellowed down the slope, narrowly missing the trunk of the great spruce, changing the contour of the creek bed and concealing its landmarks, and only a square yard of the original entrance was left. This opening was concealed by a little cluster of young spruce that had sprung up in the fallen earth. Yes, old Ephraim had had every reason to believe that no one would find him or break his sleep, and he was all the more angry at the interruption.

The falling tree had made a frightful crash just over his head, and even the deep coma in which the grizzly lay was abruptly dissolved. He sprang up, ready to fight. A little gleam of sunlight ventured through the spruce thicket, down into the mouth of the cavern, and lay like a patch of gold on the cavern floor. It served to waken some slight degree of interest in the snowy world without. It might be well to look around a moment, at least, before he lay down to sleep again. At least he had to scrape more snow over the cabin mouth. And in the meantime he might be lucky enough to find the dearest delight in his life,—a good, smashing, well-matched fight to cool the growing anger in his great veins.

Ephraim was an old bear, used to every hunting wile, and his disposition hadn't improved with years. He was the undisputed master of the forest, and he couldn't think of any particular enemy that he would not encounter with a roar of joy. As often, in the case of the old, his teeth were rotting away; and the pain was a darting, stabbing devil in his gums. His little, fierce eyes burned and smoldered with wrath, he grunted deep in his throat, and he pushed out savagely through the cavern maw. It was only a step farther through the spruce thicket into the sunlight. And at the first glance he knew that his wish was coming true.

Three figures, two abreast and one behind, came mushing through the little pass where the creek flowed. He knew them well enough. There were plenty of grizzly traditions concerned with them. He recognized them in an instant as his hereditary foes,—the one breed that had not yet learned to give him right-of-way on the trail. They were tall, fearful forms, and something in their eyes sent a shudder of cold clear to his heart, yet he was not in the humor to give ground. His nerves were jumpy and unstrung from the fall of the tree, his jaw wracked him; a turn of the hair might decide whether he would merely stand and let them pass, or whether he would launch into that terrible, death-dealing charge that most grizzly hunters, sooner or later, come to know. His mental processes did not go far enough to disassociate these enemies with the stabbing foe in his gums. For the same reason he blamed them for disruption of his sleep. His ears laid back, and he uttered a deep growl.

There was no more magnificent creature in all of the breadth of the forest than this, the grizzly of the Selkirks. He was old and savage and wise; but for all his years, in the highest pinnacle of his strength. No man need to glance twice at him to know his glory. No tenderfoot could look at him and again wonder why, in the talk round the camp fire, the tried woodsmen always spoke of the grizzly with respect.

It was true that in the far corners of the earth there were creatures that could master him. The elephant could crush the life from his mighty body with the power of his knees; Kobaoba the rhino, most surly of all game, could have pierced his heart with his horn; perhaps even the Cape buffalo—that savage explosive old gentleman of the African marshes, most famous for his deadly propensity to charge on sight—could have given him a fair battle. But woe to the lion that should be obliged to face that terrible strength! Even the tiger, sinuous and terrible—armed with fangs like cruel knives and dreadful, raking, rending claws—could not have faced him in a fair fight.

But these were folk of the tropics, and his superiority was unquestioned among the northern animals. Even the bull moose had no wish to engage in a stand-up-and-take, close-range, death fight with a grizzly. The bull caribou left his trail at the sound of his heavy body in the thicket; the wolf pack, most deadly of fighting organizations, were glad to avoid him in the snow. His first cousins, the Alaskan bears, were more mighty than he, but they were less agile and, probably, less cunning. Such lesser creatures as wished to continue to enjoy the winter sunlight stepped softly when they journeyed past his lair.

He was a peculiar gray in color,—like brown hair that has silvered in many winters. His huge head was lowered between his high, rocking shoulders, his forelegs were simply great, knotty, cast-iron bunches of fiber and tendons; his long claws—worn down by digging in the rocks for marmots—were like great, curved fingers. As he stepped, his forefeet swung out, giving to his carriage an arrogance and a swagger that would have been amusing if it hadn't been terrible. His wicked teeth gleamed white in foam, and the hair stood stiff at his shoulders.

There is no forest crisis that presents such a test to human nerves as the charge of a grizzly. There is no forest voice more fraught with ferocity and savagery of the beasts of prey than his low, deep, reverberating growl. Human beings have not yet reached such perfection of self-mastery that they can hear such a sound, leaping suddenly like a thing of substance through the bush, and disregard it. It was to be that these three foes, journeying toward him along Creek Despair, did not disregard it now. For all the depth of the snow, he pushed through the spruce thicket into the sunlight.

Thus the three hunters met him—in all his strength and glory—not fifty feet distant at the base of the hill. He seemed to be poised to charge.

Bill's keen eyes saw the bear first. All at once its huge outline against the snow leaped to his vision. At the same instant the bear growled, a sound that halted halted Virginia and Harold in their tracks. For an instant all four figures stood in indescribable tableau: the bear poised, the three staring, the snowy wastes silent and changeless and unreal.

It was the last sight in the world that Bill had expected. He had supposed that the grizzlies were all in hibernation now; he hadn't conceived of the possibilities whereby the great creature had been called from his sleep. And he knew in one glance the full peril of the situation.

Often in his forest travels Bill had met grizzlies, and nearly always he had passed them by. Usually the latter were glad to make their escape; and Bill would hasten their departure with shouts of glee. Yet this man knew the grizzly, his power and his wrath, and most of all he knew his utter unreliability. It is not the grizzly way to stand impassive when he is at bay, and neither does he like to flee up hill. If the animal did think his escape was cut off—a delusion to which the bear family seem particularly subject—he would charge them with a fury and might that had no equal in the North American animal world. And a grizzly charge is a difficult thing to stop in a distance of fifty feet.

The presence of Virginia in their party had its influence in Bill's decision. In times past he had been willing enough to take a small measure of risk to his own life, but the life of every grizzly in the North could not pay for one jot of risk to hers. Lastly he realized at the first sight of those glowing, angry eyes, the ears back, and the stiff hairs on the shoulder that the grizzly was in a fighting mood.

For all the complexity of his thought, his decision did not take an instant. There was no waiting to offer the sporting opportunity to Harold. Virginia was not aware of a lapse in time between the instant that Bill caught sight of the bear and that in which his gun came leaping to his shoulder. He had full confidence in the hard-hitting vicious bullet in Harold's thirty-five, and most of all he relied on the four reserve shots that he supposed lay in the rifle magazine. The grizzly dies hard: he felt that all four of them would be needed to arrest the charge that would likely follow his first shot.

He didn't wait for those great muscles to get into action. The animal was standing broadside to him, his head turned and red eyes watching; if Bill had his own gun, he would have aimed straight for the space between the eyes. This is never a sportsman's shot; but for an absolute marksman, in a moment of crisis, it is the surest shot of all. But he did not know Harold's gun well enough to trust such a shot. Indeed, he aimed for the great shoulder, the region of the lungs and heart. The gun cracked in the silence.

The bullet went straight home, ripping through the lungs, tearing the great arteries about the heart, shivering even a portion of the heart itself. And yet the grizzly sprang like a demon through the deep snow, straight towards him.

It is no easy thing to face a grizzly's charge. The teeth gleam in red foam, the eyes flash, the great shoulders rock. For all the deep snow that he bounded through, the beast approached at an unbelievable pace. He bawled as he came—awful, reverberating sounds that froze the blood in the veins. If the course had been open, likely he would have been upon him before Bill could send home another shot. There could only be one result to such a meeting as this. One blow would strike the life from Bill's body as the lightning strikes it from a tree. But the snow impeded the bear, and it seemed to Virginia's horrified eyes that Bill would have time to empty the magazine. She saw his fingers race as he worked the lever action of the gun: she saw his eyes lower again to the sights. The bear seemed almost upon him. And she screamed when she heard the impotent click of the hammer against the breech. Bill had fires the single shot that was in the gun.

Before ever he heard the sound Harold remembered. In one wave of horror he recalled that he had forgotten to refill the magazine with shells. Yet leaping fast—red and deadly and terrible upon the heels of his remorse—there came an emotion that seared him like a wall of fire. He saw Bill's fate. By no circumstance of which he could conceive could the man escape. A shudder passed over his frame, but it was not of revulsion. Rather it was an emotion known well to the beasts of prey, though to human beings it comes but rarely. Here was his enemy, the man he hated above all living creatures, and the blood lust surged through him like a madness. In one wave of ecstasy he felt that he was about to see the gratification of his hatred.

In the hands of a brave and loyal man, the rifle Harold carried might yet have been Bill's salvation. It was a large-caliber, close-range gun of stupendous striking power. Yet Harold didn't lift it to his shoulder. Part of it was willful omission, mostly it was the paralysis of terror. Yet he would have need enough for the gun if the bear turned on him. He saw that Bill's had was groping, hopeless though the effort was, for one of the shells that Harold had given him and which he carried in his pocket.

But there was no time to find it, to open his gun and insert it, and to fire before the ravening enemy would be upon him. He made the effort simply because it was his creed: to struggle as long as his life blood pulsed in his veins. He knew there was no chance to run or dodge. The bear could go at thrice his own pace in the deep snow. His last hope had been that Harold would come to his aid: that the man would stop the bear's charge with Bill's own heavy rifle; but now he knew that Harold's enmity of cowardice had betrayed him.

But at that instant aid came from an unexpected quarter. Virginia was not one to stand helpless or to turn and flee. She remembered the pistol at her belt, and she drew it in a flash of blue steel. True and straight she aimed toward the glowing eyes of the grizzly.

At the angle that they struck, her bullets did not penetrate the brain, but they did give Bill an instant's reprieve. The bear struck at the wounds they made, then halted, bawling, in the snow. His roving eye caught sight of Virginia's form. With a roar he bounded toward her.

The next instant was one of drama, of incredible stress and movement. For all his mortal wounds, the short distance between the bear and the girl seemed to recede with tragic swiftness. The animal's cries rang through the silent forest: near and far the wild creatures paused in their occupations to listen. Virginia also stood her ground. There was no use to flee; she merely stood straight, her eyes gazing along her pistol barrel, firing shot after shot into the animal's head. Because it was an automatic, she was able to send home the loads in rapid succession.

But they were little, futile things, with never the shocking power to stop that blasting charge. Her safety still lay in that in which she had always trusted, the same that had been her fort and her stronghold in all their past adventures. Bill saw the grizzly change in direction; his response was instinctive and instantaneous. He came leaping through the snow as if a great hand had hurled him, all of his muscles contracting in response to the swift, immutable command of his will. For all the burden of his snowshoes and the depths of the drifts, his leap was almost as fast as the grizzly's own. He had but one realization: that the girl's tender flesh must never know those rending claws and fangs. He leaped to intercept the rending charge with his own body.

But his hand had found the shell by now, dropped it into the gun, and as a last instinctive effort, pulled back the lever that slid the cartridge into the barrel. There was no time to raise the gun to his shoulder. He pointed it instinctively toward the gray throat. And the end of the barrel was against the bear's flesh as he pressed the trigger.

No human eye could follow the lightning events of the next fraction of a second. All that occurred was over and done in the duration of one heart-beat,—before the shudder and explosion in the air from the rifle's report had passed away. One instant, and the three figures seemed all together; Bill crouched with rifle held pointed in his arms, Virginia behind him, the grizzly full upon them both. The next, and Harold stood alone in the snow and the silence,—awed, terrified, and estranged as if in a dream.

Except for the three forms that lay still, half-buried and concealed in the drifts, it was as if the adventure never occurred. The spruce trees stood straight and aloof as ever. The silence stretched unbroken; its immensity had swallowed and smothered the last echo of the rifle report and the grizzly's roar. There was no movement, seemingly no life,—only the drifts and the winter forest and the futile sun, shining down between the snow-laden trees.

Yet he knew vaguely what had occurred. The bullet had gone true. It had pierced the animal's neck, breaking the vertebrae of the spinal column, and life had gone out of him as a flame goes out in the wind. But it had come too late to destroy the full force of the charge. Bill had been struck with some portion of the bear's body as he fell and had been hurled like a lifeless doll into the drifts. Virginia, too, had received some echo of that shock, probably from Bill's body as he shattered down. Now all three lay half-hidden in the snow. Which of them lived and which were dead Harold dared not guess.

But he had no time to go forward and investigate before Bill had sprung to his feet. He had received only a glancing blow; the drifts into which he had fallen were soft as pillows. In reality he had never even lost consciousness. Still subject to the one thought that guided and shaped his actions throughout the adventure, he crawled over to Virginia's side.

No living man had ever seen his face as white as it was now. His eyes were wide with the image of horror; he didn't know what wounds the dying bear might have inflicted on the girl. There was no rend in her white flesh, however; and his eye kindled and his face blazed when he saw that she yet lived.

He didn't waste even a small part of his energies by futile pleadings for her to waken. He seized her shoulders and shook her gently.

Instantly her eyes opened. Her full consciousness returned to her with a rush. She was not scratched, not even shocked by the fall, and she reached up for Bill's hands. And instantly, with a laugh on her lips, she sprang to her feet.

"You killed him?" she asked.

It was the first breath she had wasted, and no man might hold it against her. She had only to look at the huge gray form in the drifts to know her answer. Bill, because he was a woodsman first, last, and always, slipped additional shells into Harold's rifle; then walked over to the bear. He gazed down at its filming eyes.

"Bear's all dead," he answered cheerfully. And Virginia's heart raced and thrilled, and a delicious exaltation swept through her, when she glanced down at this woodsman's hands. Big and strong and brown, there was not a tremor in their fingers.

The both of them whirled in real and superlative astonishment. Some one was speaking to them. Some one was asking them if they were both all right. It was a strange voice,—one that they scarcely remembered ever hearing before.

But they saw at once that the speaker was Harold. He had come with them to-day, quite true. Both of them had almost forgotten his existence.

XIX

In the weeks they had been together, Bill had always been careful never to try to show Harold in a bad light. It was simply an expression of the inherent decency of the man: he knew that Virginia loved him, that she had plighted her troth to him, and as long as that love endured and the engagement stood, he would never try to shatter her ideals in regard to him. He knew it meant only heartbreak for her to love and wed a man she couldn't respect. He knew enough of human nature to realize that love often lives when respect is dead, and no possible good could come of showing up the unworthiness that he beheld in Harold. He had never tried to embarrass him or smirch his name. For all his indignation now, his voice was wholly cheerful and friendly when he answered.

"We're quite all right, thanks," he said. "The only casualty was the bear. A little snow on our clothes, but it will brush off. And by the way——"

He paused, and for all his even tones, Harold had a sickening and ghastly fear of the sober query in Bill's eyes. "Why did you give me an unloaded gun and tell me it was full?" he went on. "Except for a good deal of luck there'd been a smile on the face of the grizzly—but no Bill!"

He thought it only just that, in spite of Virginia's presence, Harold explain this grave omission. He felt that Virginia was entitled to an explanation too, and Harold knew, from her earnest eyes, that she was waiting his answer. He might have been arrogant and insulting to Bill, but he cared enough for Virginia's respect to wish to justify himself. He studied their faces; it was plain that they did not accuse him, even in their most secret thoughts, of evil intent in handing Bill an almost empty gun. But by the stern code of the North sins of carelessness are no less damning than intentional ones and Harold knew that he had a great deal to answer for.

"And by the way," Bill went on, as he waited for his reply, "I don't remember hearing my gun off during the fray. You might explain that, too."

"I didn't shoot because I couldn't," Harold replied earnestly. "At first you were between me and the bear—and then Virginia was. It all happened so quickly that there was nothing I could do. I can't imagine why I forgot to reload the rifle. A man can't always remember—everything. I thought I had. Thank God that it didn't turn out any worse than it did."

Bill nodded; the girl's face showed unspeakable relief. She was glad that this lover of hers had logical and acceptable reasons for his omissions. The incident was past, the issue dead. They gathered about the gray grizzled form in the snow.

"Does this—help our food problem any?" Virginia asked.

"Except in an emergency—no. Virginia, you ought to try to cut that foreleg muscle." He lifted one of the front feet of the bear in his hands. "You'd see what it would be like to try to bite it. He's an old, tough brute—worse eating than a wolf. Strong as mink and hard as rock. If we were starving, we'd cut off one of those hams in a minute; but we can wait a while at least. If we don't pick up some more game during the day, I'll hike over to my Twenty-three Mile cabin and get the supplies I've left over there. There's a smoked caribou ham, among other things. I'll bring back a backload, anyway." Then his voice changed, and he looked earnestly into Virginia's eyes. "But you won't want to hunt any more to-day. I forgot—what a shock this experience would be to you."

She smiled, and the paleness about her lips was almost gone. "I'm getting used to shocks. I feel a little shaky—but it doesn't amount to anything. I want to climb up and look at the caribou trail, at least."

"Sure enough—if you feel you can stand it. It's only a hundred yards or so up the hill. I'd like to take old Bruin's hide, but I don't see how we could handle it. I believe we'd better leave him with all his clothes on, in the snow. And Heaven knows I'd like to find out what the old boy was doing out—at a time when all the other bears are hibernating."

They continued on up the creek until the grade of the hill was less, then clambered slowly up. Fifty yards up the slope they encountered the old caribou trail, but none of these wilderness creatures had been along in recent days. They followed it a short distance, however, back in the direction they had come and above the scene of their battle with the bear.

"No profit here," Bill said at last. "We might as well go down to the creek bed and find better walking."

They turned, and in an instant more came back to their own tracks. And suddenly Bill stopped and stared at them in dumb amazement.

He looked so astonished, so inexpressibly baffled, that for a moment his two companions were stricken silent. Virginia's heart leaped in her throat. Yet the tracks contained no message for her.

"What's the matter?" Harold asked. "What do you see?"

Bill caught himself and looked up. "Nothing very important—but mighty astonishing at that. We've just walked in a two-hundred-yard circle, up the creek to where we climbed the hill, back along the hill in this direction, and then down. And we haven't crossed that grizzly's tracks anywhere."

"Well, what of it?"

"Man, this snow has been here for weeks, with very little change. Do you mean to tell me that a lively, hungry bear is going to stay that long in one place unless he's asleep? Virginia, as sure as you live we—or somethin'—wakened that bear out of hibernation. And his den is somewhere in that two-hundred-yard circle."

"There's probably a cave in the rock," Harold suggested. "And I'm more interested in the cabin and dinner than I am in it."

"Nevertheless, I've never looked into a den of hibernation, and I've always wanted to know what they're like. It will only take a minute. Come on—it will be worth seeing."

But Harold had very special and particular reasons why such a course appealed to him not at all. "Yes—and maybe find a couple of other bears in there, in the dark and no chance to fight. I'm not interested, anyway. Go and look, if you like."

"I will, if you don't mind. Do you want to come too, Virginia? There's no danger—really there isn't. If this had been an old she-bear we might have found some cubs, but these old males travel around by themselves."

"I certainly wouldn't stay away," the girl replied. And her interest was real: the study of the forest life about her had been an ever increasing delight. She felt that she would greatly like to peer into one of those dark, mysterious dens where that most mysterious American animal, the grizzly, lies in deep coma through the long, winter months.

"It will only take a minute. We haven't got to back-track him more than a hundred yards at most. We'll be back in a minute, Harold. And if you don't mind—I'll take my own gun."

They exchanged rifles, and Virginia and Bill started back toward the fallen grizzly. But the exploration of the winter lair had not been the only thing Bill had in view. He also had certain words to say to Virginia,—words that he could scarcely longer repress, and which he couldn't have spoken with ease in Harold's presence. But now that they were alone, the sentences wouldn't shape on his lips.

He mushed a while in silence. "I suppose I haven't got to tell you, Virginia," he said at last. "That you—your own courage—saved my life."

She looked up to him with lustrous eyes. The man thrilled to the last little nerve. In her comradeship for him their luster was almost like that of which he had dreamed so often. "I know it's true," she answered frankly. "And I'm glad that—that it was mine, and not somebody else's." She too seemed to be having difficulty in shaping her thoughts. "I've never been happier about any other thing. To pay—just a little bit of debt. But in paying it, I incurred another—so the obligation is just as big as ever. You know—you saved my life, too."

He nodded. This was no time for deception, for pretty lies.

"I saw you throw yourself in front of me," she went on. "I can never forget it. I'll see that picture, over and over again, till I die—how you plunged through the snow and got in front. So since we each did for the other—the only thing we could do—there's nothing more to be said about it. Isn't that so, Bill?"

The man agreed, but his lips trembled as they never did during the charge of the grizzly.

"I've learned a lesson up here—that words aren't much good and don't seem to get anywhere." The girl spoke softly. "Only deeds count. After they're done, there is nothing much—that one can say."

So they did not speak of the matter again. They came to the bear's body and back-tracked him through the snow. They pushed through the young spruce from whose limbs the grizzly had knocked the snow. They they came out upon the cavern mouth.

Instantly Bill understood how the fall of the tree had knocked away the snow from the maw. "There's been a landslide here too, or a snowslide," he said. "You see—only the top of the cave mouth is left open. The dirt's piled around the bottom."

He crawled up over the pile of rocks and dirt and, stooping, stepped within the cavern. The girl was immediately behind him. Back five feet from the opening the interior was dark as night: the cavern walls, gray at the mouth, slowly paled and faded and were obliterated in the gloom. But there was no stir of life in the darkness, no sign of any other habitant. But the walls themselves, where the light from without revealed them, held Bill's fascinated gaze.

The girl stood behind him, silent, wondering what was in his mind. "This cave—I've never seen a cave just like this. Virginia——"

The man stepped forward and scratched a match on the stone. It flared; the shadows raced away. Then Bill's breath caught in a half-sob.

Instantly he smothered the match. The darkness dropped around them like a curtain. But in that instant of light Bill beheld a scene that tore at his heart. Against the cavern wall, lost in the irremediable darkness, he had seen a strange, white shape—a ghostly thing that lay still and caught the match's gleam—a grim relic of dead years.

He turned to the girl, and his voice was almost steady when he spoke. "You'd better go out, Virginia—into the light," he advised.

"Why? Is it—danger?"

"Not danger." His voice in the silence thrilled her and moved her. "Only wickedness. But it isn't anything you'd like to see."

The single match-flare had revealed him the truth. For one little fraction of an instant he had thought that the white form, so grim and silent against the stone, revealed some forest tragedy of years ago,—a human prey dragged to a wild beast's lair. But the shape of the cavern, the character of its walls, and a thousand other clews told the story plainly. The thing he had seen was a naked skeleton, flesh and garments having dropped away in the years; and the grizzly had simply made his lair in the old shaft of his father's mine. Bill had found his father's sepulcher at last!

For a moment he stood dreaming in the gloom. He understood, now, why his previous search had never revealed the mine. He had supposed that his father had operated along some stream, washing the gold from its gravel: it had never occurred to him that he had dug a shaft. In all probability, considering the richness of their content, they had burrowed into the hill and had found an old bed of the stream, had carried the gravel to the water's edge in buckets, and washed it out. He had never looked for tunnels and shafts: if he had done so, it was doubtful if he could have found the hidden cavern. The snowslide of some years before had covered up all outward signs of their work, struck down the trees they had blazed, and covered the ashes of their own camp fires. The girl's voice in the darkness called him from his musings.

"I believe I understand," she said. "You've found your mine—and your father's body."

"Yes. Just a skeleton."

"I'm not afraid. Do you want me to stay?"

"I'd love to have you, if you will. Some way—it takes away a lot of my bitterness—to have you here."

It was true. It seemed wholly fitting that she should be with him as he explored the cavern. It was almost as if the tragedy of his father's death concerned her, too.

"I can hold matches," she told him. She came up close, and for a moment her hand, groping, closed on his,—a soft, dear pressure that spoke more than any words. When it was released he lighted another match.

They stood together, looking down at the skeleton. But she wasn't quite prepared for what she saw. A little cry of horror rang strangely in the dark shaft.

This had been no natural death. Undoubtedly the elder Bronson had been struck down from behind, as he worked, and he lay just as he fell. There was one wound in the skull, round and ghastly, and in a moment they saw the weapon that made it. A rusted pick, such as miners use, lay beside the body.

"I won't try to do much to-day," the man told her, "except to see up one of my cornerposts and erect a claim notice. My father's notice has of course rotted away in the years and the monument that probably stood out there beyond the creek bed was covered in snowslide. You see, a claim is made by putting up four stone monuments—one at each corner of the area claimed. We'll be starting down in a day or two, and I'll register the claim. Then I'll come back—and give these poor bones decent burial."

From there he walked back to the end of the shaft, scratching another match. It was wholly evident that the mine was only scratched. He held the light close, studying the rear wall of the cave. It was simply a gravel bed, verifying his guess that here lay an old bed of the creek. In the first handful of stone he scraped out he found a half-ounce nugget.

"It's rich?" she asked.

"Beyond what I ever dreamed. But there's nothing more we can do now. I've made my find at least—but it doesn't seem to make me—as happy as it ought to. Of course that man—there against the wall—would naturally keep a man from being very happy. Of, if I could only find and kill the devil who did it!"

His voice in the gloom was charged with immeasurable feeling. She had never seen this side of him before. Here was primeval emotion, the desired for vengeance, filial obligation, hate that knew no mercy and could never be forgotten. She understood, now, the savage feuds that sometimes spring up among the mountain people, unable to forget a blow or an injury. She had the first inkling of how deeply his father's murder had influenced him.

But his face was calm when they emerged into the light. They walked over to the creek, and beneath its overhanging banks there were the snow had not swept, he found enough rocks for his monument. He gathered them, carried them in armfuls to a place fifty yards beyond the creek and down it, level with such a turn in the hillside above, beyond which the old creek bed obviously could not lie; then heaped them into a moment. Then he drew an old letter from his coat pocket, and searching farther, found a stub of a pencil. Virginia looked over his shoulders as he wrote.

One hundred yards up the stream Harold watched them, dumbfounded as to what they were doing. He saw Bill finish the writing, then place the larger on the monument, fastening it down with a large stone. Then he came mushing toward them.

So intent were they upon their work that they didn't notice him until he was almost up to them. But both of them would have paused in wonder if they had observed the curious mixture of emotions upon his lips. His lips hung loose, his eyes protruded, and something that might have been greed, or might have been jealousy or some other unguessed emotion drew and harshened his features.

"You've found a mine?" he asked.

Virginia looked up, joyful at Bill's good fortune. "We've found his father's mine—the old shaft where the bear was been sleeping. But there's a dreadful side of it too."

"Show me where it is. I want to see it. Take me into it, Virginia—right away——"

Bill had a distinct sensation of revulsion at the thought of this man going into his father's sepulcher, and he didn't know why. It was an instinct too deeply buried for him to trace. But he tried to force it down. There was no reason why Virginia's fiance shouldn't view his mine. Already, Virginia was pointing out the way.

"You can claim half to it," he was whispering into her ear. "You were the one with him when he found it."

"I can—but I won't," she replied coldly. "He asked me to go with him. The thought's unworthy of you, Harold."

But he was in no mood to be humbled by her disapproval. Curiously, he was intensely excited. He mushed away toward the cavern mouth.

Two minutes later he stood in the darkness of the funnel, fumbling for a match. "Gold, gold, gold," he whispered. "Heaps and heaps of it—what I've always hunted. And Bill had to find it. That devil had to walk right into it."

He was sickened by the thought that except for his own cowardice he would have accompanied them into the den. At least he should have done that much, he told himself, to atone for his conduct during the bear's charge. Then he would have been in a position to claim half the mine—and get it too. Dark thoughts, curiously engrossing and lustful, thronged his mind.

He found a match at least and it flared in the darkness. And the white skeleton lay just at his feet.

He drew back, startled, but instantly recognized his poise. He knelt with unexplicable intentness. He too saw the ghastly wound and its grim connection with the rusted pick. And he bent, slowly, like a man who is trying to control an unwonted eagerness, lifted the pick in his arms.

His fingers seemed to curl around it, like those of a miser around his gold. Some way, his grasp seemed caressing. Oh, it was easy to handle and lift! How naturally it swung in his arms! What a deadly blow the cruel point could inflict! Just one little tap had been needed. Bronson had rocked and fallen, no longer to hold his share in the mine's gold. If there were an enemy before him now, one tap, and one alone was all that would be needed.

He could picture the scene of some twenty years before; the flickering candles, the gray walls covered with dancing shadows, the yellow gold,—beautiful in the light. He could see Bronson working,—always the plodder, always the fool! Behind him Rutheford, his partner, the pick in his arms and his brave intent in his brain. Then one swift stroke——

Harold did not know that at the thought his muscles made involuntary response. He swung the pick down, imagining the blow, with a ferocity and viciousness that would have been terrible to see.

In the darkness his face was drawn and savage, and ugly fires glowed and smoldered and flamed in his eyes.