KINGS IN EXILE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

“The Gray Master.”

KINGS IN EXILE

BY

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

AUTHOR OF “THE BACKWOODSMEN,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1912

All rights reserved

Copyright by Perry, Mason & Co. (1907), The Curtis
Publishing Co. (1908-1909), The Associated Sunday
Magazines (1908), The Red Book Magazine (1908).

Copyright, 1910,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910. Reprinted
June, 1910; July, December, 1912.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Last Bull

That was what two grim old sachems
of the Dacotahs had dubbed him; and
though his official title, on the lists of the
Zoölogical Park, was “Kaiser,” the new and
more significant name had promptly supplanted
it. The Park authorities—people of imagination
and of sentiment, as must all be who would
deal successfully with wild animals—had felt
at once that the name aptly embodied the tragedies
and the romantic memories of his all-but-vanished
race. They had felt, too, that the two
old braves who had been brought East to adorn
a city pageant, and who had stood gazing stoically
for hours at the great bull buffalo through
the barrier of the steel-wire fence, were fitted,
before all others, to give him a name. Between
him and them there was surely a tragic bond,
as they stood there islanded among the swelling
tides of civilization which had already engulfed
their kindreds. “Last Bull” they had called
him, as he answered their gaze with little, sullen,
melancholy eyes from under his ponderous and
4
shaggy front. “Last Bull”—and the passing
of his race was in the name.

Here, in his fenced, protected range, with
a space of grassy meadow, half a dozen clumps
of sheltering trees, two hundred yards of the
run of a clear, unfailing brook, and a warm shed
for refuge against the winter storms, the giant
buffalo ruled his little herd of three tawny cows,
two yearlings, and one blundering, butting calf
of the season. He was a magnificent specimen
of his race—surpassing, it was said, the finest
bull in the Yellowstone preserves or in the
guarded Canadian herd of the North. Little
short of twelve feet in length, a good five foot
ten in height at the tip of his humped and
huge fore-shoulders, he seemed to justify the
most extravagant tales of pioneer and huntsman.
His hind-quarters were trim and fine-lined,
built apparently for speed, smooth-haired,
and of a grayish lion-color. But his fore-shoulders,
mounting to an enormous hump,
were of an elephantine massiveness, and clothed
in a dense, curling, golden-brown growth of
matted hair. His mighty head was carried
low, almost to the level of his knees, on a neck
of colossal strength, which was draped, together
with the forelegs down to the knees, in a flowing
brown mane tipped with black. His head,
5
too, to the very muzzle, wore the same luxuriant
and sombre drapery, out of which curved viciously
the keen-tipped crescent of his horns.
Dark, huge, and ominous, he looked curiously
out of place in the secure and familiar tranquillity
of his green pasture.

For a distance of perhaps fifty yards, at the
back of the pasture, the range of the buffalo
herd adjoined that of the moose, divided from
it by that same fence of heavy steel-wire mesh,
supported by iron posts, which surrounded the
whole range. One sunny and tingling day in
late October—such a day as makes the blood
race full red through all healthy veins—a
magnificent stranger was brought to the Park,
and turned into the moose-range.

The newcomer was a New Brunswick bull
moose, captured on the Tobique during the
previous spring when the snow was deep and
soft, and purchased for the Park by one of the
big Eastern lumber-merchants. The moose-herd
had consisted, hitherto, of four lonely
cows, and the splendid bull was a prize which
the Park had long been coveting. He took
lordly possession, forthwith, of the submissive
little herd, and led them off at once from the
curious crowds about the gate to explore the
wild-looking thickets at the back of the pasture.
6
But no sooner had he fairly entered these thickets
than he found his further progress barred
by the steel-meshed fence. This was a bitter
disappointment, for he had expected to go
striding through miles of alder swamp and
dark spruce woods, fleeing the hated world of
men and bondage, before setting himself to get
acquainted with his new followers. His high-strung
temper was badly jarred. He drew off,
shaking his vast antlers, and went shambling
with spacious stride down along the barrier
towards the brook. The four cows, in single
file, hurried after him anxiously, afraid he might
be snatched away from them.

Last Bull, standing solitary and morose on a
little knoll in his pasture, caught sight of the
strange, dark figure of the running moose. A
spark leapt into his heavy eyes. He wheeled,
pawed the sod, put his muzzle to the ground,
and bellowed a sonorous challenge. The moose
stopped short and stared about him, the stiff
hair lifting angrily along the ridge of his massive
neck. Last Bull lowered his head and
tore up the sod with his horns.

“Last Bull, standing solitary and morose on a little knoll in his pasture.”

This vehement action caught the eyes of the
moose. At first he stared in amazement, for
he had never seen any creature that looked like
Last Bull. The two were only about fifty or
sixty yards apart, across the little valley of
the bushy swamp. As he stared, his irritation
speedily overcame his amazement. The curious-looking
creature over there on the knoll
was defying him, was challenging him. At
this time of year his blood was hot and quick
for any challenge. He gave vent to a short,
harsh, explosive cry, more like a grumbling
bleat than a bellow, and as unlike the buffalo’s
challenge as could well be imagined. Then he
fell to thrashing the nearest bushes violently
with his antlers. This, for some reason unknown
to the mere human chronicler, seemed
to be taken by Last Bull as a crowning insolence.
His long, tasselled tail went stiffly up
into the air, and he charged wrathfully down
the knoll. The moose, with his heavy-muzzled
head stuck straight out scornfully before him,
and his antlers laid flat along his back, strode
down to the encounter with a certain deadly
deliberation. He was going to fight. There
was no doubt whatever on that score. But he
had not quite made up his wary mind as to how
he would deal with this unknown and novel
adversary.

They looked not so unequally matched, these
two, the monarch of the Western plains, and the
monarch of the northeastern forests. Both
8
had something of the monstrous, the uncouth,
about them, as if they belonged not to this
modern day, but to some prehistoric epoch when
Earth moulded her children on more lavish and
less graceful lines. The moose was like the
buffalo in having his hind-quarters relatively
slight and low, and his back sloping upwards
to a hump over the immensely developed fore-shoulders.
But he had much less length of
body, and much less bulk, though perhaps eight
or ten inches more of height at the tip of the
shoulder. His hair was short, and darker than
that of his shaggy rival, being almost black except
on legs and belly. Instead of carrying his
head low, like the buffalo, for feeding on the
level prairies, he bore it high, being in the main
a tree-feeder. But the greatest difference between
the two champions was in their heads
and horns. The antlers of the moose formed a
huge, fantastic, flatly palmated or leaflike structure,
separating into sharp prongs along the
edges, and spreading more than four feet from
tip to tip. To compare them with the short,
polished crescent of the horns of Last Bull was
like comparing a two-handed broadsword to a
bowie-knife. And his head, instead of being
short, broad, ponderous, and shaggy, like Last
Bull’s, was long, close-haired, and massively
9
horse-faced, with a projecting upper lip heavy
and grim.

Had there been no impregnable steel barrier
between them, it is hard to say which would
have triumphed in the end, the ponderous weight
and fury of Last Bull, or the ripping prongs and
swift wrath of the moose. The buffalo charged
down the knoll at a thundering gallop; but
just before reaching the fence he checked himself
violently. More than once or twice before
had those elastic but impenetrable meshes given
him his lesson, hurling him back with humiliating
harshness when he dashed his bulk against
them. He had too lively a memory of past discomfitures
to risk a fresh one now in the face
of this insolent foe. His matted front came
against the wire with a force so cunningly
moderated that he was not thrown back by the
recoil. And the keen points of his horns went
through the meshes with a vehemence which
might indeed have done its work effectively
had they come in contact with the adversary.
As it was, however, they but prodded empty
air.

The moose, meanwhile, had been in doubt
whether to attack with his antlers, as was his
manner when encountering foes of his own
kind, or with his knife-edged fore-hoofs, which
10
were the weapons he used against bears, wolves,
or other alien adversaries. Finally he seemed
to make up his mind that Last Bull, having
horns and a most redoubtable stature, must be
some kind of moose. In that case, of course,
it became a question of antlers. Moreover, in
his meetings with rival bulls it had never been
his wont to depend upon a blind, irresistible
charge,—thereby leaving it open to an alert opponent
to slip aside and rip him along the flank,—but
rather to fence warily for an advantage
in the locking of antlers, and then bear down
his foe by the fury and speed of his pushing.
It so happened, therefore, that he, too, came
not too violently against the barrier. Loudly
his vast spread of antlers clashed upon the steel
meshes; and one short prong, jutting low over
his brow, pierced through and furrowed deeply
the matted forehead of the buffalo.

As the blood streamed down over his nostrils,
obscuring one eye, Last Bull quite lost his
head with rage. Drawing off, he hurled himself
blindly upon the barrier—only to be hurled
back again with a vigor that brought him to
his knees. But at the same time the moose,
on the other side of the fence, got a huge surprise.
Having his antlers against the barrier
when Last Bull charged, he was forced back
irresistibly upon his haunches, with a rudeness
quite unlike anything that he had ever before
experienced. His massive neck felt as if a
pine tree had fallen upon it, and he came back
to the charge quite beside himself with bewilderment
and rage.

“Only to be hurled back again with a vigor that brought him to his knees.”

By this time, however, the keepers and Park
attendants were arriving on the scene, armed
with pitchforks and other unpleasant executors
of authority. Snorting, and bellowing, and
grunting, the monstrous duellists were forced
apart; and Last Bull, who had been taught
something of man’s dominance, was driven off
to his stable and imprisoned. He was not let
out again for two whole days. And by that
time another fence, parallel with the first and
some five or six feet distant from it, had been
run up between his range and that of the
moose. Over this impassable zone of neutrality,
for a few days, the two rivals flung insult
and futile defiance, till suddenly, becoming
tired of it all, they seemed to agree to ignore
each other’s existence.

After this, Last Bull’s sullenness of temper
appeared to grow upon him. He was fond of
drawing apart from the little herd, and taking
up his solitary post on the knoll, where he
would stand for an hour at a time motionless
12
except for the switching of his long tail, and
staring steadily westward as if he knew where
the great past of his race had lain. In that
direction a dense grove of chestnuts, maples,
and oaks bounded the range, cutting off the
view of the city roofs, the roar of the city traffic.
Beyond the city were mountains and wide
waters which he could not see; but beyond the
waters and the mountains stretched the green,
illimitable plains—which perhaps (who knows?)
in some faint vision inherited from the ancestors
whose myriads had possessed them, his
sombre eyes, in some strange way, could see.
Among the keepers and attendants generally it
was said, with anxious regret, that perhaps
Last Bull was “going bad.” But the head-keeper,
Payne, himself a son of the plains, repudiated
the idea. He declared sympathetically
that the great bull was merely homesick, pining
for the wind-swept levels of the open country
(God’s country, Payne called it!) which his imprisoned
hoofs had never trodden.

Be this as it may, the fact could not be gainsaid
that Last Bull was growing more and more
morose. The spectators, strolling along the
wide walk which skirted the front of his range,
seemed to irritate him, and sometimes, when a
group had gathered to admire him, he would
13
turn his low-hung head and answer their staring
eyes with a kind of heavy fury, as if he
burned to break forth upon them and seek vengeance
for incalculable wrongs. This smouldering
indignation against humanity extended
equally, if not more violently, to all creatures
who appeared to him as servants or allies of
humanity. The dogs whom he sometimes saw
passing, held in leash by their masters or mistresses,
made him paw the earth scornfully if
he happened to be near the fence. The patient
horses who pulled the road-roller or the noisy
lawn-mower made his eyes redden savagely.
And he hated with peculiar zest the roguish
little trick elephant, Bong, who would sometimes,
his inquisitive trunk swinging from side
to side, go lurching lazily by with a load of
squealing children on his back.

Bong, who was a favored character, amiable
and trustworthy, was allowed the freedom of
the Park in the early morning, before visitors
began to arrive who might be alarmed at seeing
an elephant at large. He was addicted to
minding his own business, and never paid the
slightest attention to any occupants of cage or
enclosure. He was quite unaware of the hostility
which he had aroused in the perverse and
brooding heart of Last Bull.
14

One crisp morning in late November, when
all the grass in the Park had been blackened
by frost, and the pools were edged with silver
rims of ice, and mists were white and saffron
about the scarce-risen sun, and that autumn
thrill was in the air which gives one such an
appetite, Bong chanced to be strolling past
the front of Last Bull’s range. He did not see
Last Bull, who was nothing to him. But,
being just as hungry as he ought to be on so
stimulating a morning, he did see, and note
with interest, some bundles of fresh hay on the
other side of the fence.

Now, Bong was no thief. But hay had always
seemed to him a free largess, like grass
and water, and this looked like very good hay.
So clear a conscience had he on the subject
that he never thought of glancing around to see
if any of the attendants were looking. Innocently
he lurched up to the fence, reached his
lithe trunk through, gathered a neat wisp of the
hay, and stuffed it happily into his curious, narrow,
pointed mouth. Yes, he had not been
mistaken. It was good hay. With great satisfaction
he reached in for another mouthful.

Last Bull, as it happened, was standing close
by, but a little to one side. He had been ignoring,
so far, his morning ration. He was not
15
hungry. And, moreover, he rather disapproved
of the hay because it had the hostile man-smell
strong upon it. Nevertheless, he recognized it
very clearly as his property, to be eaten when
he should feel inclined to eat it. His wrath,
then, was only equalled by his amazement when
he saw the little elephant’s presumptuous gray
trunk reach in and coolly help itself. For a
moment he forgot to do anything whatever
about it. But when, a few seconds later, that
long, curling trunk of Bong’s insinuated itself
again and appropriated another bundle of the
now precious hay, the outraged owner bestirred
himself. With a curt roar, that was more of a
cough or a grunt than a bellow, he lunged forward
and strove to pin the intruding trunk to
the ground.

With startled alacrity Bong withdrew his
trunk, but just in time to save it from being
mangled. For an instant he stood with the
member held high in air, bewildered by what
seemed to him such a gratuitous attack. Then
his twinkling little eyes began to blaze, and he
trumpeted shrilly with anger. The next moment,
reaching over the fence, he brought
down the trunk on Last Bull’s hump with such
a terrible flail-like blow that the great buffalo
stumbled forward upon his knees.
16

He was up again in an instant and hurling
himself madly against the inexorable steel
which separated him from his foe. Bong
hesitated for a second, then, reaching over
the fence once more, clutched Last Bull maliciously
around the base of his horns and tried
to twist his neck. This enterprise, however,
was too much even for the elephant’s titanic
powers, for Last Bull’s greatest strength lay
in the muscles of his ponderous and corded
neck. Raving and bellowing, he plunged this
way and that, striving in vain to wrench himself
free from that incomprehensible, snake-like
thing which had fastened upon him. Bong,
trumpeting savagely, braced himself with widespread
pillars of legs, and between them it
seemed that the steel fence must go down
under such cataclysmic shocks as it was suffering.
But the noisy violence of the battle
presently brought its own ending. An amused
but angry squad of attendants came up and
stopped it, and Bong, who seemed plainly the
aggressor, was hustled off to his stall in deep
disgrace.

Last Bull was humiliated. In this encounter
things had happened which he could in no way
comprehend; and though, beyond an aching in
neck and shoulders, he felt none the worse
17
physically, he had nevertheless a sense of having
been worsted, of having been treated with
ignominy, in spite of the fact that it was his
foe, and not he, who had retired from the field.
For several days he wore a subdued air and
kept about meekly with his docile cows. Then
his old, bitter moodiness reasserted itself, and
he resumed his solitary broodings on the crest
of the knoll.

When the winter storms came on, it had
been Last Bull’s custom to let himself be
housed luxuriously at nightfall, with the rest
of the herd, in the warm and ample buffalo-shed.
But this winter he made such difficulty
about going in that at last Payne decreed that
he should have his own way and stay out. “It
will do him no harm, and may cool his peppery
blood some!” had been the keeper’s decision.
So the door was left open, and Last Bull
entered or refrained, according to his whim.
It was noticed, however,—and this struck a
chord of answering sympathy in the plainsman’s
imaginative temperament,—that, though
on ordinary nights he might come in and stay
with the herd under shelter, on nights of driving
storm, if the tempest blew from the west or
northwest, Last Bull was sure to be out on the
naked knoll to face it. When the fine sleet or
18
stinging rain drove past him, filling his nostrils
with their cold, drenching his matted mane,
and lashing his narrowed eyes, what visions
swept through his troubled, half-comprehending
brain, no one may know. But Payne, with
understanding born of sympathy and a common
native soil, catching sight of his dark
bulk under the dark of the low sky, was wont
to declare that he knew. He would say that
Last Bull’s eyes discerned, black under the
hurricane, but lit strangely with the flash of
keen horns and rolling eyes and frothed nostrils,
the endless and innumerable droves of the
buffalo, with the plains wolf skulking on their
flanks, passing, passing, southward into the
final dark. In the roar of the wind, declared
Payne, Last Bull, out there in the night, listened
to the trampling of all those vanished
droves. And though the other keepers insisted
to each other, quite privately, that their
chief talked a lot of nonsense about “that there
mean-tempered old buffalo,” they nevertheless
came gradually to look upon Last Bull with a
kind of awe, and to regard his surly whims as
privileged.

It chanced that winter that men were driving
a railway tunnel beneath a corner of the
Park. The tunnel ran for a short distance
19
under the front of Last Bull’s range, and passed
close by the picturesque cottage occupied by
Payne and two of his assistants. At this point
the level of the Park was low, and the shell of
earth was thin above the tunnel roof.

There came a Sunday afternoon, after days
of rain and penetrating January thaw, when
sun and air combined to cheat the earth with
an illusion of spring. The buds and the mould
breathed of April, and gay crowds flocked to
the Park, to make the most of winter’s temporary
repulse. Just when things were at their
gayest, with children’s voices clamoring everywhere
like starlings, and Bong, the little elephant,
swinging good-naturedly up the broad
white track with all the load he had room for
on his back, there came an ominous jar and
rumble, like the first of an earthquake, which
ran along the front of Last Bull’s range.

With sure instinct, Bong turned tail and fled
with his young charges away across the grassland.
The crowds, hardly knowing what they
fled from, with screams and cries and blanched
faces, followed the elephant’s example. A
moment later and, with a muffled crash, all
along the front of the range, the earth sank into
the tunnel, carrying with it half a dozen panels
of Last Bull’s hated fence.
20

Almost in a moment the panic of the crowd
subsided. Every one realized just what had
happened. Moreover, thanks to Bong’s timely
alarm, every one had got out of the way in
good season. All fear of earthquake being removed,
the crowd flocked back eagerly to stare
down into the wrecked tunnel, which formed
now a sort of gaping, chaotic ditch, with sides
at some points precipitous and at others brokenly
sloping. The throng was noisy with excited
interest and with relief at having escaped so
cleanly. The break had run just beneath one
corner of the keepers’ cottage, tearing away a
portion of the foundation and wrenching the
structure slightly aside without overthrowing
it. Payne, who had been in the midst of his
Sunday toilet, came out upon his twisted porch,
half undressed and with a shaving-brush covered
with lather in his hand. He gave one look at
the damage which had been wrought, then
plunged indoors again to throw his clothes on,
at the same time sounding the hurry call for
the attendants in other quarters of the Park.

Last Bull, who had been standing on his knoll,
with his back to the throngs, had wheeled in
astonishment at the heavy sound of the cave-in.
For a few minutes he had stared sullenly, not
grasping the situation. Then very slowly it
21
dawned on him that his prison walls had fallen.
Yes, surely, there at last lay his way to freedom,
his path to the great open spaces for which he
dumbly and vaguely hungered. With stately
deliberation he marched down from his knoll to
investigate.

But presently another idea came into his slow
mind. He saw the clamorous crowds flocking
back and ranging themselves along the edge of
the chasm. These were his enemies. They
were coming to balk him. A terrible madness
surged through all his veins. He bellowed savage
warning and came thundering down the field,
nose to earth, dark, mountainous, irresistible.

The crowd yelled and shrank back. “He
can’t get across!” shouted some. But others
cried: “He can! He’s coming! Save yourselves!”
And with shrieks they scattered wildly
across the open, making for the kiosks, the pavilions,
the trees, anything that seemed to promise
hiding or shelter from that onrushing doom.

At the edge of the chasm—at this point
forming not an actual drop, but a broken slide—Last
Bull hardly paused. He plunged down,
rolled over in the débris, struggled to his feet
again instantly, and went ploughing and snorting
up the opposite steep. As his colossal front,
matted with mud, loomed up over the brink, his
22
little eyes rolling and flaming, and the froth flying
from his red nostrils, he formed a very nightmare
of horror to those fugitives who dared to
look behind them.

Surmounting the brink, he paused. There
were so many enemies, he knew not which to
pursue first. But straight ahead, in the very
middle of the open, and far from any shelter,
he saw a huddled group of children and nurses
fleeing impotently and aimlessly. Shrill cries
came from the cluster, which danced with colors,
scarlet and yellow and blue and vivid pink.
To the mad buffalo, these were the most conspicuous
and the loudest of his foes, and therefore
the most dangerous. With a bellow he flung
his tail straight in the air, and charged after
them.

An appalling hush fell, for a few heart-beats,
all over the field. Then from different quarters
appeared uniformed attendants, racing and
shouting frantically to divert the bull’s attention.
From fleeing groups black-coated men leapt
forth, armed only with their walking-sticks, and
rushed desperately to defend the flock of children,
who now, in the extremity of their terror,
were tumbling as they ran. Some of the
nurses were fleeing far in front, while others,
the faithful ones, with eyes starting from their
23
heads, grabbed up their little charges and struggled
on under the burden.

Already Last Bull was halfway across the space
which divided him from his foes. The ground
shook under his ponderous gallop. At this moment
Payne reappeared on the broken porch.

One glance showed him that no one was near
enough to intervene. With a face stern and sorrowful
he lifted the deadly .405 Winchester which
he had brought out with him. The spot he covered
was just behind Last Bull’s mighty shoulder.

The smokeless powder spoke with a small,
venomous report, unlike the black powder’s
noisy reverberation. Last Bull stumbled. But
recovering himself instantly, he rushed on.
He was hurt, and he felt it was those fleeing
foes who had done it. A shade of perplexity
darkened Payne’s face. He fired again. This
time his aim was true. The heavy expanding
bullet tore straight through bone and muscle
and heart, and Last Bull lurched forward upon
his head, ploughing up the turf for yards. As
his mad eyes softened and filmed, he saw once
more, perhaps,—or so the heavy-hearted keeper
who had slain him would have us believe,—the
shadowy plains unrolling under the wild sky,
and the hosts of his vanished kindred drifting
past into the dark.

The King of the Flaming Hoops

CHAPTER I

The white, scarred face of the mountain
looked straight east, over a vast basin of
tumbled, lesser hills, dim black forests, and
steel-blue loops of a far-winding water. Here
and there long, level strata of pallid mist
seemed to support themselves on the tree-tops,
their edges fading off into the startling transparency
that comes upon the air with the first
of dawn. But that was in the lower world.
Up on the solitary summit of White Face the
daybreak had arrived. The jagged crest of the
peak shot sudden radiances of flame-crimson,
then bathed itself in a flow of rose-pinks and
thin, indescribable reds and pulsating golds.
Swiftly, as the far horizon leapt into blaze, the
aërial flood spread down the mountain-face,
revealing and transforming. It reached the
mouth of a cave on a narrow ledge. As the
splendor poured into the dark opening, a
tawny shape, long and lithe and sinewy, came
28
padding forth, noiseless as itself, as if to meet
and challenge it.

Half emerging from the entrance upon the
high rock-platform which formed its threshold,
the puma halted, head uplifted and forepaws
planted squarely to the front. With wide,
palely bright eyes she stared out across the
tremendous and mysterious landscape. As
the colored glory rushed down the mountain,
rolling back the blue-gray transparency of
shadow, those inscrutable eyes swept every suddenly
revealed glade, knoll, and waterside where
deer or elk might by chance be pasturing.

She was a magnificent beast, this puma, massive
of head and shoulder almost as a lioness,
and in her calm scrutiny of the spaces unrolling
before her gaze was a certain air of overlordship,
as if her supremacy had gone long unquestioned.
Suddenly, however, her attitude
changed. Her eyes narrowed, her mighty
muscles drew themselves together like springs
being upcoiled, she half crouched, and her
head turned sharply to the left, listening. Far
down the narrow ledge which afforded the
trail to her den she had caught the sound of
something approaching.

As she listened, she crouched lower and
lower, and her eyes began to burn with a thin,
29
green flame. Her ears would flatten back
savagely, then lift themselves again to interrogate
the approaching sounds. Her anger at
the intrusion upon her private domain was
mixed with some apprehension, for behind her,
in a warm corner of the den, curled up in a soft
and furry ball like kittens, were her two sleeping
cubs.

Her trail being well marked and with her
scent strong upon it, she knew it could be no ignorant
blunderer that drew near. It was plainly
an enemy, and an arrogant enemy, since it made
no attempt at stealth. The steps were not those
of any hunter, white man or Indian, of that
she presently assured herself. With this assurance,
her anxiety diminished and her anger increased.
Her tail, long and thick, doubled in
thickness and began to jerk sharply from side
to side. Crouching to the belly, she crept all
the way out upon the ledge and peered cautiously
around a jutting shoulder of rock.

The intruder was not yet in sight, because
the front of White Face, though apparently a
sheer and awful precipice when viewed from the
valley, was in fact wrinkled with gullies and
buttresses and bucklings of the tortured strata.
But the sound of his coming was now quite intelligible
to her. That softly ponderous tread, that
30
careless displacing of stones, those undisguised
sniffings and mumblings could come only from
a bear, and a bear frankly looking for trouble.
Well, he was going to find what he was looking
for. With an antagonism handed down to her
by a thousand ancestors, the great puma hated
bears.

Many miles north of White Face, on the
other side of that ragged mountain-ridge to
which he formed an isolated and towering outpost,
there was a fertile valley which had just
been invaded by settlers. On every hand awoke
the sharp barking of the axe. Rifle-shots
startled the echoes. Masterful voices and confident
human laughter filled all the wild inhabitants
with wonder and dismay. The undisputed
lord of the range was an old silver-tip grizzly,
of great size and evil temper. Furious at the
unexpected trespass on his sovereignty, yet well
aware of his powerlessness against the human
creature that could strike from very far off with
lightning and thunder, he had made up his
mind at once to withdraw to some remoter
range. Nevertheless, he had lingered for some
days, sullenly expecting he knew not what.
These formless expectations were most unpleasantly
fulfilled when he came upon a man
in a canoe paddling close in by the steep shore
31
of the lake. He had hurled himself blindly
down the bank, raging for vengeance, but when
he reached the water’s edge, the man was far
out of reach. Then, while he stood there
wavering, half minded to swim in pursuit, the
man had spoken with the lightning and the
thunder, after the terrifying fashion of his kind.
The bear had felt himself stung near the tip of
the shoulder, as if by a million wasps at once,
and the fiery anguish had brought him to his
senses.

It was no use trying to fight man, so he had
dashed away into the thickets, and not halted
till he had put miles between himself and the
inexplicable enemy.

For two days, with occasional stops to forage
or to sleep, the angry grizzly had travelled
southward, heading towards the lonely peak of
White Face. As the distance from his old haunts
increased, his fears diminished; but his anger
grew under the ceaseless fretting of that wound
on his neck just where he could not reach to
lick and soothe it. The flies, however, could
reach it very well, and did. As a consequence,
by the time he reached the upper slopes of
White Face, he was in a mood to fight anything.
He would have charged a regiment,
had he suddenly found one in his path.
32

When he turned up a stone for the grubs,
beetles, and scorpions which lurked beneath it,
he would send it flying with a savage sweep of
his paw. When he caught a rabbit, he smashed
it flat in sheer fury, as if he cared more to
mangle than to eat.

At last he stumbled upon the trail of a puma.
As he sniffed at it, he became, if possible, more
angry than ever. Pumas he had always hated.
He had never had a chance to satisfy his grudge,
for never had one dared to face his charge;
but they had often snarled down defiance at
him from some limb of oak or pine beyond his
reach. He flung himself forward upon the
trail with vengeful ardor. When he realized,
from the fact that it was a much-used trail and
led up among the barren rocks, that it was
none other than the trail to the puma’s lair, his
satisfaction increased. He would be sure to
find either the puma at home or the puma’s
young unguarded.

“When the grizzly saw her, his wicked little dark eyes glowed suddenly red.”

When the puma, at last, saw him emerge
around a curve of the trail, and noted his
enormous stature, she gave one longing, wistful
look back over her shoulder to the shadowed
nook wherein her cubs lay sleeping. Had
there been any chance to get them both safely
away, she would have shirked the fight, for
their sakes. But she could not carry them
both in her mouth at once up the face of the
mountain. She would not desert either one.
She hesitated a moment, as if doubtful whether
or not to await attack in the mouth of the
cave. Then she crept farther out, where the
ledge was not three feet wide, and crouched
flat, silent, watchful, rigid, in the middle of the
trail.

When the grizzly saw her, his wicked little
dark eyes glowed suddenly red, and he came
up with a lumbering rush. With his gigantic,
furry bulk, it looked as if he must instantly
annihilate the slim, light creature that opposed
him. It was a dreadful place to give battle,
on that straight shelf of rock overhanging a
sheer drop of perhaps a thousand feet. But
scorn and rage together blinded the sagacity
of the bear. With a grunt he charged.

Not until he was within ten feet of her did
the crouching puma stir. Then she shot into the
air, as if hurled up by the release of a mighty
spring. Quick as a flash the grizzly shrank
backward upon his haunches and swept up a
huge black paw to parry the assault. But he
was not quite quick enough. The puma’s
spring overreached his guard. She landed
fairly upon his back, facing his tail; but in the
34
fraction of a second she had whirled about and
was tearing at his throat with teeth and claws,
while the terrible talons of her hinder paws
ripped at his flanks.

With a roar of pain and amazement the
grizzly struggled to shake her off, clutching and
striking at her with paws that at one blow could
smash in the skull of the most powerful bull.
But he could not reach her. Then he reared
up, and threw himself backwards against the
face of the rock, striving to crush her under his
enormous weight. And in this he almost succeeded.
Just in time, she writhed around and
outward, but not quite far enough, for one paw
was caught and ground to a pulp. But at the
next instant, thrust back from the rock by his
own effort, the bear toppled outward over the
brink of the shelf. Grappling madly to save
himself, he caught only the bowed loins of the
puma, who now sank her teeth once more into
his throat, while her rending claws seemed to
tear him everywhere at once. He crushed her
in his grip; and in a dreadful ball of screeching,
roaring, biting, mangling rage the two plunged
downward into the dim abyss. Once, still
locked in the death-grip, they struck upon a
jutting rock, and bounded far out into space.
Then, as the ball rolled over in falling, it came
35
apart; and separated now, though still very close
together, the two bodies fell sprawlingly, and
vanished into the blue-shadowed deeps which
the dawn had not yet reached.

Upon this sudden and terrible ending of the
fight appeared a bearded frontiersman who had
been trailing the grizzly for half an hour and
waiting for light enough to secure a sure shot.
With something like awe in his face he came,
and knelt down, with hands gripping cautiously,
and peered over the dreadful brink. “Gee!
But that there cat was game!” he muttered,
drawing back and sweeping a comprehensive
gaze across the stupendous landscape, as if
challenging denial of his statement. Obviously
the silences were of the same opinion, for there
came no suggestion of dissent. Carefully he
rose to his feet and pressed on towards the
cave.

Without hesitation he entered, for he knew
that the puma’s mate some weeks before had
been shot, far down in the valley. He found
the kittens asleep and began to fondle them.
At his touch, and the smell of him, they awoke,
spitting and clawing with all their mother’s
courage. Young as they were, their claws drew
blood abundantly. “Gritty little devils!”
growled the man good-naturedly, snatching
36
back his hand and wiping the blood on his
trouser-leg. Then he took off his coat, threw
it over the troublesome youngsters, rolled them
in it securely, so that not one protesting claw
could get out, and started back to the camp with
the grumbling and uneasy bundle in his arms.

Three months later, the two puma cubs, sleek,
fat, full of gayety as two kittens of like age, and
convinced by this time that man was the source
and origin of all good things, were sold to a
travelling collector. One, the female, was sent
down to a zoölogical garden on the Pacific coast.
The other, the male, much the larger and at the
same time the more even-tempered and amenable
to teaching, found its way to the cages of
an animal-trainer in the East.

CHAPTER II

“King’s kind of ugly to-night, seems to me;
better keep yer eyes peeled!” said Andy Hansen,
the assistant trainer, the big, yellow-haired
Swede who knew not fear. Neither did he
know impatience or irritability; and so all the
animals, as a rule, were on their good behavior
under his calm, masterful, blue eye. Yet he
was tactful with the beasts, and given to humoring
their moods as far as convenient without
ever letting them guess it.

“Oh, you go chase yourself, Andy!” replied
Signor Tomaso, the trainer, with a strong New
England accent. “If I got to look out for King,
I’d better quit the business. Don’t you go
trying to make trouble between friends, Andy.”

“Of course, Bill, I know he’d never try to
maul you,” explained Hansen seriously, determined
that he should not be misunderstood in
the smallest particular. “But he’s acting curious.
Look out he don’t get into a scrap with
some of the other animals.”

“I reckon I kin keep ’em all straight,” answered
the trainer dryly, as he turned away to
get ready for the great performance which the
38
audience, dimly heard beyond the canvas walls,
was breathlessly awaiting.

The trainer’s name was William Sparks,
and his birthplace Big Chebeague, Maine; but
his lean, swarthy face and piercing, green-brown
eyes, combined with the craving of his audiences
for a touch of the romantic, had led him to
adopt the more sonorous pseudonym of “Signor
Tomaso.” He maintained that if he went under
his own name, nobody would ever believe that
what he did could be anything wonderful.
Except for this trifling matter of the name,
there was no fake about Signor Tomaso. He
was a brilliant animal-trainer, as unacquainted
with fear as the Swede, as dominant of eye,
and of immeasurably greater experience. But
being, at the same time, more emotional, more
temperamental than his phlegmatic assistant, his
control was sometimes less steady, and now and
again he would have to assert his authority with
violence. He was keenly alive to the varying
personalities of his beasts, naturally, and hence
had favorites among them. His especial favorite,
who heartily reciprocated the attachment,
was the great puma, King, the most
intelligent and amiable of all the wild animals
that had ever come under his training whip.

As Hansen’s success with the animals, during
39
the few months of his experience as assistant,
had been altogether phenomenal, his chief felt
a qualm of pique upon being warned against
the big puma. He had too just an appreciation
of Hansen’s judgment, however, to quite
disregard the warning, and he turned it over
curiously in his mind as he went to his dressing-room.
Emerging a few minutes later in
the black-and-white of faultless evening dress,
without a speck on his varnished shoes, he
moved down along the front of the cages, addressing
to the occupant of each, as he passed,
a sharp, authoritative word which brought it to
attention.

With the strange, savage smell of the cages
in his nostrils, that bitter, acrid pungency to
which his senses never grew blunted, a new
spirit of understanding was wont to enter
Tomaso’s brain. He would feel a sudden kinship
with the wild creatures, such a direct and
instant comprehension as almost justified his
fancy that in some previous existence he had
himself been a wild man of the jungle and
spoken in their tongue. As he looked keenly
into each cage, he knew that the animal whose
eyes for that moment met his was in untroubled
mood. This, till he came to the cage containing
the latest addition to his troupe, a large
40
cinnamon bear, which was rocking restlessly to
and fro and grumbling to itself. The bear was
one which had been long in captivity and well
trained. Tomaso had found him docile, and
clever enough to be admitted at once to the
performing troupe. But to-night the beast’s
eyes were red with some ill-humor. Twice
the trainer spoke to him before he heeded; but
then he assumed instantly an air of mildest subservience.
The expression of a new-weaned
puppy is not more innocently mild than the look
which a bear can assume when it so desires.

“Ah, ha! old sport! So it’s you that’s got
a grouch on to-night; I’ll keep an eye on you!”
he muttered to himself. He snapped his heavy
whip once, and the bear obediently sat up on
its haunches, its great paws hanging meekly.
Tomaso looked it sharply in the eye. “Don’t
forget, now, and get funny!” he admonished.
Then he returned to the first cage, which contained
the puma, and went up close to the bars.
The great cat came and rubbed against him,
purring harshly.

“There ain’t nothing the matter with you,
boy, I reckon,” said Tomaso, scratching him
affectionately behind the ears. “Andy must
have wheels in his head if he thinks I’ve got to
keep my eyes peeled on your account.”
41

Out beyond the iron-grilled passage, beyond
the lighted canvas walls, the sharp, metallic
noises of the workmen setting up the great performing-cage
came to a stop. There was a
burst of music from the orchestra. That, too,
ceased. The restless hum of the unseen masses
around the arena died away into an expectant
hush. It was time to go on. At the
farther end of the passage, by the closed door
leading to the performing cage, Hansen appeared.
Tomaso opened the puma’s cage.
King dropped out with a soft thud of his great
paws, and padded swiftly down the passage, his
master following. Hansen slid wide the door,
admitting a glare of light, a vast, intense rustle
of excitement; and King marched majestically
out into it, eying calmly the tier on climbing
tier of eager faces. It was his customary privilege,
this, to make the entrance alone, a good
half minute ahead of the rest of the troupe;
and he seemed to value it. Halfway around
the big cage he walked, then mounted his
pedestal, sat up very straight, and stared blandly
at the audience. A salvo of clapping ran smartly
round the tiers—King’s usual tribute, which
he had so learned to expect that any failure of
it would have dispirited him for the whole performance.
42

Signor Tomaso had taken his stand, whip in
hand, just inside the cage, with Hansen opposite
him, to see that the animals, on entry, went
each straight to his own bench or pedestal.
Any mistake in this connection was sure to lead
to trouble, each beast being almost childishly
jealous of its rights. Inside the long passage
an attendant was opening one cage after another;
and in a second more the animals began
to appear in procession, filing out between the
immaculate Signor and the roughly clad Swede.
First came a majestic white Angora goat, carrying
high his horned and bearded head, and
stepping most daintily upon slim, black hoofs.
Close behind, and looking just ready to pounce
upon him but for dread of the Signor’s eye,
came slinking stealthily a spotted black-and-yellow
leopard, ears back and tail twitching.
He seemed ripe for mischief, as he climbed reluctantly
on to his pedestal beside the goat;
but he knew better than to even bare a claw.
And as for the white goat, with his big golden
eyes superciliously half closed, he ignored his
dangerous neighbor completely, while his jaws
chewed nonchalantly on a bit of brown shoe-lace
which he had picked up in the passage.

Close behind the leopard came a bored-looking
lion, who marched with listless dignity
43
straight to his place. Then another lion, who
paused in the doorway and looked out doubtfully,
blinking with distaste at the strong light.
Tomaso spoke sharply, like the snap of his
whip, whereupon the lion ran forward in haste.
But he seemed to have forgotten which was his
proper pedestal, for he hopped upon the three
nearest in turn, only to hop down again with
apologetic alacrity at the order of the cracking
whip. At last, obviously flustered, he reached
a pedestal on which he was allowed to remain.
Here he sat, blinking from side to side and
apparently much mortified.

The lion was followed by a running wolf,
who had shown his teeth savagely when the
lion, for a moment, trespassed upon his pedestal.
This beast was intensely interested in the
audience, and, as soon as he was in his place,
turned his head and glared with green, narrowed
eyes at the nearest spectators, as if trying
to stare them out of countenance. After the
wolf come a beautiful Bengal tiger, its black-and-golden
stripes shining as if they had been
oiled. He glided straight to his stand, sniffed
at it superciliously, and then lay down before it.
The whip snapped sharply three times, but the
tiger only shut his eyes tight. The audience
grew hushed. Tomaso ran forward, seized the
44
beast by the back of the neck, and shook him
roughly. Whereupon the tiger half rose, opened
his great red mouth like a cavern, and roared in
his master’s face. The audience thrilled from
corner to corner, and a few cries came from
frightened women.

The trainer paused for an instant, to give full
effect to the situation. Then, stooping suddenly,
he lifted the tiger’s hind-quarters and deposited
them firmly on the pedestal, and left
him in that awkward position.

“There,” he said in a loud voice, “that’s all
the help you’ll get from me!”

The audience roared with instant and delighted
appreciation. The tiger gathered up
the rest of himself upon his pedestal, wiped his
face with his paw, like a cat, and settled down
complacently with a pleased assurance that he
had done the trick well.

At this moment the attention of the audience
was drawn to the entrance, where there seemed
to be some hitch. Tomaso snapped his whip
sharply, and shouted savage orders, but nothing
came forth. Then the big Swede, with an
agitated air, snatched up the trainer’s pitchfork,
which stood close at hand in case of emergency,
made swift passes at the empty doorway, and
jumped back. The audience was lifted fairly
45
to its feet with excitement. What monster could
it be that was giving so much trouble? The
next moment, while Tomaso’s whip hissed in
vicious circles over his head, a plump little drab-colored
pug-dog marched slowly out upon the
stage, its head held arrogantly aloft. Volleys
of laughter crackled around the arena, and the
delighted spectators settled, tittering, back into
their seats.

The pug glanced searchingly around the
cage, then selecting the biggest of the lions as
a worthy antagonist, flew at his pedestal, barking
furious challenge. The lion glanced down
at him, looked bored at the noise, and yawned.
Apparently disappointed, the pug turned away
and sought another adversary. He saw King’s
big tail hanging down beside his pedestal.
Flinging himself upon it, he began to worry it
as if it were a rat. The next moment the tail
threshed vigorously, and the pug went rolling
end over end across the stage.

Picking himself up and shaking the sawdust
from his coat, the pug growled savagely and
curled his little tail into a tighter screw. Bristling
with wrath, he tiptoed menacingly back
toward the puma’s pedestal, determined to wipe
out the indignity. This time his challenge
was accepted. Tomaso’s whip snapped, but the
46
audience was too intent to hear it. The great
puma slipped down from his pedestal, ran forward
a few steps, and crouched.

With a shrill snarl the pug rushed in. At
the same instant the puma sprang, making a
splendid tawny curve through the air, and
alighted ten feet behind his antagonist’s tail.
There he wheeled like lightning and crouched.
But the pug, enraged at being balked of his
vengeance, had also wheeled, and charged again
in the same half second. In the next, he had
the puma by the throat. With a dreadful
screech the great beast rolled over on his side
and stiffened out his legs. The pug drew off,
eyed him critically to make sure that he was
quite dead, then ran, barking shrill triumph,
to take possession of the victim’s place. Then
the whip cracked once more. Whereupon the
puma got up, trotted back to his pedestal,
mounted it, and tucked the pug protectingly
away between his great forepaws.

The applause had not quite died away when
a towering, sandy-brown bulk appeared in the
entrance to the cage. Erect upon its hind legs,
and with a musket on its shoulder, it marched
ponderously and slowly around the circle, eying
each of the sitting beasts—except the wolf—suspiciously
as it passed. The watchful eyes
47
of both Signor Tomaso and Hansen noted that
it gave wider berth to the puma than to any of
the others, and also that the puma’s ears, at the
moment, were ominously flattened. Instantly
the long whip snapped its terse admonition to
good manners. Nothing happened, except that
the pug, from between the puma’s legs, barked
insolently. The sandy-brown bulk reached its
allotted pedestal,—which was quite absurdly
too small for it to mount,—dropped the musket
with a clatter, fell upon all fours with a loud
whoof of relief, and relapsed into a bear.

The stage now set to his satisfaction, Signor
Tomaso advanced to the centre of it. He
snapped his whip, and uttered a sharp cry
which the audience doubtless took for purest
Italian. Immediately the animals all descended
from their pedestals, and circled solemnly around
him in a series of more or less intricate evolutions,
all except the bear, who, not having yet
been initiated into this beast quadrille, kept his
place and looked scornful. At another signal
the evolutions ceased, and all the beasts, except
one of the lions, hurried back to their places.
The lion, with the bashful air of a boy who gets
up to “speak his piece” at a school examination,
lingered in the middle of the stage. A
rope was brought. The Swede took one end
48
of it, the attendant who had brought it took
the other, and between them they began to
swing it, very slowly, as a great skipping-rope.
At an energetic command from Signor Tomaso
the lion slipped into the swinging circle, and
began to skip in a ponderous and shamefaced
fashion. The house thundered applause. For
perhaps half a minute the strange performance
continued, the whip snapping rhythmically with
every descent of the rope. Then all at once,
as if he simply could not endure it for another
second, the lion bolted, head down, clambered
upon his pedestal, and shut his eyes hard as if
expecting a whipping. But as nothing happened
except a roar of laughter from the seats,
he opened them again and glanced from side
to side complacently, as if to say, “Didn’t I
get out of that neatly?”

The next act was a feat of teetering. A
broad and massive teeter-board was brought
in, and balanced across a support about two
feet high. The sulky leopard, at a sign from
Tomaso, slouched up to it, pulled one end to
the ground, and mounted. At the centre he
balanced cautiously for a moment till it tipped,
then crept on to the other end, and crouched
there, holding it down as if his very life depended
on it. Immediately the white goat dropped from
49
his pedestal, minced daintily over, skipped up
upon the centre of the board, and mounted to
the elevated end. His weight was not sufficient
to lift, or even to disturb, the leopard, who kept
the other end anchored securely. But the goat
seemed to like his high and conspicuous position,
for he maintained it with composure and
stared around with great condescension upon the
other beasts.

The goat having been given time to demonstrate
his unfitness for the task he had undertaken,
Tomaso’s whip cracked again. Instantly
King descended from his pedestal, ran
over to the teeter-board, and mounted it at the
centre. The goat, unwilling to be dispossessed
of his high place, stamped and butted at him
indignantly, but with one scornful sweep of his
great paw the puma brushed him off to the sawdust,
and took his place at the end of the board.
Snarling and clutching at the cleats, the leopard
was hoisted into the air, heavily outweighed.
The crowd applauded; but the performance,
obviously, was not yet perfect. Now came the
white goat’s opportunity. He hesitated a moment,
till he heard a word from Tomaso. Then
he sprang once more upon the centre of the
board, faced King, and backed up inch by inch
towards the leopard till the latter began to descend.
50
At this point of balance the white goat
had one forefoot just on the pivot of the board.
With a dainty, dancing motion, and a proud
tossing of his head, he now threw his weight
slowly backward and forward. The great teeter
worked to perfection. Signor Tomaso was kept
bowing to round after round of applause while
the leopard, the goat, and King returned proudly
to their places.

After this, four of the red-and-yellow uniformed
attendants ran in, each carrying a large
hoop. They stationed themselves at equal distances
around the circumference of the cage,
holding the hoops out before them at a height
of about four feet from the ground. At the
command of Tomaso, the animals all formed
in procession—though not without much cracking
of the whip and vehement command—and
went leaping one after the other through the
hoops—all except the pug, who tried in vain
to jump so high, and the bear, who, not knowing
how to jump at all, simply marched around and
pretended not to see that the hoops were there.
Then four other hoops, covered with white
paper, were brought in, and head first through
them the puma led the way. When it came
to the bear’s turn, the whip cracked a special
signal. Whereupon, instead of ignoring the
51
hoop as he had done before, he stuck his head
through it and marched off with it hanging on
his neck. All four hoops he gathered up in this
way, and, retiring with them to his place, stood
shuffling restlessly and grunting with impatience
until he was relieved of the awkward burden.

A moment later four more hoops were handed
to the attendants. They looked like the first
lot; but the attendants took them with hooked
handles of iron and held them out at arm’s length.
Touched with a match, they burst instantly into
leaping yellow flames; whereupon all the beasts,
except King, stirred uneasily on their pedestals.
The whip snapped with emphasis; and all the
beasts—except King, who sat eying the flames
tranquilly, and the bear, who whined his disapproval,
but knew that he was not expected to
take part in this act—formed again in procession,
and ran at the flaming hoops as if to jump
through them as before. But each, on arriving
at a hoop, crouched flat and scurried under it
like a frightened cat—except the white goat,
which pranced aside and capered past derisively.
Pretending to be much disappointed in them,
Signor Tomaso ordered them all back to their
places, and, folding his arms, stood with his
head lowered as if wondering what to do about
it. Upon this, King descended proudly from
52
his pedestal and approached the blazing terrors.
With easiest grace and nonchalance he lifted
his lithe body, and went bounding lightly
through the hoops, one after the other. The
audience stormed its applause. Twice around
this terrifying circuit he went, as indifferent to
the writhing flames as if they had been so much
grass waving in the wind. Then he stopped
abruptly, turned his head, and looked at Tomaso
in expectation. The latter came up, fondled
his ears, and assured him that he had done
wonders. Then King returned to his place,
elation bristling in his whiskers.

While the flaming hoops were being rushed
from the ring and the audience was settling
down again to the quiet of unlimited expectation,
a particularly elaborate act was being prepared.
A massive wooden stand, with shelves
and seats at various heights, was brought in.
Signor Tomaso, coiling the lash of his whip and
holding the heavy handle, with its loaded butt, as
a sceptre, took his place on a somewhat raised
seat at the centre of the frame. Hansen, with his
pitchfork in one hand and a whip like Tomaso’s
in the other, drew nearer; and the audience,
with a thrill, realized that something more than
ordinarily dangerous was on the cards. The
tiger came and stretched itself at full length before
53
Tomaso, who at once appropriated him as
a footstool. The bear and the biggest of the
lions posted themselves on either side of their
master, rearing up like the armorial supporters
of some illustrious escutcheon, and resting their
mighty forepaws apparently on their master’s
shoulders, though in reality on two narrow
little shelves placed there for the purpose.
Another lion came and laid his huge head on
Tomaso’s knees, as if doing obeisance. By this
time all the other animals were prowling about
the stand, peering this way and that, as if trying
to remember their places; and the big Swede
was cracking his whip briskly, with curt, deep-toned
commands, to sharpen up their memories.
Only King seemed quite clear as to what he had
to do—which was to lay his tawny body along the
shelf immediately over the heads of the lion and
the bear; but as he mounted the stand from the
rear, his ears went back and he showed a curious
reluctance to fulfil his part. Hansen’s keen eyes
noted this at once, and his whip snapped emphatically
in the air just above the great puma’s
nose. Still King hesitated. The lion paid no
attention whatever, but the bear glanced up with
reddening eyes and a surly wagging of his head.
It was all a slight matter, too slight to catch the
eye or the uncomprehending thoughts of the
54
audience. But a grave, well-dressed man, with
copper-colored face, high cheek-bones and
straight, coal-black hair, who sat close to the
front, turned to a companion and said:—

“Those men are good trainers, but they don’t
know everything about pumas. We know that
there is a hereditary feud between the pumas
and the bears, and that when they come together
there’s apt to be trouble.”

The speaker was a full-blooded Sioux, and a
graduate of one of the big Eastern universities.
He leaned forward with a curious fire in his deep-set,
piercing eyes, as King, unwillingly obeying
the mandates of the whip, dropped down and
stretched out upon his shelf, his nervous forepaws
not more than a foot above the bear’s head.
His nostrils were twitching as if they smelled
something unutterably distasteful, and his thick
tail looked twice its usual size. The Sioux,
who, alone of all present, understood these signs,
laid an involuntary hand of warning upon his
companion’s knee.

Just what positions the other animals were
about to take will never be known. King’s
sinews tightened. “Ha-ow!” grunted the
Sioux, reverting in his excitement to his ancient
utterance. There was a lightning sweep of
King’s paw, a shout from Hansen, a wah of surprise
55
and pain from the bear. King leaped
back to the top of the stand to avoid the expected
counter-stroke. But not against him did
the bear’s rage turn. The maddened beast
seemed to conclude that his master had betrayed
him. With a roar he struck at Tomaso with
the full force of his terrible forearm. Tomaso
was in the very act of leaping forward from his
seat, when the blow caught him full on the
shoulder, shattering the bones, ripping the whole
side out of his coat, and hurling him senseless
to the floor.

The change in the scene was instantaneous
and appalling. Most of the animals, startled,
and dreading immediate punishment, darted for
their pedestals,—any pedestals that they found
within reach,—and fought savagely for the possession
of the first they came to. The bear fell
furiously upon the body of Tomaso. Cries and
shrieks arose from the spectators. Hansen
rushed to the rescue, his fork clutched in both
hands. Attendants, armed with forks or iron
bars, seemed to spring up from nowhere. But
before any one could reach the spot, an appalling
screech tore across the uproar, and King’s
yellow body, launched from the top of the stand,
fell like a thunderbolt upon the bear’s back.

The shock rolled the bear clean over. While
56
he was clawing about wildly, in the effort to
grapple with his assailant, Hansen dragged
aside the still unconscious Tomaso, and two attendants
carried him hurriedly from the stage.

Audience and stage alike were now in a sort
of frenzy. Animals were fighting here and
there in tangled groups; but for the moment
all eyes were riveted on the deadly struggle
which occupied the centre of the stage.

For all that he had less than a quarter the
weight and nothing like a quarter the bulk of
his gigantic adversary, the puma, through the
advantage of his attack, was having much the
best of the fight. Hansen had no time for sentiment,
no time to concern himself as to whether
his chief was dead or alive. His business was
to save valuable property by preventing the
beasts from destroying each other. It mattered
not to him, now, that King had come so effectively
to Tomaso’s rescue. Prodding him mercilessly
with his fork, and raining savage blows
upon his head, he strove, in a cold rage, to
drive him off; but in vain. But other keepers,
meanwhile, had run in with ropes and iron bars.
A few moments more and both combatants were
securely lassoed. Then they were torn apart
by main force, streaming with blood. Blinded
by blankets thrown over their heads, and hammered
57
into something like subjection, they were
dragged off at a rush and slammed unceremoniously
into their dens. With them out of the
way, it was a quick matter to dispose of the
other fights, though not till after the white goat
had been killed to satisfy that ancient grudge
of the leopard’s, and the wolf had been cruelly
mauled for having refused to give up his pedestal
to one of the excited lions. Only the pug
had come off unscathed, having had the presence
of mind to dart under the foundations of
the frame at the first sign of trouble, and stay
there. When all the other animals had been
brought to their senses and driven off, one by
one, to their cages, he came forth from his hiding
and followed dejectedly, the curl quite taken
out of his confident tail. Then word went
round among the spectators that Tomaso was
not dead—that, though badly injured, he would
recover; and straightway they calmed down,
with a complacent sense of having got the value
of their money. The great cage was taken
apart and carried off. The stage was speedily
transformed. And two trick comedians, with
slippers that flapped a foot beyond their toes,
undertook to wipe out the memory of what had
happened.

CHAPTER III

The show was touring the larger towns of
the Northwest. On the following day it
started, leaving Tomaso behind in hospital,
with a shattered shoulder and bitter wrath in
his heart. At the next town, Hansen took
Tomaso’s place, but, for two reasons, with a
sadly maimed performance. He had not yet
acquired sufficient control of the animals to
dare all Tomaso’s acts; and the troupe was
lacking some of its most important performers.
The proud white goat was dead. The bear,
the wolf, and one of the lions were laid up with
their wounds. And as for the great puma,
though he had come off with comparatively
little hurt, his temper had apparently been quite
transformed. Hansen could do nothing with
him. Whether it was that he was sick for
Tomaso, whom he adored, or that he stewed
in a black rage over the blows and pitchforkings,
hitherto unknown to him, no one could
surely say. He would do nothing but crouch,
brooding, sullen and dangerous, at the back of
his cage. Hansen noted the green light flickering
59
fitfully across his pale, wide eyes, and
prudently refrained from pressing matters.

He was right. For, as a matter of fact, it
was against the big Swede exclusively, and
not against man in general, that King was
nursing his grudge. In a dim way it had got
into his brain that Hansen had taken sides with
the bear against him and Tomaso, and he
thirsted for vengeance. At the same time, he
felt that Tomaso had deserted him. Day by
day, as he brooded, the desire for escape—a
desire which he had never known before—grew
in his heart. Vaguely, perhaps, he
dreamed that he would go and find Tomaso.
At any rate, he would go—somewhere, anywhere,
away from this world which had turned
unfriendly to him. When this feeling grew
dominant, he would rise suddenly and go
prowling swiftly up and down behind the bars
of his cage like a wild creature just caught.

Curiously enough—for it is seldom indeed
that Fate responds to the longing of such exiles
from the wild—his opportunity came.
Late at night the show reached a little town
among the foothills. The train had been delayed
for hours. The night was dark. Everything
was in confusion, and all nerves on edge.
The short road from the station to the field
60
where the tents were to be set up was in bad
repair, or had never been really a road. It ran
along the edge of a steep gully. In the darkness
one wheel of the van containing King’s cage
dropped to the hub into a yawning rut. Under
the violence of the jolt a section of the edge
of the bank gave way and crashed down to
the bottom of the gully, dragging with it the
struggling and screaming horses. The cage
roof was completely smashed in.

To King’s eyes the darkness was but a
twilight, pleasant and convenient. He saw
an opening big enough to squeeze through;
and beyond it, beyond the wild shouting and
the flares of swung lanterns, a thick wood dark
beneath the paler sky. Before any one could
get down to the wreck, he was out and
free and away. Crouching with belly to the
earth, he ran noiselessly, and gained the
woods before any one knew he had escaped.
Straight on he ran, watchful but swift, heading
for the places where the silence lay
heaviest. Within five minutes Hansen had
half the men of the show, with ropes, forks,
and lanterns, hot on the trail. Within fifteen
minutes, half the male population of
the town was engaged in an enthusiastic
puma hunt. But King was already far away,
61
and making progress that would have been
impossible to an ordinary wild puma. His
life among men had taught him nothing about
trees, so he had no unfortunate instinct to
climb one and hide among the branches to
see what his pursuers would be up to. His
idea of getting away—and, perhaps, of finding
his vanished master—was to keep right
on. And this he did, though of course not
at top speed, the pumas not being a race of
long-winded runners like the wolves. In an
hour or two he reached a rocky and precipitous
ridge, quite impassable to men except
by day. This he scaled with ease, and at the
top, in the high solitude, felt safe enough to
rest a little while. Then he made his way
down the long, ragged western slopes, and at
daybreak came into a wild valley of woods and
brooks.

By this time King was hungry. But game
was plentiful. After two or three humiliating
failures with rabbits—owing to his inexperience
in stalking anything more elusive than
a joint of dead mutton, he caught a fat wood-chuck,
and felt his self-respect return. Here
he might have been tempted to halt, although,
to be sure, he saw no sign of Tomaso, but
beyond the valley, still westward, he saw mountains,
62
which drew him strangely. In particular,
one uplifted peak, silver and sapphire as
the clear day, and soaring supreme over the
jumble of lesser summits, attracted him. He
knew now that that was where he was going,
and thither he pressed on with singleness of
purpose, delaying only when absolutely necessary,
to hunt or to sleep. The cage, the stage,
the whip, Hansen, the bear, even the proud
excitement of the flaming hoops, were swiftly
fading to dimness in his mind, overwhelmed
by the inrush of new, wonderful impressions.
At last, reaching the lower, granite-ribbed flanks
of old White Face itself, he began to feel curiously
content, and no longer under the imperative
need of haste.

Here it was good hunting. Yet, though well
satisfied, he made no effort to find himself a
lair to serve as headquarters, but kept gradually
working his way onward up the mountain.
The higher he went, the more content he grew,
till even his craving for his master was forgotten.
Latent instincts began to spring into life,
and he lapsed into the movements and customs
of the wild puma. Only when he came upon a
long, massive footprint in the damp earth by a
spring, or a wisp of pungent-smelling fur on
the rubbed and clawed bark of a tree, memory
63
would rush back upon him fiercely. His ears
would flatten down, his eyes would gleam green,
his tail would twitch, and crouching to earth he
would glare into every near-by thicket for a
sight of his mortal foe. He had not yet learned
to discriminate perfectly between an old scent
and a new.

About this time a hunter from the East, who
had his camp a little farther down the valley,
was climbing White Face on the trail of a large
grizzly. He was lithe of frame, with a lean,
dark, eager face, and he followed the perilous
trail with a lack of prudence which showed a
very inadequate appreciation of grizzlies. The
trail ran along a narrow ledge cresting an
abrupt but bushy steep. At the foot of the
steep, crouched along a massive branch and
watching for game of some sort to pass by, lay
the big puma. Attracted by a noise above
his head he glanced up, and saw the hunter.
It was certainly not Tomaso, but it looked like
him; and the puma’s piercing eyes grew almost
benevolent. He had no ill-feeling to any man
but the Swede.

Other ears than those of the puma had heard
the unwary hunter’s footsteps. The grizzly had
caught them and stopped to listen. Yes, he
was being followed. In a rage he wheeled
64
about and ran back noiselessly to see who it was
that could dare such presumption. Turning a
shoulder of rock, he came face to face with the
hunter, and at once, with a deep, throaty grunt,
he charged.

The hunter had not even time to get his
heavy rifle to his shoulder. He fired once,
point blank, from the hip. The shot took effect
somewhere, but in no vital spot evidently, for it
failed to check, even for one second, that terrific
charge. To meet the charge was to be blasted
out of being instantly. There was but one
way open. The hunter sprang straight out
from the ledge with a lightning vision of thick,
soft-looking bushes far below him. The slope
was steep, but by no means perpendicular, and
he struck in a thicket which broke the full
shock of the fall. His rifle flew far out of his
hands. He rebounded, clutching at the bushes;
but he could not check himself. Rolling over
and over, his eyes and mouth choked with dust
and leaves, he bumped on down the slope, and
brought up at last, dazed but conscious, in a
swampy hole under the roots of a huge over-leaning
tree.

“Almost over his head, on a limb not six feet distant, crouched, ready to spring, the biggest puma he had ever seen.”

Striving to clear his eyes and mouth, his
first realization was that he could not lift his
left arm. The next, that he seemed to have
jumped from the frying-pan into the fire. His
jaws set themselves desperately, as he drew the
long hunting-knife from his belt and struggled
up to one knee, resolved to at least make his
last fight a good one. Almost over his head,
on a limb not six feet distant, crouched, ready
to spring, the biggest puma he had ever seen.
At this new confronting of doom his brain
cleared, and his sinews seemed to stretch with
fresh courage. It was hopeless, of course, as
he knew, but his heart refused to recognize the
fact. Then he noted with wonder that not at
him at all was the puma looking, but far over
his head. He followed that look, and again his
heart sank, this time quite beyond the reach of
hope. There was the grizzly coming headlong
down the slope, foam slavering from his red
jaws.

Bewildered, and feeling like a rat in a hole,
the hunter tried to slip around the base of the
tree, desperately hoping to gain some post of
vantage whence to get home at least two or
three good blows before the end. But the moment
he moved, the grizzly fairly hurled himself
downwards. The hunter jumped aside and
wheeled, with his knife lifted, his disabled left
arm against the tree trunk. But in that same
instant, a miracle! Noiselessly the puma’s
66
tawny length shot out overhead and fell upon
the bear in the very mid-rush of the charge.

At once it seemed as if some cataclysmic
upheaval were in progress. The air, as it were,
went mad with screeches, yells, snarls, and
enormous thick gruntings. The bushes went
down on every side. Now the bear was on
top, now the puma. They writhed over and
over, and for some seconds the hunter stared
with stupefaction. Then he recovered his wits.
He saw that the puma, for some inexplicable
reason, had come to his help. But he saw, also,
that the gigantic grizzly must win. Instead of
slipping off and leaving his ally to destruction,
he ran up, waited a moment for the perfect opportunity,
and drove his knife to the hilt into
the very centre of the back of the bear’s neck,
just where it joined the skull. Then he sprang
aside.

Strangely the noise died away. The huge
bulk of the grizzly sank slowly into a heap,
the puma still raking it with the eviscerating
weapons of his hinder claws. A moment more
and he seemed to realize that he had achieved
a sudden triumph. Bleeding, hideously mangled,
but still, apparently, full of fighting vigor,
he disengaged himself from the unresisting mass
and looked around him proudly. His wild eyes
67
met those of the hunter, and the hunter had an
anxious moment. But the great beast looked
away again at once, and seemed, in fact, to
forget all about the man’s existence. He lay
down and commenced licking assiduously at
his wounds. Filled with astonishment, and just
now beginning to realize the anguish in his
broken arm, the hunter stole discreetly away.

After an hour or two the puma arose, rather
feebly, passed the body of his slain foe without
a glance, and clambered up the slope to the
ledge. He wanted a place of refuge now, a
retreat that would be safe and cool and dark.
Up and up he followed the winding of that narrow
trail, and came out at last upon a rocky
platform before a black-mouthed cave. He
knew well enough that he had killed the owner
of the cave, so he entered without hesitation.

Here, for two days, he lay in concealment,
licking his wounds. He had no desire to eat;
but two or three times, because the wounds
fevered him, he came forth and descended the
trail a little way to where he had seen a cold
spring bubbling from the rocks. His clean
blood, in that high, clean air, quickly set itself
to the healing of the hurts, and strength flowed
back swiftly into his torn sinews. At dawn of
the third day he felt himself suddenly hungry,
68
and realizing that he must seek some small game,
even though not yet ready for any difficult hunting,
he crept forth, just as the first thin glory of
rose light came washing into the cave. But
before he started down the trail he paused, and
stood staring, with some dim half memory, out
across the transparent, hollow spaces, the jumbled
hilltops, misty, gray-green forests, and steel-bright
loops of water to which he had at last
come home.

The Monarch of Park Barren

CHAPTER I

From the cold spring lakes and sombre
deeps of spruce forest, over which the
bald granite peak of Old Saugamauk kept endless
guard, came reports of a moose of more
than royal stature, whose antlers beggared all
records for symmetry and spread. From a
home-coming lumber cruiser here, a wandering
Indian there, the word came straggling in, till
the settlements about the lower reaches of the
river began to believe there might be some truth
behind the wild tales. Then—for it was autumn,
the season of gold and crimson falling
leaves, and battles on the lake-shores under the
white full moon—there followed stories of
other moose seen fleeing in terror, with torn
flanks and bleeding shoulders; and it was realized
that the prowess of the great moose bull
was worthy of his stature and his adornment.
Apparently he was driving all the other bulls
off the Saugamauk ranges.

By this time the matter became of interest
72
to the guides. The stories gathered in from
different quarters, so it was hard to guess just
where the gigantic stranger was most likely to
be found. To north and northeast of the mountain
went the two Armstrongs, seeking the
stranger’s trail; while to south and southeastward
explored the Crimmins boys. If real, the
giant bull had to be located; if a myth, he had
to be exploded before raising impossible hopes
in the hearts of visiting sportsmen.

Then suddenly arrived corroboration of all
the stories. It came from Charley Crimmins.
He was able to testify with conviction that the
giant bull was no figment of Indian’s imagination
or lumberman’s inventive humor. For it
was he whose search had been successful.

In fact, he might have been content to have
it just a shade less overwhelmingly successful.
That there is such a thing as an embarrassment
of success was borne in upon him when he
found himself jumping madly for the nearest
tree, with a moose that seemed to have the
stature of an elephant crashing through the
thickets close behind him. He reached the
tree just in time to swing well up among its
branches. Then the tree quivered as the furious
animal flung his bulk against it. Crimmins
had lost his rifle in the flight. He could do
nothing but sit shivering on his branch, making
remarks so uncomplimentary that the great bull,
if he could have appreciated them, would probably
have established himself under that tree
till vengeance was accomplished. But not
knowing that he had been insulted, he presently
grew tired of snorting at his captive, and wandered
off through the woods in search of more
exciting occupation. Then, indignant beyond
words, Charley descended from his retreat, and
took his authoritative report in to the Settlements.

“He reached the tree just in time to swing well up among the branches.”

At first it was thought that there would be
great hunting around Old Saugamauk, till
those tremendous antlers should fall a prize
to some huntsman not only lucky but rich.
For no one who could not pay right handsomely
for the chance might hope to be guided
to the range where such an unequalled trophy
was to be won. But when the matter, in all
its authenticated details, came to the ears of
Uncle Adam, dean of the guides of that region,
he said “No” with an emphasis that left no
room for argument. There should be no hunting
around the slopes of Saugamauk for several
seasons. If the great bull was the terror they
made him out to be, then he had driven all the
other bulls from his range, and there was nothing
74
to be hunted but his royal self. “Well,”
decreed the far-seeing old guide, “we’ll let him
be for a bit, till his youngsters begin to grow
up like him. Then there’ll be no heads in all
the rest of New Brunswick like them that comes
from Old Saugamauk.” This decree was accepted,
the New Brunswick guides being among
those who are wise enough to cherish the golden-egged
goose.

In the course of that season the giant moose
was seen several times by guides and woodsmen—but
usually from a distance, as the inconsiderate
impetuosity of his temper was not favorable
to close or calm observation. The only
people who really knew him were those who,
like Charley Crimmins, had looked down upon
his grunting wrath from the branches of a substantial
tree.

Upon certain important details, however, all
observers agreed. The stranger (for it was
held that, driven by some southward wandering
instinct, he had come down from the wild
solitudes of the Gaspé Peninsula) was reckoned
to be a good eight inches taller at the shoulders
than any other moose of New Brunswick record,
and several hundredweight heavier. His antlers,
whose symmetry and palmation seemed
perfect, were estimated to have a spread of
75
sixty inches at least. That was the conservative
estimate of Uncle Adam, who had made
his observations with remarkable composure
from a tree somewhat less lofty and sturdy
than he would have chosen had he had the
time for choice.

In color the giant was so dark that his back
and flanks looked black except in the strongest
sunlight. His mighty head, with long, deeply
overhanging muzzle, was of a rich brown; while
the under parts of his body, and the inner surfaces
of his long, straight legs, were of a rusty
fawn color. His “bell”—as the shaggy appendix
that hangs from the neck of a bull
moose, a little below the throat, is called—was
of unusual development, and the coarse hair
adorning it peculiarly glossy. To bring down
such a magnificent prize, and to carry off such
a trophy as that unmatched head and antlers,
the greatest sportsmen of America would have
begrudged no effort or expense. But though
the fame of the wonderful animal was cunningly
allowed to spread to the ears of all sportsmen,
its habitat seemed miraculously elusive. It
was heard of on the Upsalquitch, the Nipisiguit,
the Dungarvan, the Little Sou’west, but
never, by some strange chance, in the country
around Old Saugamauk. Visiting sportsmen
76
hunted, spent money, dreamed dreams, followed
great trails and brought down splendid heads,
all over the Province; but no stranger with a
rifle was allowed to see the proud antlers of
the monarch of Saugamauk.

The right of the splendid moose to be called
the Monarch of Saugamauk was settled beyond
all question one moonlight night when
the surly old bear who lived in a crevasse far
up under the stony crest of the mountain came
down and attempted to dispute it. The wild
kindreds, as a rule, are most averse to unnecessary
quarrels. Unless their food or their mates
are at stake, they will fight only under extreme
provocation, or when driven to bay. They are
not ashamed to run away, rather than press
matters too far and towards a doubtful issue.
A bull moose and a bear are apt to give each
other a wide berth, respecting each other’s
prowess. But there are exceptions to all rules,
especially where bears, the most individual of
our wild cousins, are concerned. And this
bear was in a particularly savage mood. Just
in the mating season he had lost his mate, who
had been shot by an Indian. The old bear did
not know what had happened to her, but he
was ready to avenge her upon any one who
might cross his path.
77

Unluckily for him, it was the great moose
who crossed his path; and the luck was all
Charley Crimmins’s, who chanced to be the
spectator of what happened there beside the
moonlit lake.

Charley was on his way over to the head
of the Nipisiguit, when it occurred to him that
he would like to get another glimpse of the
great beast who had so ignominiously discomfited
him. Peeling a sheet of bark from
the nearest white birch, he twisted himself a
“moose-call,” then climbed into the branches
of a willow which spread out over the edge of
the shining lake. From this concealment he
began to utter persuasively the long, uncouth,
melancholy call by which the moose cow summons
her mate.

Sometimes these vast northern solitudes seem,
for hours together, as if they were empty of all
life. It is as if a wave of distrust had passed
simultaneously over all the creatures of the wild.
At other times the lightest occasion suffices to
call life out of the stillness. Crimmins had not
sounded more than twice his deceptive call,
when the bushes behind the strip of beech
crackled sharply. But it was not the great bull
that stepped forth into the moonlight. It was
a cow moose. She came out with no effort
78
at concealment, and walked up and down
the beach, angrily looking for her imagined
rival.

When the uneasy animal’s back was towards
him, Crimmins called again, a short, soft call.
The cow jumped around as if she had been
struck, and the stiff hair along her neck stood
up with jealous rage. But there was no rival
anywhere in sight, and she stood completely
mystified, shaking her ungainly head, peering
into the dark undergrowth, and snorting tempestuously
as if challenging the invisible rival
to appear. Then suddenly her angry ridge of
hair sank down, she seemed to shrink together
upon herself, and with a convulsive bound she
sprang away from the dark undergrowth, landing
with a splash in the shallow water along
shore. At the same instant the black branches
were burst apart, and a huge bear, forepaws upraised
and jaws wide open, launched himself
forth into the open.

Disappointed at missing his first spring, the
bear rushed furiously upon his intended victim,
but the cow, for all her apparent awkwardness,
was as agile as a deer. Barely eluding
his rush, she went shambling up the shore at
a terrific pace, plunged into the woods, and
vanished. The bear checked himself at the
79
water’s edge, and turned, holding his nose high
in the air, as if disdaining to acknowledge that
he had been foiled.

Crimmins hesitatingly raised his rifle. Should
he bag this bear, or should he wait and sound
his call again a little later, in the hope of yet
summoning the great bull? As he hesitated,
and the burly black shape in the moonlight also
stood hesitating, the thickets rustled and parted
almost beneath him, and the mysterious bull
strode forth with his head held high.

He had come in answer to what he thought
was the summons of his mate; but when he saw
the bear, his rage broke all bounds. He doubtless
concluded that the bear had driven his mate
away. With a bawling roar he thundered down
upon the intruder.

The bear, as we have seen, was in no mood
to give way. His small eyes glowed suddenly
red with vengeful fury, as he wheeled and gathered
himself, half crouching upon his haunches,
to meet the tremendous attack. In this attitude
all his vast strength was perfectly poised,
ready for use in any direction. The moose,
had he been attacking a rival of his own kind,
would have charged with antlers down, but
against all other enemies the weapons he relied
upon were his gigantic hoofs, edged like chisels.
80
As he reached his sullenly waiting antagonist
he reared on his hind-legs, towering like a black
rock about to fall and crush whatever was in
its path. Like pile-drivers his fore-hoofs struck
downwards, one closely following the other.

The bear swung aside as lightly as a weasel,
and eluded, but only by a hair’s breadth, that
destructive stroke. As he wheeled he delivered
a terrific, swinging blow, with his armed forepaw,
upon his assailant’s shoulder.

The blow was a fair one. Any ordinary
moose bull would have gone down beneath it,
with his shoulder-joint shattered to splinters.
But this great bull merely staggered, and stood
for a second in amazement. Then he whipped
about and darted upon the bear with a sort of
hoarse scream, his eyes flashing with a veritable
madness. He neither reared to strike, nor lowered
his antlers to gore, but seemed intent upon
tearing the foe with his teeth, as a mad horse
might. At the sight of such resistless fury
Crimmins involuntarily tightened his grip on
his branch and muttered: “That ain’t no moose!
It’s a—” But before he could finish his comparison,
astonishment stopped him. The bear,
unable with all his strength and weight to withstand
the shock of that straight and incredibly
swift charge, had been rolled over and over
81
down the gentle slope of the beach. At the
same moment the moose, blinded by his rage
and unable to check himself, had tripped over
a log that lay hidden in the bushes, and fallen
headlong on his nose.

Utterly cowed by the overwhelming completeness
of this overthrow, the bear was on
his feet again before his conqueror, and scurrying
to refuge like a frightened rat. He made
for the nearest tree, and that nearest tree, to
Crimmins’s dismay, was Crimmins’s. The startled
guide swung himself hastily to a higher
branch which stretched well out over the water.

Before the great bull could recover his footing,
the fugitive had gained a good start. But
desperately swift though he was, the doom that
thundered behind him was swifter, and caught
him just as he was scrambling into the tree.
Those implacable antlers ploughed his hind-quarters
remorselessly, till he squealed with pain
and terror. His convulsive scrambling raised
him, the next instant, beyond reach of that punishment;
but immediately the great bull reared,
and struck him again and again with his terrible
hoofs, almost crushing the victim’s maimed
haunches. The bear bawled again, but maintained
his clutch of desperation, and finally drew
himself up to a safe height, where he crouched
82
on a branch, whimpering pitifully, while the
victor raged below.

At this moment the bear caught sight of
Crimmins eying him steadily. To the cowed
beast this was a new peril menacing him. With
a frightened glance he crawled out on another
branch, as far as it could be trusted to support
his weight. And there he clung, huddled and
shivering like a beaten puppy, looking from the
man to the moose, from the moose to the man,
as if he feared they might both jump at him
together.

But the sympathies of Crimmins were now
entirely with the unfortunate bear, his fellow-prisoner,
and he looked down at the arrogant
tyrant below with a sincere desire to humble
his pride with a rifle-bullet. But he was too
far-seeing a guide for that. He contented himself
with climbing a little lower till he attracted
the giant’s attention to himself, and then dropping
half a handful of tobacco, dry and powdery,
into those snorting red nostrils.

It was done with nice precision, just as the
giant drew in his breath. He got the fullest
benefit of the pungent dose; and such trivial
matters as bears and men were instantly forgotten
in the paroxysms which seized him.
His roaring sneezes seemed as if they would
83
rend his mighty bulk asunder. He fairly stood
upon his head, burrowing his muzzle into the
moist leafage, as he strove to purge the exasperating
torment from his nostrils. Crimmins
laughed till he nearly fell out of the tree, while
the bear forgot to whimper as he stared in terrified
bewilderment. At last the moose stuck
his muzzle up in the air and began backing
blindly over stones and bushes, as if trying to
get away from his own nose. Plump into four
or five feet of icy water he backed. The shock
seemed to give him an idea. He plunged his
head under, and fell to wallowing and snorting
and raising such a prodigious disturbance
that all the lake shores rang with it. Then he
bounced out upon the beach again, and dashed
off through the woods as if a million hornets
were at his ears.

Weak with laughter, Crimmins climbed
down out of his refuge, waved an amiable farewell
to the stupefied bear, and resumed the trail
for the Nipisiguit.

CHAPTER II

For the next two years the fame of the great
moose kept growing, adding to itself various
wonders and extravagances till it assumed
almost the dimensions of a myth. Sportsmen
came from all over the world in the hope of
bagging those unparalleled antlers. They shot
moose, caribou, deer, and bear, and went away
disappointed only in one regard. But at last
they began to swear that the giant was a mere
fiction of the New Brunswick guides, designed
to lure the hunters. The guides, therefore,
began to think it was time to make good and
show their proofs. Even Uncle Adam was
coming around to this view, when suddenly
word came from the Crown Land Department
at Fredericton that the renowned moose must
not be allowed to fall to any rifle. A special
permit had been issued for his capture and
shipment out of the country, that he might be
the ornament of a famous Zoölogical Park and
a lively proclamation of what the New Brunswick
forests could produce.
85

The idea of taking the King of Saugamauk
alive seemed amusing to the guides, and to
Crimmins particularly. But Uncle Adam,
whose colossal frame and giant strength seemed
to put him peculiarly in sympathy with the
great moose bull, declared that it could and
should be done, for he would do it. Upon this,
scepticism vanished, even from the smile of
Charley Crimmins, who voiced the general
sentiment when he said,—

“Uncle Adam ain’t the man to bite off any
more than he can chew!”

But Uncle Adam was in no hurry. He had
such a respect for his adversary that he would
not risk losing a single point in the approaching
contest. He waited till the mating season
and the hunting season were long past, and the
great bull’s pride and temper somewhat cooled.
He waited, moreover, for the day to come—along
towards midwinter—when those titanic
antlers should loosen at their roots, and fall off
at the touch of the first light branch that might
brush against them. This, the wise old woodsman
knew, would be the hour of the King’s
least arrogance. Then, too, the northern
snows would be lying deep and soft and encumbering,
over all the upland slopes whereon the
moose loved to browse.
86

Along toward mid-February word came to
Uncle Adam that the Monarch had “yarded
up,” as the phrase goes, on the southerly slope
of Old Saugamauk, with three cows and their
calves of the previous spring under his protection.
This meant that, when the snow had
grown too deep to permit the little herd to
roam at will, he had chosen a sheltered area
where the birch, poplar, and cherry, his favorite
forage, were abundant, and there had trodden
out a maze of deep paths which led to all
the choicest browsing, and centred about a
cluster of ancient firs so thick as to afford
covert from the fiercest storms. The news
was what the wise old woodsman had been
waiting for. With three of his men, a pair of
horses, a logging-sled, axes, and an unlimited
supply of rope, he went to capture the King.

It was a clear, still morning, so cold that
the great trees snapped sharply under the
grip of the bitter frost. The men went on
snowshoes, leaving the teams hitched in a
thicket on the edge of a logging road some
three or four hundred yards from the “moose-yard.”
The sun glittered keenly on the long
white alleys which led this way and that at
random through the forest. The snow, undisturbed
and accumulating for months, was
87
heaped in strange shapes over hidden bushes,
stumps, and rocks. The tread of the snowshoes
made a furtive crunching sound as it
rhythmically broke the crisp surface.

Far off through the stillness the great moose,
lying with the rest of the herd in their shadowy
covert, caught the ominous sound. He lurched
to his feet and stood listening, while the herd
watched him anxiously, awaiting his verdict as
to whether that strange sound meant peril or no.

For reasons which we have seen, the giant
bull knew little of man, and that little not
of a nature to command any great respect.
Nevertheless, at this season of the year, his
blood cool, his august front shorn of its
ornament and defence, he was seized with an
incomprehensible apprehension. After all, as
he felt vaguely, there was an unknown menace
about man; and his ear told him that there
were several approaching. A few months
earlier he would have stamped his huge
hoofs, thrashed the bushes with his colossal
antlers, and stormed forth to chastise the intruders.
But now, he sniffed the sharp air,
snorted uneasily, drooped his big ears, and
led a rapid but dignified retreat down one of
the deep alleys of his maze.

This was exactly what Uncle Adam had
88
looked for. His object was to force the herd out
of the maze of alleys, wherein they could move
swiftly, and drive them floundering through
the deep, soft snow, which would wear them
out before they could go half a mile. Spreading
his men so widely that they commanded all
trails by which the fugitives might return, he
followed up the flight at a run. And he accompanied
the pursuit with a riot of shouts and
yells and laughter, designed to shake his quarry’s
heart with the fear of the unusual. Wise in all
woodcraft, Uncle Adam knew that one of the
most daunting of all sounds, to the creatures of
the wild, was that of human laughter, so inexplicable
and seemingly so idle.

At other times the great bull would merely
have been enraged at this blatant clamor and
taken it as a challenge. But now he retreated
to the farthest corner of his maze. From this
point there were but two paths of return, and
along both the uproar was closing in upon him.
Over the edge of the snow—which was almost
breast-high to him, and deep enough to bury
the calves, hopelessly deep, indeed, for any of
the herd but himself to venture through—he
gave a wistful look towards the depths of the
cedar swamps in the valley, where he believed
he could baffle all pursuers. Then his courage—but
89
without his autumnal fighting rage—came
back to him. His herd was his care. He
crowded the cows and calves between himself
and the snow, and turned to face his pursuers
as they came running and shouting through
the trees.

When Uncle Adam saw that the King was
going to live up to his kingly reputation and
fight rather than be driven off into the deep
snow, he led the advance more cautiously till
his forces were within twenty-five or thirty
paces of the huddling herd. Here he paused,
for the guardian of the herd was beginning to
stamp ominously with his great, clacking hoofs,
and the reddening light in his eyes showed
that he might charge at any instant.

He did not charge, however, because his
attention was diverted by the strange action
of the men, who had stopped their shouting
and begun to chop trees. It amazed him to
see the flashing axes bite savagely into the great
trunks and send the white chips flying. The
whole herd watched with wide eyes, curious
and apprehensive; till suddenly a tree toppled,
swept the hard blue sky, and came down with
a crashing roar across one of the runways.
The cows and calves bounded wildly, clear out
into the snow. But the King, though his eyes
90
dilated with amazement, stood his ground and
grunted angrily.

A moment more and another tree, huge-limbed
and dense, came down across the other
runway. Two more followed, and the herd
was cut off from its retreat. The giant bull, of
course, with his vast stride and colossal strength,
could have smashed his way through and over
the barrier; but the others, to regain the safe
mazes of the “yard,” would have had to make
a detour through the engulfing snow.

Though the King was now fairly cornered,
Uncle Adam was puzzled to know what to do
next. In his hesitation, he felled some more
trees, dropping the last one so close that the
herd was obliged to crowd back to avoid being
struck by the falling top. This, at last, was
too much for the King, who had never before
known what it was to be crowded. While his
followers plunged away in terror, burying themselves
helplessly before they had gone a dozen
yards, he bawled with fury and charged upon
his tormentors.

“For perhaps thirty or forty yards the bull was able to keep up this almost incredible pace.”

Though the snow, as we have seen, came
up to his chest, the giant’s strength and swiftness
were such that the woodsmen were taken
by surprise, and Uncle Adam, who was in front,
was almost caught. In spite of his bulk, he
turned and sprang away with the agility of a
wildcat; but if his snowshoes had turned and
hindered him for one half second, he would
have been struck down and trodden to a jelly
in the smother of snow. Seeing the imminence
of his peril, the other woodsmen threw up
their rifles; but Uncle Adam, though extremely
busy for the moment, saw them out of the
corner of his eye as he ran, and angrily ordered
them not to shoot. He knew what he was
about, and felt quite sure of himself, though the
enemy was snorting at his very heels.

For perhaps thirty or forty yards the bull
was able to keep up this almost incredible pace.
Then the inexorable pull of the snow began to
tell, even upon such thews as his, and his pace
slackened. But his rage showed no sign of
cooling. So, being very accommodating, Uncle
Adam slackened his own pace correspondingly,
that his pursuer might not be discouraged.
And the chase went on. But it went slower,
and slower, and slower, till at last it stopped with
Uncle Adam still just about six feet in the lead,
and the great moose still blind-mad, but too exhausted
to go one foot farther. Then Uncle
Adam chuckled softly and called for the ropes.
There was kicking, of course, and furious lunging
and wild snorting, but the woodsmen were
92
skilful and patient, and the King of Old Saugamauk
was conquered. In a little while he lay
upon his side, trussed up as securely and helplessly
as a papoose in its birch-bark carrying-cradle.
There was nothing left of his kingship
but to snort regal defiance, to which his captors
offered not the slightest retort. In his bonds he
was carried off to the settlements, on the big
logging-sled, drawn by the patient horses whom
he scorned.

CHAPTER III

After this ignominy, for days the King was
submissive, with the sullen numbness of despair.
Life for him became a succession of
stunning shocks and roaring change. He
would be put into strange box-prisons, which
would straightway begin to rush terribly
through the world with a voice of thunder.
Through the cracks in the box he would watch
trees and fields and hills race by in madness
of flight. He would be taken out of the box,
and murmuring crowds would gape at him till
the black mane along his neck would begin to
rise in something of his old anger. Then some
one would drive the crowd away, and he would
slip back into his stupor. He did not know
which he hated most,—the roaring boxes, the
fleeing landscapes, or the staring crowds. At
last he came to a loud region where there were
no trees, but only what seemed to him vast,
towering, naked rocks, red, gray, yellow, brown,
full of holes from which issued men in swarms.
These terrible rocks ran in endless rows,
94
and through them he came at last to a wide
field, thinly scattered with trees. There was
no seclusion in it, no deep, dark, shadowy hemlock
covert to lie down in; but it was green,
and it was spacious, and it was more or less
quiet. So when he was turned loose in it, he
was almost glad. He lifted his head, with a
spark of the old arrogance returning to his
eyes. And through dilating nostrils he drank
the free air till his vast lungs thrilled with
almost forgotten life.

The men who had brought him to the park—this
bleak barren he would have called it,
had he had the faculty of thinking in terms of
human speech, this range more fitted for the
frugal caribou than for a ranger of the deep
forests like himself—these men stood watching
him curiously after they had loosed him from
his bonds. For a few minutes he forgot all
about them. Then his eyes fell on them,
and a heat crept slowly into his veins as he
looked. Slowly he began to resume his kingship.
His eyes changed curiously, and a light,
fiery and fearless, flamed in their depths. His
mane began to bristle.

“It’s time for us to get out of this. That
fellow’s beginning to remember he has some
old scores to settle up!” remarked the Director
95
coolly to the head-keeper and his assistants;
and they all stepped backwards, with a casual
air, towards the big gate, which stood ajar to
receive them. Just as they reached it, the old
fire and fury surged back into the exile’s veins,
but heated seven fold by the ignominies which
he had undergone. With a hoarse and bawling
roar, such as had never before been heard in
those guarded precincts, he launched himself
upon his gaolers. But they nimbly slipped
through the gate and dropped the massive bars
into their sockets.

They were just in time. The next instant
the King had hurled himself with all his
weight upon the barrier. The sturdy ironwork
and the panels on either side of the posts
clanged, groaned, and even yielded a fraction
of an inch beneath the shock. But in the rebound
they thrust their assailant backward
with startling violence. Bewildered, he glared
at the obstacle, which looked so slender, yet
was so strong to balk him of his vengeance.
Then, jarred and aching, he withdrew haughtily
to explore his new domain. The Director, gazing
after him, nodded with supreme satisfaction.

“Those fellows up in New Brunswick told
no lies!” said he.

“He certainly is a peach!” assented the
96
head-keeper heartily. “When he grows his
new antlers, I reckon we will have to enlarge
the park.”

The great exile found his new range interesting
to explore, and began to forget his indignation.
Privacy it had not, for the trees at
this season were all leafless, and there were no
dense fir or spruce thickets into which he
could withdraw, to look forth unseen upon
this alien landscape. But there were certain
rough boulders behind which he could lurk.
And there were films of ice, and wraiths of
thin snow in the hollows, the chill touch of
which helped him to feel more or less at home.
In the distance he caught sight of a range of
those high, square rocks wherein the men dwelt;
and hating them deeply, he turned and pressed
on in the opposite direction over a gentle rise
and across a little valley; till suddenly, among
the trees, he came upon a curious barrier
of meshed stuff, something like a gigantic
cobweb. Through the meshes he could distinctly
see the country beyond, and it seemed
to be just the country he desired, more wooded
and inviting than what he had traversed. Confidently
he pushed upon the woven obstacle;
but to his amazement it did not give way before
him. He eyed it resentfully. How absurd
97
that so frail a thing should venture to forbid
him passage! He thrust upon it again,
more brusquely, to be just as brusquely denied.
The hot blood blazed to his head, and
he dashed himself upon it with all his strength.
The impenetrable but elastic netting yielded
for a space, then sprang back with an impetuosity
that flung him clear off his feet. He fell
with a loud grunt, lay for a moment dismayed,
then got up and eyed his incomprehensible
adversary with a blank stare. He was learning
so many strange lessons that it was difficult
to assimilate them all at once.

The following morning, when he was feasting
on a pile of the willow and poplar forage
which he loved, and which had appeared as if
by magic close beside the mysterious barrier,
he saw some men, perhaps a hundred yards
away, throw open a section of the barrier.
Forgetting to be angry at their intrusion on
his range, he watched them curiously. A
moment more, and a little herd of his own
kind, apparently quite indifferent to the men,
followed them into the range. He was not
surprised at their appearance, for his nose had
already told him there were moose about. But
he was surprised to see them on friendly terms
with man.
98

There were several cows in the herd, with a
couple of awkward yearlings; and the King,
much gratified, ambled forward with huge
strides to meet them and take them under his
gracious protection. But a moment later two
fine young bulls came into his view, following
the rest of the herd at a more dignified pace.
The King stopped, lowered his mighty front,
laid back his ears like an angry stallion, and
grunted a hoarse warning. The stiff black hair
along his neck slowly arose and stood straight
up.

The two young bulls stared in stupid astonishment
at this tremendous apparition. It
was not the fighting season, so they had no
jealousy, and felt nothing but a cold indifference
toward the stranger. But as he came striding
down the field his attitude was so menacing,
his stature so formidable, that they could not
but realize there was trouble brewing. It was
contrary to all traditions that they should take
the trouble to fight in midwinter, when they had
no antlers and their blood was sluggish. Nevertheless,
they could not brook to be so affronted,
as it were, in their own citadel.

Their eyes began to gleam angrily, and they
advanced, shaking their heads, to meet the insolent
stranger. The keepers, surprised, drew
99
together close by the gate; while one of them
left hurriedly and ran towards a building which
stood a little way off among the trees.

As the King swept down upon the herd,
bigger and blacker than any bull they had ever
seen before, the cows shrank away and stood
staring placidly. They were well fed, and for
the time indifferent to all else in their sheltered
world. Still, a fight is a fight, and if there was
going to be one, they were ready enough to
look on.

Alas for the right of possession when it runs
counter to the right of might! The two young
bulls were at home and in the right, and their
courage was sound. But when that black
whirlwind from the fastnesses of Old Saugamauk
fell upon them, it seemed that they had
no more rights at all.

Side by side they confronted the onrushing
doom. At the moment of impact, they reared
and struck savagely with their sharp hoofs.
But the gigantic stranger troubled himself with
no such details. He merely fell upon them,
like a blind but raging force, irresistible as a
falling hillside and almost as disastrous. They
both went down before him like calves, and
rolled over and over, stunned and sprawling.

The completeness of this victory, establishing
100
his supremacy beyond cavil, should have satisfied
the King, especially as this was not the
mating season and there could be no question
of rivalry. But his heart was bursting with
injury, and his thirst for vengeance was raging
to be glutted. As the vanquished bulls struggled
to recover their feet, he bounded upon the
nearest and trod him down again mercilessly.
The other, meanwhile, fled for his life, stricken
with shameless terror; and the exile, leaving
his victim, went thundering in pursuit, determined
that both should be annihilated. It was
a terrifying sight, the black giant, mane erect,
neck out-thrust, mouth open, eyes glaring with
implacable fury, sweeping down upon the fugitive
with his terrific strides.

But just then, when another stride would
have sufficed, a strange thing happened! A
flying noose settled over the pursuer’s head,
tightened, jerked his neck aside, and threw him
with a violence that knocked the wind clean
out of his raging body. While his vast lungs
sobbed and gasped to recover the vital air,
other nooses whipped about his legs; and
before he could recover himself even enough
to struggle, he was once more trussed up as he
had been by Uncle Adam amid the snows of
Saugamauk.
101

In this ignominious position, his heart bursting
with shame and impotence, he was left
lying while his two battered victims were lassoed
and led away. Since it was plain that
the King would not suffer them to live in his
kingdom, even as humble subjects, they were to
be removed to some more modest domain; for
the King, whether he deserved it or not, was to
have the best reserved for him.

It was little kingly he felt, the fettered giant,
as he lay there panting on his side. The cows
came up and gazed at him with a kind of placid
scorn, till his furious snortings and the undaunted
rage that flamed in his eyes made
them draw back apprehensively. Then, the
men who had overthrown him returned. They
dragged him unceremoniously up to the gate,
slipped his bonds, and discreetly put themselves
on the other side of the barrier before he could
get to his feet. With a grunt he wheeled and
faced them with such hate in his eyes that they
thought he would once more hurl himself upon
the bars. But he had learned his lesson. For
a few moments he stood quivering. Then, as
if recognizing at last a mastery too absolute
even for him to challenge, he shook himself
violently, turned away, and stalked off to join
the herd.
102

That evening, about sundown, it turned
colder. Clouds gathered heavily, and there
was the sense of coming snow in the air. A
great wind, rising fitfully, drew down out of
the north. Seeing no covert to his liking, the
King led his little herd to the top of a naked
knoll, where he could look about and choose a
shelter. But that great wind out of the north,
thrilling in his nostrils, got into his heart and
made him forget what he had come for. Out
across the alien gloom he stared, across the
huddled, unknown masses of the dark, till he
thought he saw the bald summit of Old Saugamauk
rising out of its forests, till he thought
he heard the wind roar in the spruce tops, the
dead branches clash and crack. The cows, for
a time, huddled close to his massive flanks, expecting
some new thing from his vast strength.
Then, as the storm gathered, they remembered
the shelter which man had provided for them,
and the abundant forage it contained. One
after the other they turned and filed away
slowly down the slopes, through the dim trees,
towards the corner where they knew a gate
would stand open for them, and then a door
into a warm-smelling shed. The King, lost in
his dream, did not notice their going. But
suddenly, feeling himself alone, he started and
103
looked about. The last of the yearlings, at its
mother’s heels, was just vanishing through the
windy gloom. He hesitated, started to follow,
then stopped abruptly. Let them go! They
would return to him probably. Turning back
to his station on the knoll, he stood with his
head held high, his nostrils drinking the cold,
while the winter night closed in upon him, and
the wind out of his own north rushed and
roared solemnly in his face.

The Gray Master

CHAPTER I

Why he was so much bigger, more powerful,
and more implacably savage than
the other members of the gray, spectral pack,
which had appeared suddenly from the north
to terrorize their lone and scattered clearings,
the settlers of the lower Quah-Davic Valley
could not guess. Those who were of French
descent among them, and full of the old Acadian
superstitions, explained it simply enough
by saying he was a loup-garou, or “wer-wolf,”
and resigned themselves to the impossibility
of contending against a creature of such supernatural
malignity and power. But their fellows
of English speech, having no such tradition to
fall back upon, were mystified and indignant.
The ordinary gray, or “cloudy,” wolf of the East
they knew, though he was so rare south of
Labrador that few of them had ever seen one.
They dismissed them all, indifferently, as “varmin.”
But this unaccountable gray ravager
108
was bigger than any two such wolves, fiercer
and more dauntless than any ten. Though the
pack he led numbered no more than half a
dozen, he made it respected and dreaded through
all the wild leagues of the Quah-Davic. To
make things worse, this long-flanked, long-jawed
marauder was no less cunning than fierce.
When the settlers, seeking vengeance for sheep,
pigs, and cattle slaughtered by his pack, went
forth to hunt him with dogs and guns, it seemed
that there was never a wolf in the country.
Nevertheless, either that same night or the
next, it was long odds that one or more of those
same dogs who had been officious in the hunt
would disappear. As for traps and poisoned
meat, they proved equally futile. They were
always visited, to be sure, by the pack, at some
unexpected and indeterminable moment, but
treated always with a contumelious scorn which
was doubtless all that such clumsy tactics merited.
Meanwhile the ravages went on, and the
children were kept close housed at night, and
cool-eyed old woodsmen went armed and vigilant
along the lonely roads. The French habitant
crossed himself, and the Saxon cursed his
luck; and no one solved the mystery.

Yet, after all, as Arthur Kane, the young
schoolmaster at Burnt Brook Cross-Roads, began
109
dimly to surmise, the solution was quite
simple. A lucky gold-miner, returning from
the Klondike, had brought with him not only
gold and an appetite, but also a lank, implacable,
tameless whelp from the packs that haunt
the sweeps of northern timber. The whelp had
gnawed his way to freedom. He had found,
fought, thrashed, and finally adopted, a little
pack of his small, Eastern kin. He had thriven,
and grown to the strength and stature that were
his rightful heritage. And “the Gray Master
of the Quah-Davic,” as Kane had dubbed him,
was no loup-garou, no outcast human soul incarcerate
in wolf form, but simply a great Alaskan
timber-wolf.

But this, when all is said, is quite enough.
A wolf that can break the back of a full-grown
collie at one snap of his jaws, and gallop off
with the carcass as if it were a chipmunk, is
about as undesirable a neighbor, in the night
woods, as any loup-garou ever devised by the
habitant’s excitable imagination.

All up and down the Quah-Davic Valley the
dark spruce woods were full of game,—moose,
deer, hares, and wild birds innumerable,—with
roving caribou herds on the wide barren beyond
the hill-ridge. Nevertheless, the great
gray wolf would not spare the possessions of
110
the settlers. His pack haunted the fringes of
the settlements with a needless tenacity which
seemed to hold a challenge in it, a direct and
insolent defiance. And the feeling of resentment
throughout the Valley was on the point
of crystallizing into a concerted campaign of
vengeance which would have left even so cunning
a strategist as the Gray Master no choice
but to flee or fall, when something took place
which quite changed the course of public sentiment.
Folk so disagreed about it that all concerted
action became impossible, and each one
was left to deal with the elusive adversary in
his own way.

This was what happened.

In a cabin about three miles from the nearest
neighbor lived the Widow Baisley, alone with
her son Paddy, a lad under ten years old, and
little for his age. One midwinter night she
was taken desperately ill, and Paddy, reckless
of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran
wildly to get help. The moon was high and
full, and the lifeless backwoods road was a narrow,
bright, white thread between the silent
black masses of the spruce forest. Now and
then, as he remembered afterwards, his ear
caught a sound of light feet following him in
the dark beyond the roadside. But his plucky
111
little heart was too full of panic grief about his
mother to have any room for fear as to himself.
Only the excited amazement of his neighbors,
over the fact that he had made the journey in
safety, opened his eyes to the hideous peril he
had come through. Willing helpers hurried
back with him to his mother’s bedside. And
on the way one of them, a keen huntsman who
had more than once pitted his woodcraft in
vain against that of the Gray Master, had the
curiosity to step off the road and examine the
snow under the thick spruces. Perhaps imagination
misled him, when he thought he caught
a glimpse of savage eyes, points of green flame,
fading off into the black depths. But there
could be no doubt as to the fresh tracks he
found in the snow. There they were,—the
footprints of the pack, like those of so many
big dogs,—and among them the huge trail of
the great, far-striding leader. All the way, almost
from his threshold, these sinister steps
had paralleled those of the hurrying child.
Close to the edge of the darkness they ran,—close,
within the distance of one swift leap,—yet
never any closer!

Why had the great gray wolf, who faced
and pulled down the bull moose, and from
whose voice the biggest dogs in the settlements
112
ran like whipped curs—why had he
and his stealthy pack spared this easy prey?
It was inexplicable, though many had theories
good enough to be laughed to scorn by those
who had none. The habitants, of course, had
all their superstitions confirmed, and with a
certain respect and refinement of horror added:
Here was a loup-garou so crafty as to spare, on
occasion! He must be conciliated, at all costs.
They would hunt him no more, his motives
being so inexplicable. Let him take a few
sheep, or a steer, now and then, and remember
that they, at least, were not troubling him. As
for the English-speaking settlers, their enmity
cooled down to the point where they could no
longer get together any concentrated bitterness.
It was only a big rascal of a wolf, anyway,
scared to touch a white man’s child, and
certainly nothing for a lot of grown men to
organize about. Some of the women jumped
to the conclusion that a certain delicacy of
sentiment had governed the wolves in their
strange forbearance, while others honestly believed
that the pack had been specially sent
by Providence to guard the child through the
forest on his sacred errand. But all, whatever
their views, agreed in flouting the young schoolteacher’s
uninteresting suggestion that perhaps
113
the wolves had not happened, at the moment,
to be hungry.

As it chanced, however, even this very rational
explanation of Kane’s was far from the
truth. The truth was that the great wolf
had profited by his period of captivity in the
hands of a masterful man. Into his fine sagacity
had penetrated the conception—hazy, perhaps,
but none the less effective—that man’s
vengeance would be irresistible and inescapable
if once fairly aroused. This conception he had
enforced upon the pack. It was enough. For,
of course, even to the most elementary intelligence
among the hunting, fighting kindreds of
the wild, it was patent that the surest way to
arouse man’s vengeance would be to attack
man’s young. The intelligence lying behind
the wide-arched skull of the Gray Master was
equal to more intricate and less obvious conclusions
than that.

Among all the scattered inhabitants of the
Quah-Davic Valley there was no one who devoted
quite so much attention to the wonderful
gray wolf as did the young school-teacher.
His life at the Burnt Brook Cross-Roads, his
labors at the little Burnt Brook School, were
neither so exacting nor so exciting but that he
had time on his hands. His preferred expedients
114
for spending that time were hunting, and
studying the life of the wild kindreds. He was
a good shot with both rifle and camera, and
would serve himself with one weapon or the
other as the mood seized him. When life, or
his dinner, went ill with him, or he found himself
fretting hopelessly for the metropolitan excitement
of the little college city where he had
been educated, he would choose his rifle. And
so wide-reaching, so mysterious, are the ties which
enmesh all created beings, that it would seem to
even matters up and relieve his feelings wonderfully
just to kill something, if only a rabbit or a
weasel.

But at other times he preferred the camera.

Naturally Kane was interested in the mysterious
gray wolf more than in all the other prowlers
of the Quah-Davic put together. He was
quite unreasonably glad when the plans for a
concerted campaign against the marauder so
suddenly fell through. That so individual a
beast should have its career cut short by an
angry settler’s bullet, to avenge a few ordinary
pigs or sheep, was a thing he could hardly contemplate
with patience. To scatter the pack
would be to rob the Quah-Davic solitudes of
half their romance. He determined to devote
himself to a study of the great wolf’s personality
115
and characteristics, and to foil, as far as this
could be done without making himself unpopular,
such plots as might be laid for the beast’s
undoing.

Recognizing, however, that this friendly interest
might not be reciprocated, Kane chose
his rifle rather than his camera as a weapon, on
those stinging, blue-white nights when he went
forth to seek knowledge of the gray wolf’s ways.
His rifle was a well-tried repeating Winchester,
and he carried a light, short-handled axe in his
belt besides the regulation knife; so he had no
serious misgivings as he trod the crackling,
moonlit snow beneath the moose-hide webbing
of his snowshoes. But not being utterly foolhardy,
he kept to the open stretches of meadow,
or river-bed, or snow-buried lake, rather than
in the close shadows of the forest.

But now, when he was so expectant, the wolf-pack
seemed to find business elsewhere. For
nights not a howl had been heard, not a fresh
track found, within miles of Burnt Brook Cross-Roads.
Then, remembering that a watched
pot takes long to boil, Kane took fishing-lines
and bait, and went up the wide, white brook-bed
to the deep lake in the hills, whence it launches
its shallow flood towards the Quah-Davic. He
took with him also for companionship, since
116
this time he was not wolf-hunting, a neighbor’s
dog that was forever after him—a useless,
yellow lump of mongrel dog-flesh, but friendly
and silent. After building a hasty shelter of
spruce boughs some distance out from shore in
the flooding light, he chopped holes through
the ice and fell to fishing for the big lake trout
that inhabited those deep waters. He had luck.
And soon, absorbed in the new excitement, he
had forgotten all about the great gray wolf.

It was late, for Kane had slept the early part
of the night, waiting for moonrise before starting
on his expedition. The air was tingling
with windless cold, and ghostly white with the
light of a crooked, waning moon. Suddenly,
without a sound, the dog crept close against
Kane’s legs. Kane felt him tremble. Looking
up sharply, his eyes fell on a tall, gray form, sitting
erect on the tip of a naked point, not a
hundred yards away, and staring, not at him,
but at the moon.

In spite of himself, Kane felt a pricking in
his cheeks, a creeping of the skin under his
hair. The apparition was so sudden, and, above
all, the cool ignoring of his presence was so
disconcerting. Moreover, through that half-sinister
light, his long muzzle upstretched towards
the moon, and raised as he was a little
117
above the level on which Kane was standing,
the wolf looked unnaturally and impossibly tall.
Kane had never heard of a wolf acting in this
cool, self-possessed, arrogantly confident fashion,
and his mind reverted obstinately to the outworn
superstitions of his habitants friends. But, after
all, it was this wolf, not an ordinary brush-fence
wolf, that he was so anxious to study; and the
unexpected was just what he had most reason
to expect! He was getting what he came for.

Kane knew that the way to study the wild
creatures was to keep still and make no noise.
So be stiffened into instant immobility, and regretted
that he had brought the dog with him.
But he need not have worried about the dog,
for that intelligent animal showed no desire
to attract the Gray Master’s notice. He was
crouched behind Kane’s legs, and motionless
except for his shuddering.

For several minutes no one stirred—nothing
stirred in all that frozen world. Then, feeling
the cold begin to creep in upon him in the stillness,
Kane had to lift his thick-gloved hands
to chafe his ears. He did it cautiously, but
the caution was superfluous. The great wolf
apparently had no objection to his moving as
much as he liked. Once, indeed, those green,
lambent eyes flamed over him, but casually, in
118
making a swift circuit of the shores of the lake
and the black fringe of the firs; but for all the
interest which their owner vouchsafed him,
Kane might as well have been a juniper bush.

Knowing very well, however, that this elaborate
indifference could not be other than feigned,
Kane was patient, determined to find out what
the game was. At the same time, he could
not help the strain beginning to tell on him.
Where was the rest of the pack? From time
to time he glanced searchingly over his shoulder
towards the all-concealing fir woods.

At last, as if considering himself utterly alone,
the great wolf opened his jaws, stretched back
his neck, and began howling his shrill, terrible
serenade to the moon. As soon as he paused,
came far-off nervous barkings and yelpings
from dogs who hated and trembled in the scattered
clearings. But no wolf-howl made reply.
The pack, for all the sign they gave, might have
vanished off the earth. And Kane wondered
what strong command from their leader could
have kept them silent when all their ancient
instincts bade them answer.

As if well satisfied with his music, the great
wolf continued to beseech the moon so persistently
that at last Kane lost patience. He
wanted more variety in the programme. Muttering,
119
“I’ll see if I can’t rattle your fine composure
a bit, my friend!” he raised his rifle and
sent a bullet whining over the wolf’s head. The
wolf cocked his ears slightly and looked about
carelessly, as if to say, “What’s that?” then
coolly resumed his serenade.

Nettled by such ostentatious nonchalance,
Kane drove another bullet into the snow within
a few inches of the wolf’s forefeet. This proved
more effective. The great beast looked down
at the place where the ball had struck, sniffed
at it curiously, got up on all fours, and turned
and stared steadily at Kane for perhaps half a
minute. Kane braced himself for a possible onslaught.
But it never came. Whirling lightly,
the Gray Master turned his back on the disturber
of his song, and trotted away slowly,
without once looking back. He did not make
directly for the cover, but kept in full view and
easy gunshot for several hundred yards. Then
he disappeared into the blackness of the spruce
woods. Thereupon the yellow mongrel, emerging
from his shelter behind Kane’s legs, pranced
about on the snow before him with every sign
of admiration and relief.

But Kane was too puzzled to be altogether
relieved. It was not according to the books
for any wolf, great or small, to conduct himself
120
in this supercilious fashion. Looking back
along the white bed of the brook, the path by
which he must return, he saw that the sinking
of the moon would very soon involve it in thick
shadow. This was not as he wished it. He had
had enough of fishing. Gathering up his now
frozen prizes, and strapping the bag that contained
them over his shoulder, so as to leave
both hands free, he set out for home at the
long, deliberate, yet rapid lope of the experienced
snowshoer; and the yellow dog, confidence
in his companion’s prowess now thoroughly
established, trotted on heedlessly three
or four paces ahead.

Already the shadow of the woods lay halfway
across the bed of the brook, but down the
middle of the strip of brightness, still some five
or six paces in breadth, Kane swung steadily.
As he went, he kept a sharp eye on the shadowed
edge of his path. He had gone perhaps
a mile, when all at once he felt a tingling at the
roots of his hair, which seemed to tell him he
was being watched from the darkness. Peer as
he would, however, he could catch no hint of
moving forms; strain his ears as he might,
he could hear no whisper of following feet.
Moreover, he trusted to the keener senses,
keener instincts, of the dog, to give him warning
121
of any furtive approach; and the dog was
obviously at ease.

He was just beginning to execrate himself
for letting his nerves get too much on edge,
when suddenly out from the black branches
just ahead shot a long, spectral shape and fell
upon the dog. There was one choked yelp—and
the dog and the terrible shape vanished
together, back into the blackness.

It was all so instantaneous that before Kane
could get his rifle up they were gone. Startled
and furious, he fired at random, three times, into
cover. Then he steadied himself, remembering
that the number of cartridges in his chamber
was not unlimited. Seeing to it that his axe
and knife were both loose for instant action, he
stopped and replenished his Winchester. Then
he hurried on as fast as he could without betraying
haste.

As he went, he was soon vividly conscious
that the wolves—not the Gray Master alone,
but the whole pack also—were keeping pace
with him through the soundless dark beyond
the rim of the spruces. But not a hint of their
grim companioning could he see or hear. He
felt it merely in the creeping of his skin, the
elemental stirring of the hair at the back of his
neck. From moment to moment he expected
122
the swift attack, the battle for his life. But he
was keyed up to it. It was not fear that made
his nerves tingle, but the tense, trembling excitement
of the situation. Even against these
strange, hidden forces of the forest, his spirit
felt sure of victory. He felt as if his rifle would
go up and speak, almost of itself, unerringly at
the first instant of attack, even before the adversary
broke into view. But through all the
drawn-out length of those last three miles his
hidden adversaries gave no sign, save that once a
dead branch, concealed under the snow, snapped
sharply. His rifle was at his shoulder, it seemed
to him, almost before the sound reached his ear.
But nothing came of it. Then a panic-mad rabbit,
stretched straight out in flight, darted across
the fast narrowing brightness of his path. But
nothing followed. And at last, after what seemed
to him hours, he came out upon the open
pastures overlooking Burnt Brook Settlement.
Here he ran on a little way; and then, because
the strain had been great, he sat down suddenly
upon a convenient stump and burst into a peal
of laughter which must have puzzled the wolves
beyond measure.

After this, though well aware that the Gray
Master’s inexplicable forbearance had saved him
a battle which, for all his confidence, might quite
123
conceivably have gone against him, Kane’s interest
in the mysterious beast was uncompromisingly
hostile. He was bitter on account of
the dog. He felt that the great wolf had put a
dishonor upon him; and for a few days he was
no longer the impartial student of natural history,
but the keen, primitive hunter with the blood-lust
hot in his veins. Then this mood passed, or,
rather, underwent a change. He decided that
the Gray Master was, indeed, too individual a
beast to be just snuffed out, but, at the same
time, far too dangerous to be left at liberty.

And now all the thought and effort that
could be spared from his daily duties at the
Cross-Roads were bent to the problem of capturing
the great wolf alive. He would be doing
a service to the whole Quah-Davic Valley.
And he would have the pleasure of presenting
the splendid captive to his college town, at that
time greatly interested in the modest beginnings
of a zoölogical garden which its citizens
were striving to inaugurate. It thrilled his
fancy to imagine a tin placard on the front of a
cage in the little park, bearing the inscription—

Canis Occidentalis.
Eastern North America.
Presented by Arthur Kane, Esq.

After a few weeks of assiduous trapping,
however, Kane felt bound to acknowledge that
this modest ambition of his seemed remote
from fulfilment. Every kind of trap he could
think of, that would take a beast alive, he tried
in every kind of way. And having run the
whole insidious gamut, he would turn patiently
to run it all over again. Of course, the result
was inevitable, for no beast, not even such a
one as the Gray Master, is a match, in the long
run, for a man who is in earnest. Yet Kane’s
triumph, when it blazed upon his startled eyes
at last, was indirect. In avoiding, and at the
same time uncovering and making mock of,
Kane’s traps, the great wolf put his foot into
another, a powerful bear-trap, which a cunning
old trapper had hidden near by, without bait.
The trap was secured to a tree by a stout chain—and
rage, strain, tear as he might, the Gray
Master found himself snared. In his silent
fury he would probably have gnawed off the
captive foot, for the sake of freedom. But before
he came to that, Kane arrived and occupied
his attention fully.

Kane’s disappointment, at finding the splendid
prize in another trap than his own, was
but momentary. He knew his successful rival
would readily part with his claims, for due
125
consideration. But he was puzzled as to what
should be done in the immediate emergency.
He wanted to go back home for help, for ropes,
straps, and a muzzle with which he had provided
himself; but he was afraid lest, in his
absence, the trapper might arrive and shoot the
captive, for the sake of the pelt and the bounty.
In his uncertainty he waited, hoping that the
trapper might come soon; and by way of practice
for the serious enterprise that would come
later, as well as to direct the prisoner’s mind a
little from his painful predicament, Kane began
trying to lasso him with a coil of heavy cord
which he carried.

His efforts in this direction were not altogether
successful, but the still fury which they
aroused in the great wolf’s breast doubtless obscured
the mordant anguish in his foot. One
terrific leap at his enemy, resulting in an ignominious
overthrow as the chain stopped him in
mid-air, had convinced the subtle beast of the
vanity of such tactics. Crouching back, he
eyed his adversary in silence, with eyes whose
hatred seemed to excoriate. But whenever the
running noose at the end of the cord came
coiling swiftly at his head, with one lightning
snap of his long teeth he would sever it as with
a knife. By the time Kane had grown tired of
126
this diversion the cord was so full of knots that
no noose would any longer run.

But at this point the old trapper came slouching
up on his snowshoes, a twinkle of elation in
his shrewd, frosty, blue eyes.

“I reckon we’ll show the varmint now as
how he ain’t no loup-garou!” he remarked,
lightly swinging his axe.

But Kane hastily intervened.

“Please don’t kill him, Dave!” he begged.
“I want him, bad! What’ll you take for
him?”

“Just as he stands?” demanded the old
trapper, with a chuckle. “I ain’t a-goin’ to deliver
the goods to yer door, ye know!”

“No,” laughed Kane, “just as he stands, right
here!”

“Well, seein’ as it’s you, I don’t want no
more’n what his pelt’ld fetch, an’ the bounty on
his nose,” answered the trapper.

“All right,” said Kane. “You wait here a
bit, will you, an’ keep him amused so’s he won’t
gnaw his paw off; an’ I’ll run back to the
Cross-Roads and get some rope and things I
guess I’ll be needing.”

When he got back with rope, straps, a big
mastiff-muzzle, and a toboggan, he found Dave
in a very bad humor, and calling the watchful,
127
silent, crouching beast hard names. In his
efforts to amuse himself by stirring that imperturbable
and sinister quiet into action, he had
come just within the range of the Gray Master’s
spring. Swift as that spring was, that of the
alert backwoodsman was just swift enough to
elude it—in part. Dave’s own hide had escaped,
but his heavy jacket of homespun had
had the back ripped clean out of it.

But now, for all his matchless strength, courage,
and craft, the Gray Master’s game was
played out. The fickle Fates of the wild had
pronounced against him. He could not parry
two flying nooses at once. And presently,
having been choked for a few moments into
unconsciousness, he awoke to find himself
bound so that he could not move a leg, and his
mighty jaws imprisoned in a strange cage of
straps and steel. He was tied upon the toboggan,
and being dragged swiftly through the
forest—that free forest of which he had so long
felt himself master—at the heels of his two
conquerors. His only poor consolation was
that the hideous, crunching thing had been removed
from his bleeding paw, which, however,
anguished cruelly for the soothing of his
tongue.

CHAPTER II

During the strenuous and dangerous weeks
while Kane was gaoler to his dreaded captive,
his respect for the grim beast’s tameless spirit
by no means diminished; but he had no shadow
of misgiving as to the future to which he
destined his victim. He felt that in sending
the incomparable wolf to the gardens, where he
would be well cared for, and at the same time
an educative influence, he was being both just
and kind. And it was with feelings of unmixed
delight that he received a formal resolution of
gratitude from the zoölogical society for his
valued and in some respects unique donation.

It was about a year and a half later that
Kane had occasion to revisit the city of his
Alma Mater. As soon as possible he hurried
to inspect the little gardens, which had already
marched so far towards success as to be familiarly
styled “The Zoo.” There were two or
three paddocks of deer, of different North
American species—for the society was inclined
to specialize on the wild kindreds of
native origin. There were moose, caribou, a
129
couple of bears, raccoons, foxes, porcupines,
two splendid pumas, a rather flea-bitten and
toothless tiger, and the Gray Master, solitary
in his cage!

A sure instinct led Kane straight to that cage,
which immediately adjoined the big double cage
of the pumas. As he approached, he caught
sight of a tall, gray shape pacing, pacing, pacing,
pacing to and fro behind the bars with a sort
of measured restlessness that spoke an immeasurable
monotony. When he reached the
front of the cage, Kane saw that the great
wolf’s eyes were noting nothing of what was
about him, but dim with some far-off vision.
As he marked the look in them, and thought
of what they must be remembering and aching
for, his heart began to smite him. He felt his
first pang of self-reproach, for having doomed
to ignominious exile and imprisonment this
splendid creature who had deserved, at least,
to die free. As he mused over this point, half
angrily, the Gray Master suddenly paused, and
his thin nostrils wrinkled. Perhaps there still
clung about Kane’s clothes some scent of the
spruce woods, some pungent breath of the
cedar swamps. He turned and looked Kane
straight in the eyes.

There was unmistakable recognition in that
130
deep stare. There was also, to Kane’s sensitive
imagination, a tameless hate and an unspeakable
but dauntless despair. Convicted in his
own mind of a gross and merciless misunderstanding
of his wild kindreds, whom he professed
to know so well, he glanced up and saw
the painted placard staring down at him, exactly
as he had anticipated––

Canis Occidentalis.
Eastern North America.
Presented by Arthur Kane, Esq.

The sight sickened him. He had a foolish
impulse to tear it down and to abase himself
with a plea for pardon before the silent beast
behind the bars. But when he looked again,
the Gray Master had turned away, and was
once more, with indrawn, far-off vision in his
eyes, pacing, pacing, pacing to and fro. Kane
felt overwhelmed with the intolerable weariness
of it, as if it had been going on, just like that,
ever since he had pronounced this doom upon
his vanquished adversary, and as if it would go
on like that forever. In vain by coaxing word,
by sharp, sudden whistle, by imitations of owl,
loon, and deer calls, which brought all the boys
in the place admiringly about him, did he strive
131
to catch again the attention of the captive.
But not once more, even for the fleeting fraction
of a second, would the Gray Master turn his
eyes. And presently, angry and self-reproachful,
Kane turned on his heel and went home,
pursued by the enthusiasm of the small boys.

After this, Kane went nearly every day to
the little “Zoo”; but never again did he win
the smallest hint of notice from the Gray
Master. And ever that tireless pacing smote
him with bitterest self-reproach. Half unconsciously
he made it a sort of penance to go and
watch his victim, till at last he found himself
indulging in sentimental, idiotic notions of
trying to ransom the prisoner. Realizing
that any such attempt would make him supremely
ridiculous, and that such a dangerous
and powerful creature could not be set free
anywhere, he consoled himself with a resolve
that never again would he take captive any of
the freedom-loving, tameless kindreds of the
wilderness. He would kill them and have
cleanly done with it, or leave them alone.

One morning, thinking to break the spell of
that eternal, hopeless pacing by catching the
Gray Master at his meals, Kane went up to the
gardens very early, before any of the usual visitors
had arrived. He found that the animals
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had already been fed. The cages were being
cleaned. He congratulated himself on his opportune
arrival, for this would give him a new
insight into the ways of the beasts with their
keepers.

The head-keeper, as it chanced, was a man
of long experience with wild animals, in one
of the chief zoölogical parks of the country.
Long familiarity, however, had given him that
most dangerous gift, contempt. And he had
lost his position through that fault most unforgivable
in an animal keeper, drunkenness. Owing
to this fact, the inexperienced authorities
of this little “Zoo” had been able to obtain his
services at a comparatively moderate wage—and
were congratulating themselves on the possession
of a treasure.

On this particular morning, Biddell was not
by any means himself. He was cleaning the
cage of the two pumas, and making at the same
time desperate efforts to keep his faculties clear
and avoid betraying his condition. The two
big cats seemed to observe nothing peculiar in
his manner, and obeyed him, sulkily, as usual;
but Kane noticed that the great wolf, though
pacing up and down according to his custom,
had his eyes on the man in the next cage, instead
of upon his own secret visions. Biddell
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had driven the two pumas back through the
door which led from the open cage to the room
which served them for a den, and closed the
door on them. Then, having finished his duties
there, he unfastened the strong door between
this cage and that of the Gray Master, and
stepped through, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Biddell was armed, of course, with a heavy-pronged
fork, but he carried it carelessly as he
went about his work, as if he had long since
taught the sombre wolf to keep at a distance.
But to-day the wolf acted curiously. He backed
away in silence, as usual, but eyed the man fixedly
with a look which, as it seemed to Kane,
showed anything rather than fear. The stiff
hair rose slightly along his neck and massive
shoulders. Kane could not help congratulating
himself that he was not in the keeper’s place.
But he felt sure everything was all right, as Biddell
was supposed to know his business.

When Biddell came to the place where the
wolf was standing, the latter made way reluctantly,
still backing, and staring with that sinister
fixity which Kane found so impressive. He
wondered if Biddell noticed. He was just on
the point of speaking to him about it, through
the bars, when he chanced to glance aside to
the cage of the pumas. Biddell, in his foggy
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state of mind, had forgotten to close an inner
door connecting the two rooms in the rear.
The pumas had quietly passed through, and
emerged again into their cage by the farther
entrance. Catching sight of the door into the
wolf’s cage standing ajar, they had crept up to
it; and now, with one great noiseless paw, the
leader of the two was softly pushing it open.

Kane gave an inarticulate yell of warning.
No words were needed to translate that warning
to the keeper, who was sobered completely
as he flashed round and saw what was happening.
With a sharp command he rushed to
drive the pumas back and close the gate. But
one was already through, and the other blocked
the way.

At this tense instant, while Kane glanced
swiftly aside to see if any help were in sight,
the Gray Master launched himself across the
cage. Kane could not see distinctly, so swiftly
did it happen, whether the man or the intruding
puma was the object of that mad rush. But
in the next second the man was down, on his
face, with the silent wolf and the screeching
puma locked in a death grapple on top of him.

“Then the second puma pounced.”

Horrified, and yelling for help, Kane tore at
the bars, but there was no way of getting in, the
door being locked. He saw that the wolf had
secured a hold upon the puma’s throat, but that
the great cat’s claws were doing deadly work.
Then the second puma pounced, with a screech,
upon the Gray Master’s back, bearing him down.

At this moment Biddell rolled out from under
the raving, writhing heap, and staggered to his
feet, bleeding, but apparently uninjured. With
his fork and his booted foot he threw himself
upon the combatants furiously, striving to separate
them. After what seemed to Kane an age
he succeeded in forcing off the second puma
and driving it through the gate, which he shut.
Then he returned to the fight.

But he had little more to do now, for the fight
was over. Though no wolf is supposed to be
a fair match for a puma, the Gray Master, with
his enormous strength and subtle craft, might
perhaps have held his own against his first antagonist
alone. But against the two he was
powerless. The puma, badly torn, now crouched
snarling upon his unresisting body. Biddell
forced the victor off and drove him into a corner,
where he lay lashing his sides with heavy,
twitching tail.

The keeper was sober enough now. One
long look at the great wolf’s body satisfied
him it was all over. He turned and saw
Kane’s white face pressed against the bars.
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With a short laugh he shook himself, to make
sure he was all sound, then pushed the body
of the Gray Master gently with his foot. Yet
there was respect, not disrespect, in the gesture.

“I wouldn’t have had that happen for a
thousand dollars, Mr. Kane!” said he in a
voice of keen regret. “That was a great
beast, an’ we’ll never get another wolf to
match him.”

Kane was on the point of saying that it
would not have happened but for certain circumstances
which it was unnecessary for him
to specify. He realized, however, that he was
glad it had happened, glad the long pacing,
pacing, pacing was at an end, glad the load of
his self-reproach was lifted off. So he said
something quite different.

“Well, Biddell, he’s free! And maybe,
when all’s said, that was just what he was
after!”

Then he turned and strode hurriedly away,
more content in his heart than he had felt
for days.

The Sun-Gazer

CHAPTER I

To Jim Horner it seemed as if the great,
white-headed eagle was in some way
the uttered word of the mountain and the
lake—of the lofty, solitary, granite-crested
peak, and of the deep, solitary water at its
base. As his canoe raced down the last mad
rapid, and seemed to snatch breath again
as it floated out upon the still water of the
lake, Jim would rest his paddle across
the gunwales and look upward expectantly.
First his keen, far-sighted, gray eyes would
sweep the blue arc of sky, in search of
the slow circling of wide, motionless wings.
Then, if the blue was empty of this far
shape, his glance would range at once to a
dead pine standing sole on a naked and
splintered shoulder of the mountain which
he knew as “Old Baldy.” There he was
almost sure to see the great bird sitting,
motionless and majestic, staring at the sun.
Floating idly and smoking, resting after his
140
long battle with the rapids, he would watch,
till the immensity and the solitude would
creep in upon his spirit and oppress him.
Then, at last, a shrill yelp, far off and faint,
but sinister, would come from the pine-top;
and the eagle, launching himself on open
wings from his perch, would either wheel
upward into the blue, or flap away over the
serried fir-tops to some ravine in the cliffs
that hid his nest.

One day, when Jim came down the river
and stopped, as usual, to look for the great
bird, he scanned in vain both sky and cliff-side.
At last he gave up the search and
paddled on down the lake with a sense
of loss. Something had vanished from the
splendor of the solitude. But presently he
heard, close overhead, the beat and whistle
of vast wings, and looking up, he saw the
eagle passing above him, flying so low that
he could catch the hard, unwinking, tameless
stare of its black and golden eyes as they
looked down upon him with a sort of inscrutable
challenge. He noted also a peculiarity
which he had never seen in any other eagle.
This one had a streak of almost black feathers
immediately over its left eye, giving it a
heavy and sinister eyebrow. The bird carried
141
in the clutch of its talons a big, glistening
lake trout, probably snatched from the
fish-hawk; and Jim was able to take note
of the very set of its pinion-feathers as the
wind hummed in their tense webs. Flying
with a massive power quite unlike the ease
of his soaring, the eagle mounted gradually
up the steep, passed the rocky shoulder with
its watch-tower pine, and disappeared over
the edge of a ledge which looked to Horner
like a mere scratch across the face of the
mountain.

“There’s where his nest is, sure!” muttered
Horner to himself. And remembering
that cold challenge in the bird’s yellow stare,
he suddenly decided that he wanted to see
an eagle’s nest. He had plenty of time. He
was in no particular hurry to get back to the
settlement and the gossip of the cross-roads
store. He turned his canoe to land, lifted her
out and hid her in the bushes, and struck back
straight for the face of “Old Baldy.”

The lower slope was difficult to climb, a
tangle of tumbled boulders and fallen trunks,
mantled in the soundless gloom of the fir-forest.
Skilled woodsman though he was,
Horner’s progress was so slow, and the
windless heat became so oppressive to his
142
impatience, that he was beginning to think of
giving up the idle venture, when suddenly he
came face to face with a perpendicular and
impassable wall of cliff. This curt arrest to
his progress was just what was needed to
stiffen his wavering resolution. He understood
the defiance which his ready fancy had
found in the stare of the eagle. Well, he had
accepted the challenge. He would not be
baffled by a rock. If he could not climb over
it, he would go round it; but he would find the
nest.

With an obstinate look in his eyes, Horner
began to work his way along the foot of the
cliff towards the right. Taking advantage of
every inch of ascent that he could gain, he
at last found, to his satisfaction, that he had
made sufficient height to clear the gloom of
the woods. As he looked out over their tops,
a light breeze cooled his wet forehead, and
he pressed on with fresh vigor. Presently
the slope grew a trifle easier, the foothold
surer, and he mounted more rapidly. The
steely lake, and the rough-ridged, black-green
sea of the fir-tops began to unroll below him.
At last he rounded an elbow of the steep,
and there before him, upthrust perhaps a hundred
feet above his head, stood the outlying
143
shoulder of rock, crowned with its dead pine, on
which he was accustomed to see the eagle
sitting. Even as he looked, motionless, there
came a rushing of great wings; and suddenly
there was the eagle himself, erect on his high
perch, and staring, as it seemed to Horner,
straight into the sun.

When Horner resumed his climbing, the great
bird turned his head and gazed down upon him
with an ironic fixity which betrayed neither
dread nor wonder. Concluding that the nest
would be lying somewhere within view of its
owner’s watch-tower, Horner now turned his
efforts towards reaching the dead pine. With
infinite difficulty, and with a few bruises to
arm and leg, he managed to cross the jagged
crevice which partly separated the jutting rock-pier
from the main face of the cliff. Then, laboriously
and doggedly, he dragged himself up the
splintered slope, still being forced around to the
right, till there fell away below him a gulf into
which it was not good for the nervous to look.
Feeling that a fate very different from that of
Lot’s wife might be his if he should let himself
look back too indiscreetly, he kept his eyes upon
the lofty goal and pressed on upwards with a
haste that now grew a trifle feverish. It began
to seem to him that the irony of the eagle’s
144
changeless stare might perhaps not be unjustified.

Not till Horner had conquered the steep and,
panting but elated, gained the very foot of the
pine, did the eagle stir. Then, spreading his
wings with a slow disdain, as if not dread but
aversion to this unbidden visitor bade him go,
he launched himself on a long, splendid sweep
over the gulf, and then mounted on a spacious
spiral to his inaccessible outlook in the blue.
Leaning against the bleached and scarred trunk
of the pine, Horner watched this majestic departure
for some minutes, recovering his breath
and drinking deep the cool and vibrant air.
Then he turned and scanned the face of the
mountain.

“He launched himself on a long, splendid sweep over the gulf.”

There it lay, in full view—the nest which he
had climbed so far to find. It was not more
than a hundred yards away. Yet, at first sight,
it seemed hopelessly out of reach. The chasm
separating the ledge on which it clung from the
outlying rock of the pine was not more than
twenty feet across; but its bottom was apparently
somewhere in the roots of the mountain. There
was no way of passing it at this point. But
Horner had a faith that there was a way to be
found over or around every obstacle in the world,
if only one kept on looking for it resolutely
enough. To keep on looking for a path to the
eagle’s nest, he struggled forward, around the
outer slope of the buttress, down a ragged incline,
and across a narrow and dizzy “saddle-back,”
which brought him presently upon another angle
of the steep, facing southeast. Clinging with his
toes and one hand, while he wiped his dripping
forehead with his sleeve, he looked up—and
saw the whole height of the mountain, unbroken
and daunting, stretched skyward above him.

But to Horner the solemn sight was not
daunting in the least.

“Gee!” he exclaimed, grinning with satisfaction.
“I hev circumvented that there cervice,
sure’s death!”

Of the world below he had now a view that
was almost overpoweringly unrestricted; but of
the mountain, and his scene of operations, he
could see only the stretch directly above him.
A little calculation convinced him, however, that
all he had to do was to keep straight on up for
perhaps a hundred and fifty feet, then, as soon
as the slope would permit, work around to his
left, and descend upon the nest from above. Incidentally,
he made up his mind that his return
journey should be made by another face of the
mountain—any other, rather than that by which
he had rashly elected to come.
146

It seemed to Horner like a mile, that last hundred
and fifty feet; but at last he calculated that
he had gained enough in height. At the same
time he felt the slope grow easier. Making his
way towards the left, he came upon a narrow
ledge, along which he could move easily side-wise,
by clinging to the rock. Presently it
widened to a path by which he could walk almost
at ease, with the wide, wild solitude, dark green
laced with silver watercourses, spread like a stupendous
amphitheatre far below him. It was the
wilderness which he knew so well in detail, yet had
never before seen as a whole; and the sight, for a
few moments, held him in a kind of awed surprise.
When, at last, he tore his gaze free from the majestic
spectacle, there, some ten or twelve yards
below his feet, he saw the object of his quest.

It was nothing much to boast of in the way
of architecture, this nest of the Kings of the
Air—a mere cart-load of sticks and bark and
coarse grass, apparently tumbled at haphazard
upon the narrow ledge. But in fact its foundations
were so skilfully wedged into the crevices
of the rock, its structure was so cunningly interwoven,
that the fiercest winds which scourged
that lofty seat were powerless against it. It
was a secure throne, no matter what tempests
might rage around it.
147

Sitting half erect on the nest were two
eaglets, almost full grown, and so nearly full
feathered that Horner wondered why they did
not take wing at his approach. He did not
know that the period of helplessness with these
younglings of royal birth lasted even after they
looked as big and well able to take care of
themselves as their parents. It was a surprise
to him, also, to see that they were quite unlike
their parents in color, being black all over
from head to tail, instead of a rich brown with
snow-white head, neck, and tail. As he stared,
he slowly realized that the mystery of the rare
“black eagle” was explained. He had seen
one once, flying heavily just above the tree-tops,
and imagined it a discovery of his own. But
now he reached the just conclusion that it had
been merely a youngster in its first plumage.

As he stared, the two young birds returned
his gaze with interest, watching him with
steady, yellow, undaunted eyes from under their
flat, fierce brows; with high-shouldered wings
half raised, they appeared quite ready to resent
any familiarity which the strange intruder
might be contemplating.

Horner lay face downward on his ledge, and
studied the perpendicular rock below him for a
way to reach the next. He had no very definite
148
idea what he wanted to do when he got there;
possibly, if the undertaking seemed feasible, he
might carry off one of the royal brood and
amuse himself with trying to domesticate it.
But, at any rate, he hoped to add something,
by a closer inspection, to his rather inadequate
knowledge of eagles.

And this hope, indeed, as he learned the
next moment, was not unjustified. Cautiously
he was lowering himself over the edge, feeling
for the scanty and elusive foothold, when all at
once the air was filled with a rush of mighty
wings, which seemed about to overwhelm him.
A rigid wing-tip buffeted him so sharply that
he lost his hold on the ledge. With a yell of
consternation, which caused his assailant to
veer off, startled, he fell backwards, and plunged
down straight upon the nest.

It was the nest only that saved him from
instant death. Tough and elastic, it broke his
fall; but at the same time its elasticity threw
him off, and on the rebound he went rolling
and bumping on down the steep slopes below
the ledge, with the screaming of the eagles in
his ears, and a sickening sense in his heart that
the sunlit world tumbling and turning somersaults
before his blurred sight was his last view
of life. Then, to his dim surprise, he was
149
brought up with a thump; and clutching desperately
at a bush which scraped his face, he
lay still. At the same moment a flapping mass
of feathers and fierce claws landed on top of him,
but only to scramble off again as swiftly as possible
with a hoarse squawk. He had struck one
of the young eagles in his fall, hurled it from the
nest, and brought it down with him to this lower
ledge which had given him so timely a refuge.

For several minutes, perhaps, he lay clutching
the bush desperately and staring straight
upwards. There he saw both parent eagles
whirling excitedly, screaming, and staring down
at him; and then the edge of the nest, somewhat
dilapidated by his strange assault, overhanging
the ledge about thirty feet above. At
length his wits came back to him, and he
cautiously turned his head to see if he was in
danger of falling if he should relax his hold on
the bush. He was in bewildering pain, which
seemed distributed all over him; but in spite
of it he laughed aloud, to find that the bush, to
which he hung so desperately, was in a little
hollow on a spacious platform, from which he
could not have fallen by any chance. At that
strange, uncomprehended sound of human
laughter the eagles ceased their screaming for
a few moments and wheeled farther aloof.
150

With great difficulty and anguish Horner
raised himself to a sitting position and tried to
find out how seriously he was hurt. One leg
was quite helpless. He felt it all over, and
came to the conclusion that it was not actually
broken; but for all the uses of a leg, for the
present at least, it might as well have been
putty, except for the fact that it pained him
abominably. His left arm and shoulder, too,
seemed to be little more than useless encumbrances,
and he wondered how so many bruises
and sprains could find place on one human
body of no more than average size. However,
having assured himself, with infinite relief, that
there were no bones broken, he set his teeth
grimly and looked about to take account of the
situation.

CHAPTER II

The ledge on which he had found refuge was
apparently an isolated one, about fifty or sixty
feet in length, and vanishing into the face of
the sheer cliff at either end. It had a width of
perhaps twenty-five feet; and its surface, fairly
level, held some soil in its rocky hollows. Two
or three dark-green seedling firs, a slim young
silver birch, a patch or two of wind-beaten grass,
and some clumps of harebells, azure as the clear
sky overhead, softened the bareness of this tiny,
high-flung terrace. In one spot, at the back, a
spread of intense green and a handbreadth of
moisture on the rock showed where a tiny spring
oozed from a crevice to keep this lonely oasis
in the granite alive and fresh.

At the farthest edge of the shelf, and eying
him with savage dread, sat the young eagle
which had fallen with him. Horner noticed,
with a kind of sympathy, that even the bird, for
all his wings, had not come out of the affair
without some damage; for one of its black wings
was not held up so snugly as the other. He
152
hoped it was not broken. As he mused vaguely
upon this unimportant question, his pain so exhausted
him that he sank back and lay once
more staring up at the eagles, who were still
wheeling excitedly over the nest. In an exhaustion
that was partly sleep and partly coma,
his eyes closed. When he opened them again,
the sun was hours lower and far advanced
towards the west, so that the ledge was in
shadow. His head was now perfectly clear;
and his first thought was of getting himself
back to the canoe. With excruciating effort he
dragged himself to the edge of the terrace and
looked down. The descent, at this point, was
all but perpendicular for perhaps a hundred
feet. In full possession of his powers, he would
find it difficult enough. In his present state
he saw clearly that he might just as well throw
himself over as attempt it.

Not yet disheartened, however, he dragged
himself slowly towards the other end of the terrace,
where the young eagle sat watching him.
As he approached, the bird lifted his wings, as
if about to launch himself over and dare the
element which he had not yet learned to master.
But one wing drooped as if injured, and he knew
the attempt would be fatal. Opening his beak
angrily, he hopped away to the other end of the
153
terrace. But Horner was paying no heed to
birds at that moment. He was staring down
the steep, and realizing that this ledge which
had proved his refuge was now his prison, and
not unlikely to become also his tomb.

Sinking back against a rock, and grinding
his teeth with pain, he strove to concentrate
his attention upon the problem that confronted
him. Was he to die of thirst and hunger on
this high solitude before he could recover sufficiently
to climb down? The thought stirred
all his dogged determination. He would keep
alive, and that was all there was about it. He
would get well, and then the climbing down
would be no great matter. This point settled,
he dismissed it from his consideration and
turned his thoughts to ways and means. After
all, there was that little thread of a spring trickling
from the rock! He would have enough
to drink. And as for food—how much worse
it would have been had the ledge been a bare
piece of rock! Here he had some grass, and
the roots of the herbs and bushes. A man
could keep himself alive on such things if he
had will enough. And, as a last resource, there
was the young eagle! This idea, however, was
anything but attractive to him; and it was with
eyes of good-will rather than of appetite that he
154
glanced at his fellow-prisoner sitting motionless
at the other extremity of the ledge.

“It’ld be hard lines, pardner, ef I should hev
to eat you, after all!” he muttered, with a
twisted kind of grin. “We’re both of us in a
hole, sure enough, an’ I’ll play fair as long as I
kin!”

As he mused, a great shadow passed over
his head, and looking up, he saw one of the
eagles hovering low above the ledge. It was
the male, his old acquaintance, staring down at
him from under that strange, black brow. He
carried a large fish in his talons, and was plainly
anxious to feed his captive young, but not quite
ready to approach this mysterious man-creature
who had been able to invade his eyrie as if with
wings. Horner lay as still as a stone, watching
through half-closed lids. The young eagle,
seeing food so near, opened its beak wide and
croaked eagerly; while the mother bird, larger
but wilder and less resolute than her mate,
circled aloof with sharp cries of warning. At
last, unable any longer to resist the appeals of
his hungry youngster, the great bird swooped
down over him, dropped the fish fairly into his
clutches, and slanted away with a hurried flapping
which betrayed his nervousness.

As the youngster fell ravenously upon his
155
meal, tearing it and gulping the fragments,
Horner drew a deep breath.

“There’s where I come in, pardner,” he explained.
“When I kin git up an appetite for
that sort of vittles, I’ll go shares with you, ef
y’ain’t got no objection!”

Having conceived this idea, Horner was
seized with a fear that the captive might presently
gain the power of flight and get away.
This was a thought under which he could not
lie still. In his pocket he always carried a
bunch of stout salmon-twine and a bit of copper
rabbit-wire, apt to be needed in a hundred
forest emergencies. He resolved to catch the
young eagle and tether it securely to a bush.

His first impulse was to set about this enterprise
at once. With excruciating effort he
managed to pull off his heavy woollen hunting-shirt,
intending to use it as the toreador uses
his mantle, to entangle the dangerous weapons of
his adversary. Then he dragged himself across
to the other end of the ledge and attempted
to corner the captive. For this he was not
quite quick enough, however. With a flop and
a squawk the bird eluded him, and he realized
that he had better postpone the undertaking
till the morrow. Crawling back to his hollow
by the bush, he sank down, utterly exhausted.
156
Not till the sharp chill which comes with sunset
warned him of its necessity, was he able to
grapple with the long, painful problem of getting
his shirt on again.

Through the night he got some broken
sleep, though the hardness of his bed aggravated
every hurt he had suffered. On the edge
of dawn he saw the male eagle come again—this
time more confidently and deliberately—to
feed the captive. After he was gone,
Horner tried to move, but found himself now,
from the night’s chill and the austerity of his
bed, altogether helpless. Not till the sun was
high enough to warm him through and through,
and not till he had manipulated his legs and
arms assiduously for more than an hour, did
his body feel as if it could ever again be of any
service to him. Then he once more got off
his shirt and addressed himself to the catching
of the indignant bird whom he had elected to
be his preserver.

Though the anguish caused by every movement
was no less intense than it had been the
afternoon before, he was stronger now and more
in possession of his faculties. Before starting
the chase, he cut a strip from his shirt to wind
around the leg of the young eagle, in order that
he might be able to tether it tightly without
157
cutting the flesh. The bird had suddenly become
most precious to him!

Very warily he made his approaches, sidling
down the ledge so as to give his quarry the
least possible room for escape. As he drew
near, the bird turned and faced him, with its
one uninjured wing lifted menacingly and its
formidable beak wide open. Holding the
heavy shirt ready to throw, Horner crept up
cautiously, so intent now upon the game that
the anguish in the leg which he dragged stiffly
behind him was almost forgotten. The young
bird, meanwhile, waited, motionless and vigilant,
its savage eyes hard as glass.

At last a faint quiver and shrinking in the
bird’s form, an involuntary contracting of the
feathers, gave warning to Horner’s experienced
eye that it was about to spring aside. On the
instant he flung the shirt, keeping hold of it by
the sleeve. By a singular piece of luck, upon
which he had not counted at all, it opened as
he threw it, and settled right over the bird’s
neck and disabled wing, blinding and baffling it
completely. With a muffled squawk it bounced
into the air, both talons outspread and clawing
madly; but in a second Horner had it by the
other wing, pulling it down, and rolling himself
over upon it so as to smother those dangerous
158
claws. He felt them sink once into his injured
leg, but that was already anguishing so vehemently
that a little more or less did not matter.
In a few moments he had his captive bundled
up with helplessness, and was dragging it to a
sturdy bush near the middle of the terrace.
Here, without much further trouble, he wrapped
one of its legs with the strip of flannel from
his shirt, twisted on a hand-length of wire, and
then tethered it safely with a couple of yards of
his doubled and twisted cord.

Just as he had accomplished this to his satisfaction,
and was about to undo the imprisoning
shirt, it flashed across his mind that it was
lucky the old eagles had not been on hand to
interfere. He glanced upward—and saw the
dark form dropping like a thunderbolt out of
the blue. He had just time to fling himself over
on his back, lifting his arm to shield his face,
and his foot to receive the attack, when the hiss
of that lightning descent filled his ears. Involuntarily
he half closed his eyes. But no shock
came, except a great buffet of air on his face.
Not quite daring to grapple with that ready
defence, the eagle had opened its wings when
within a few feet of the ledge, and swerved
upward again, where it hung hovering and
screaming. Horner saw that it was the female,
159
and shook his fist at her in defiance. Had it
been his old acquaintance and challenger, the
male, he felt sure that he would not have got
off so easily.

Puzzled and alarmed, the mother now
perched herself beside the other eaglet, on the
edge of the nest. Then, keeping a careful eye
upon her, lest she should return to the attack,
Horner dexterously unrolled the shirt, and
drew back just in time to avoid a vicious slash
from the talons of his indignant prisoner. The
latter, after some violent tugging and flopping
at his tether and fierce biting at the wire, suddenly
seemed to conclude that such futile
efforts were undignified. He settled himself
like a rock and stared unwinkingly at his
captor.

It was perhaps an hour after this, when the
sun had grown hot, and Horner, having slaked
his thirst at the spring in the rock, had tried
rather ineffectually to satisfy his hunger on
grass roots, that the male eagle reappeared,
winging heavily from the farthest end of the
lake. From his talons dangled a limp form,
which Horner presently made out to be a duck.

“Good!” he muttered to himself. “I always
did like fowl better’n fish.”

When the eagle arrived, he seemed to notice
160
something different in the situation, for he
wheeled slowly overhead for some minutes,
uttering sharp yelps of interrogation. But the
appeals of the youngster at last brought him
down, and he delivered up the prize. The
moment he was gone, Horner crept up to where
the youngster was already tearing the warm
body to pieces. Angry and hungry, the bird
made a show of fighting for his rights; but his
late experience with his invincible conqueror
had daunted him. Suddenly he hopped away,
the full length of his tether; and Horner
picked up the mangled victim. But his appetite
was gone by this time; he was not
yet equal to a diet of raw flesh. Tossing the
prize back to its rightful owner, he withdrew
painfully to grub for some more grass roots.

“After this the eagle came regularly every three or four hours with food for the prisoner.”

After this the eagle came regularly every
three or four hours with food for the prisoner.
Sometimes it was a fish—trout, or brown
sucker, or silvery chub—sometimes a duck
or a grouse, sometimes a rabbit or a muskrat.
Always it was the male, with that grim black
streak across the side of his white face, who
came. Always Horner made a point of taking
the prize at once from the angry youngster,
and then throwing it back to him, unable to
stomach the idea of the raw flesh. At last, on
the afternoon of the third day of his imprisonment,
he suddenly found that it was not the
raw flesh, but the grass roots, which he loathed.
While examining a fine lake-trout, he remembered
that he had read of raw fish being excellent
food under the right conditions. This
was surely one of those right conditions. Picking
somewhat fastidiously, he nevertheless managed
to make so good a meal off that big trout
that there was little but head and tail to toss
back to his captor.

“Never mind, pardner!” he said seriously.
“I’ll divide fair nex’ time. But you know
you’ve been havin’ more’n your share lately.”

But the bird was so outraged that for a long
time he would not look at these remnants, and
only consented to devour them, at last, when
Horner was not looking.

After this Horner found it easy enough to
partake of his prisoner’s meals, whether they
were of fish, flesh, or fowl; and with the ice-cold
water from the little spring, and an occasional
mouthful of leaves and roots, he fared
well enough to make progress towards recovery.
The male eagle grew so accustomed to
his presence that he would alight beside the
prisoner, and threatened Horner with that old,
cold stare of challenge, and frequently Horner
162
had to drive him off in order to save his share
of the feast from the rapacity of the eaglet.
But as for the female, she remained incurably
suspicious and protesting. From the upper
ledge, where she devoted her care to the other
nestling, she would yelp down her threats and
execrations, but she never ventured any nearer
approach.

For a whole week the naked hours of day
and dark had rolled over the peak before
Horner began to think himself well enough to
try the descent. His arm and shoulder were
almost well, but his leg, in spite of ceaseless
rubbing and applications of moist earth, remained
practically helpless. He could not
bear his weight on it for a second. His first
attempt at lowering himself showed him that
he must not be in too great haste. It was
nearly a week more before he could feel assured,
after experiments at scaling the steep
above him, that he was fit to face the terrible
steep below. Then he thought of the eaglet,
his unwilling and outraged preserver! After
a sharp struggle, of which both his arms and
legs bore the marks for months, he caught the
bird once more and examined the injured wing.
It was not broken; and he saw that its owner
would be able to fly all right in time, perhaps
163
as soon as his more fortunate brother in the
nest above. Satisfied on this point, he loosed
all the bonds and jumped back to avoid the indomitable
youngster’s retort of beak and claws.
Unamazed by his sudden freedom, the young
eagle flopped angrily away to the farther end
of the ledge; and Horner, having resumed his
useful shirt, started to climb down the mountain,
whose ascent he had so heedlessly adventured
nearly two weeks before. As he lowered
himself over the dizzy brink, he glanced
up, to see the male eagle circling slowly above
him, gazing down at him with the old challenge
in his unwinking, golden eyes.

“I reckon you win!” said Horner, waving
the imperturbable bird a grave salutation. “But
you’re a gentleman, an’ I thank you fer your
kind hospitality.”

It was still early morning when Horner
started to descend the mountain. It was dusk
when he reached the lake and flung himself
down, prostrated with fatigue and pain and
strain of nerve, beside his canoe. From moment
to moment, through spells of reeling faintness
and spasmodic exhaustion, the silent gulfs
of space had clutched at him, as if the powers of
the solitude and the peak had but spared him
so long to crush him inexorably in the end. At
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last, more through the sheer indomitableness of
the human spirit than anything else, he had
won. But never afterwards could he think of
that awful descent without a sinking of the
heart. For three days more he made his camp
by the lake, recovering strength and nerve
before resuming his journey down the wild
river to the settlements. And many times a
day his salutations would be waved upward to
that great, snowy-headed, indifferent bird, wheeling
in the far blue, or gazing at the sun from
his high-set watch-tower of the pine.

CHAPTER III

Two or three years later, it fell in Horner’s
way to visit a great city, many hundreds of
miles from the gray peak of “Old Baldy.” He
was in charge of an exhibit of canoes, snowshoes,
and other typical products of his forest-loving
countrymen. In his first morning of
leisure, his feet turned almost instinctively to
the wooded gardens wherein the city kept
strange captives, untamed exiles of the wilderness,
irreconcilable aliens of fur and hide and
feather, for the crowds to gape at through their
iron bars.

He wandered aimlessly past some grotesque,
goatish-looking deer which did not interest
him, and came suddenly upon a paddock containing
a bull moose, two cows, and a yearling
calf. The calf looked ungainly and quite content
with his surroundings. The cows were
faded and moth-eaten, but well fed. He had
no concern for them at all. But the bull, a
splendid, black-shouldered, heavy-muffled fellow,
with the new antlers just beginning to knob
out from his massive forehead, appealed to him
166
strongly. The splendid, sullen-looking beast
stood among his family, but towered over and
seemed unconscious of them. His long, sensitive
muzzle was held high to catch a breeze
which drew coolly down from the north, and
his half-shut eyes, in Horner’s fancy, saw not
the wires of his fence, but the cool, black-green
fir thickets of the north, the gray rampikes of
the windy barrens, the broad lily leaves afloat
in the sheltered cove, the wide, low-shored lake
water gleaming rose-red in the sunset.

“It’s a shame,” growled Horner, “to keep a
critter like that shut up in a seven-by-nine
chicken-pen!” And he moved on, feeling as
if he were himself a prisoner, and suddenly
homesick for a smell of the spruce woods.

It was in this mood that he came upon the
great dome-roofed cage containing the hawks
and eagles. It was a dishevelled, dirty place,
with a few uncanny-looking dead trees stuck
up in it to persuade the prisoners that they
were free. Horner gave a hasty glance and
then hurried past, enraged at the sight of these
strong-winged adventurers of the sky doomed
to so tame a monotony of days. But just as
he got abreast of the farther extremity of the
cage, he stopped, with a queer little tug at his
heart-strings. He had caught sight of a great,
167
white-headed eagle, sitting erect and still on a
dead limb close to the bars, and gazing through
them steadily, not at him, but straight into the
eye of the sun.

“Shucks! It ain’t possible! There’s millions
o’ bald eagles in the world!” muttered
Horner discontentedly.

It was the right side of the bird’s head that
was turned towards him, and that, of course,
was snowy white. Equally, of course, it was as,
Horner told himself, the height of absurdity to
think that this grave, immobile prisoner gazing
out through the bars at the sun could be his
old friend of the naked peak. Nevertheless,
something within his heart insisted it was so.
If only the bird would turn his head! At last
Horner put two fingers between his mouth,
and blew a whistle so piercing that every one
stared rebukingly, and a policeman came strolling
along casually to see if any one had signalled
for help. But Horner was all unconscious of
the interest which he had excited. In response
to his shrill summons the eagle had slowly, very
deliberately, turned his head, and looked him
steadily in the eyes. Yes, there was the strange
black bar above the left eye, and there, unbroken
by defeat and captivity, was the old
look of imperturbable challenge!
168

Horner could almost have cried, from pity
and homesick sympathy. Those long days on
the peak, fierce with pain, blinding bright with
sun, wind-swept and solitary, through which
this great, still bird had kept him alive, seemed
to rush over his spirit all together.

“Gee, old pardner!” he murmured, leaning
as far over the railing as he could. “But ain’t
you got the grit! I’d like to know who it was
served this trick on you. But don’t you fret.
I’ll get you out o’ this, ef it takes a year’s arnings
to do it! You wait an’ see!” And with
his jaws set resolutely he turned and strode
from the gardens. That bird should not stay
in there another night if he could help it.

Horner’s will was set, but he did not understand
the difficulties he had to face. At first
he was confronted, as by a stone wall, by the
simple and unanswerable fact that the bird was
not for sale at any price. And he went to bed
that night raging with disappointment and
baffled purpose. But in the course of his
efforts and angry protestations he had let out
a portion of his story—and this, as a matter of
interest, was carried to the president of the
society which controlled the gardens. To this
man, who was a true naturalist and not a mere
dry-as-dust cataloguer of bones and teeth, the
169
story made a strong appeal, and before Horner
had quite made up his mind whether to get out
a writ of habeas corpus for his imprisoned friend,
or commit a burglary on the cage, there came
a note inviting him to an interview at the president’s
office. The result of this interview was
that Horner came away radiant, convinced at
last that there was heart and understanding in
the city as well as in the country. He had
agreed to pay the society simply what it might
cost to replace the captive by another specimen
of his kind; and he carried in his pocket an
order for the immediate delivery of the eagle
into his hands.

To the practical backwoodsman there was
no fuss or ceremony now to be gone through.
He admired the expeditious fashion in which
the keeper of the bird-house handled his dangerous
charge, coming out of the brief tussle without
a scratch. Trussed up as ignominiously as
a turkey—proud head hooded, savage talons
muffled, and skyey wings bound fast, the splendid
bird was given up to his rescuer, who rolled
him in a blanket without regard to his dignity,
and carried him off under his arm like a bundle
of old clothes.

Beyond the outskirts of the city Horner had
observed a high, rocky, desolate hill which
170
seemed suited to his purpose. He took a
street car and travelled for an hour with the
bundle on his knees. Little his fellow-passengers
guessed of the wealth of romance, loyalty,
freedom, and spacious memory hidden in that
common-looking bundle on the knees of the
gaunt-faced, gray-eyed man. At the foot of
the hill, at a space of bare and ragged common,
Horner got off. By rough paths, frequented
by goats, he made his way up the rocky slope,
through bare ravines and over broken ridges,
and came at last to a steep rock in a solitude,
whence only far-off roofs could be seen, and
masts, and bridges, and the sharp gleam of the
sea in the distance.

This place satisfied him. On the highest
point of the rock he carefully unfastened the
bonds of his prisoner, loosed him, and jumped
back with respect and discretion. The great
bird sat up very straight, half raised and lowered
his wings as if to regain his poise, looked
Horner dauntlessly in the eye, then stared
slowly about him and above, as if to make sure
that there were really no bars for him to beat
his wings against. For perhaps a full minute
he sat there. Then, having betrayed no unkingly
haste, he spread his wings to their full
splendid width and launched himself from the
171
brink. For a few seconds he flapped heavily,
as if his wings had grown unused to their function.
Then he got his rhythm, and swung into
a wide, mounting spiral, which Horner watched
with sympathetic joy. At last, when he was
but a wheeling speck in the pale blue dome,
he suddenly turned and sailed off straight towards
the northeast, with a speed which carried
him out of sight in a moment.

Horner drew a long breath, half wistful, half
glad.

“Them golden eyes of yourn kin see a thunderin’
long ways off, pardner,” he muttered, “but
I reckon even you can’t make out the top of
‘Old Baldy’ at this distance. It’s the eyes o’
your heart ye must have seen it with, to make
for it so straight!”

The Lord of the Glass House

CHAPTER I

In the sheltered Caribbean cove the water
was warm as milk, green and clear as
liquid beryl, and shot through with shimmering
sun. Under that stimulating yet mitigated
radiance the bottom of the cove was astir with
strange life, grotesque in form, but brilliant as
jewels or flowers. Long, shining weeds, red,
yellow, amber, purple, and olive, waved sinuously
among the weed-like sea-anemones which
outshone them in colored sheen. Fantastic
pink-and-orange crabs sidled awkwardly but
nimbly this way and that. Tiny sea-horses,
yet more fantastic, slipped shyly from one weed-covert
to another, aware of a possible peril in
every gay but menacing bloom. And just above
this eccentric life of the shoal sea-floor small
fishes of curious form shot hither and thither,
live, darting gleams of gold and azure and
amethyst. Now and again a long, black
shadow would sail slowly over the scene of
freakish life—the shadow of a passing albacore
176
or barracouta. Instantly the shining fish
would hide themselves among the shining
shells, and every movement, save that of the
unconsciously waving weeds, would be stilled.
But the sinister shadow would go by, and
straightway the sea-floor would be alive again,
busy with its affairs of pursuit and flight.

The floor of the cove was uneven, by reason
of small, shell-covered rocks and stones being
strewn over it at haphazard. From under the
slightly overhanging base of one of these stones
sprouted what seemed a cluster of yellowish
gray, pink-mottled weed-stems, which sprawled
out inertly upon the mottled bottom. Over
the edge of the stone came swimming slowly
one of the gold-and-azure fish, its jewelled, impassive
eyes on the watch for some small prey.
Up from the bottom, swift as a whip-lash, darted
one of those inert-looking weed-stems, and
fastened about the bright fish just behind the
gills.

Fiercely the shining one struggled, lashing
with tail and fins till the water swirled to a
boil over the shell-covered rock, and the sea-anemones
all about shut their gorgeous, greedy
flower-cups in a panic. But the struggle was
a vain one. Slowly, inexorably, that mottled
tentacle curled downward with its prey, and a
portion of the under side of the rock became
alive! Two ink-black eyes appeared, bulging,
oval, implacable; and between them opened a
great, hooked beak, like a giant parrot’s. There
was no separate head behind this gaping beak,
but eyes and beak merely marked the blunt
end of a mottled, oblong, sac-like body.

“And the writhing tentacles composed themselves once more to stillness upon the bottom, awaiting the next careless passer-by.”

As the victim was drawn down to the waiting
beak, among the bases of the tentacles, all
the tentacles awoke to dreadful life, writhing
in aimless excitement, although there was no
work for them to do. In a few seconds the fish
was torn asunder and engulfed—those inky
eyes the while unwinking and unmoved. A
darker, livid hue passed fleetingly over the
pallid body of the octopus. Then it slipped
back under the shelter of the rock; and the
writhing tentacles composed themselves once
more to stillness upon the bottom, awaiting
the next careless passer-by. Once more they
seemed mere inert trailers of weed, not worth
the notice of fish or crab. And soon the
anemones near by reopened their treacherous
blooms of yellow and crimson.

Whether because there was something in the
gold-and-azure fish that disturbed his inward
content, or because his place of ambush had
somehow grown distasteful to his soft, unarmored
178
body, the octopus presently bestirred
himself and crawled forth into the open, walking
awkwardly on the incurled tips of his tentacles.
It looked about as comfortable a method
of progression as for a baby to creep on the
back of its hands. The traveller himself did
not seem to find it altogether satisfactory, for
all at once he sprang upward nimbly, clear of
the bottom, and gathered his eight tentacles into
a compact parallel bunch extending straight out
past his eyes. In this attitude he was no longer
clumsy, but trim and swift-looking. Beneath
the bases of the tentacles, on the under side of
the body, a sort of valve opened spasmodically
and took in a huge gulp of water, which was
at once ejected with great force through a tube
among the tentacles. Driven by the strange
propulsion of this pulsating stream, the elongated
shape shot swiftly on its way, but travelling
backward instead of forward. The traveller
had apparently taken his direction with care
before he started, however, for he made his
way straight to another rock, weedier and
more overhanging than the first. Here he
stopped, settled downward, and let his tentacles
once more sprawl wide, preparatory to backing
his spotted body-sac into its new quarters.

This was the moment when he was least
179
ready for attack or defence; and just at this
moment a foraging dolphin, big-jawed and hungry,
shot down upon him through the lucent
green, mistaking him, perhaps, for an overgrown
but unretaliating squid. The assailant
aimed at the big, succulent-looking body, but
missed his aim, and caught instead one of the
tentacles which had reared themselves instantly
to ward off the attack. Before he realized
what was happening, another tentacle had
curled about his head, clamping his jaws firmly
together so that he could not open them to release
his hold; while yet others had wrapped
themselves securely about his body.

The dolphin was a small one; and such a
situation as this had never come within range
of his experience. In utter panic he lashed
out with his powerful tail and darted forward,
carrying the octopus with him. But
the weight upon his head, the crushing encumbrance
about his body, were too much
for him, and bore him slowly downward. Suddenly
two tentacles, which had been trailing
for an anchorage, got grip upon the bottom—and
the dolphin’s frantic flight came to a stop
abruptly. He lashed, plunged, whirled in a
circle, but all to no purpose. His struggles
grew weaker. He was drawn down, inexorably,
180
till he lay quivering on the sand. Then
the great beak of the octopus made an end of
the matter, and the prey was dragged back
to the lair beneath the weed-covered rock.

A long time after this, a shadow bigger and
blacker than that of any albacore—bigger
than that of any shark or saw-fish—drifted
over the cove. There was a splash, and a
heavy object came down upon the bottom,
spreading the swift stillness of terror for yards
about. The shadow ceased drifting, for the
boat had come to anchor. Then in a very
few minutes, because the creatures of the sea
seem unable to fear what does not move, the
life of the sea-floor again bestirred itself, and
small, misshapen forms that did not love the
sunlight began to convene in the shadow of the
boat.

Presently, from over the side of the boat
descended a dark tube, with a bright tip that
seemed like a kind of eye. The tube moved
very slowly this way and that, as if to let the
eye scan every hiding-place on the many-colored
bottom. As it swept over the rock
that sheltered the octopus, it came to a stop.
Those inert, sprawling things that looked like
weeds appeared to interest it. Then it was
softly withdrawn.
181

A few moments later, a large and tempting
fish appeared at the surface of the water, and
began slowly sinking straight downward in a
most curious fashion. The still eyes of the
octopus took note at once. They had never
seen a fish behave that way before; but it
plainly was a fish. A quiver of eagerness
passed through the sprawling tentacles, for
their owner was already hungry again. But
the prize was still too far away, and the tentacles
did not move. The curious fish, however,
seemed determined to come no nearer,
and at last the waiting tentacles came stealthily
to life. Almost imperceptibly they drew themselves
forward, writhing over the bottom as
casually as weeds adrift in a light current.
And behind them those two great, inky, impassive
eyes, and then the fat, mottled, sac-like
body, emerged furtively from under the
rock.

The bottom, just at this point, was covered
with a close brown weed, and almost at once
the body of the octopus and his tentacles began
to change to the same hue. When the
change was complete, the gliding monster was
almost invisible. He was now directly beneath
that incomprehensible fish; but the fish had
gently risen, so that it was still out of reach.
182

For a few seconds the octopus crouched,
staring upward with motionless orbs, and
gathering himself together. Then he sprang
straight up, like a leaping spider. He fixed
two tentacles upon the tantalizing prey; then
the other tentacles straightened out, and with
a sharp jet of water from his propulsion tube
he essayed to dart back to his lair.

To his amazement, the prey refused to come.
In some mysterious way it managed to hold itself—or
was held—just where it was. Amazement
gave way to rage. The monster wrapped
his prize in three more tentacles, and then
plunged his beak into it savagely. The next
instant he was jerked to the surface of the
water. A blaze of fierce sun blinded him, and
strong meshes enclosed him, binding and entangling
his tentacles.

In such an appalling crisis most creatures
of sea or land would have been utterly demoralized
by terror. Not so the octopus.
Maintaining undaunted the clutch of one tentacle
upon his prize, he turned the others,
along with the effectual menace of his great
beak, to the business of battle. The meshes
fettered him in a way that drove him frantic
with rage, but two of his tentacles managed
to find their way through, and writhed madly
183
this way and that in search of some tangible
antagonist on which to fasten themselves.
While they were yet groping vainly for a grip,
he felt himself lifted bodily forth into the
strangling air, and crowded—net, prey, and
all—into a dark and narrow receptacle full of
water.

This fate, of course, was not to be tamely
endured. Though he was suffocating in the
unnatural medium, and though his great, unwinking
eyes could see but vaguely outside
their native element, he was all fight. One
tentacle clutched the rim of the metal vessel;
and one fixed its deadly suckers upon the bare
black arm of a half-seen adversary who was
trying to crowd him down into the dark prison.
There was a strident yell. A sharp, authoritative
voice exclaimed: “Look out! Don’t
hurt him! I’ll make him let go!” But the
next instant the frightened darky had whipped
out a knife and sliced off a good foot of the
clutching tentacle. As the injured stump
shrank back upon its fellows like a spade-cut
worm, the other tentacle was deftly twisted
loose from its hold on the rim, and the captive
felt himself forced down into the narrow prison.
A cover was clapped on, and he found himself
in darkness, with his prey still gripped securely.
184
Upset and raging though he was, there was
nothing to be done about it, so he fell to feasting
indignantly upon the prize for which he
had paid so dear.

CHAPTER II

Left to himself, the furious prisoner by and
by disentangled himself from the meshes of
the net, and composed himself as well as he
could in his straitened quarters. Then for
days and days thereafter there was nothing
but tossing and tumbling, blind feeding, and
uncomprehended distress; till at last his prison
was turned upside down and he was dropped
unceremoniously into a great tank of glass and
enamel that glowed with soft light. Bewildered
though he was, he took in his surroundings
in an instant, straightened his tentacles
out before him, and darted backwards to the
shelter of an overhanging rock which he had
marked on the floor of the tank. Having
backed his defenceless body under that shield,
he flattened his tentacles anxiously among the
stones and weeds that covered the tank-bottom,
and impassively stared about.

It was certainly an improvement on the black
hole from which he had just escaped. Light
came down through the clear water, but a
cold, white light, little like the green and gold
186
glimmer that illumined the slow tide in his
Caribbean home. The floor about him was not
wholly unfamiliar. The stones, the sand, the
colored weeds, the shells,—they were like, yet
unlike, those from which he had been snatched
away. But on three sides there were white,
opaque walls, so near that he could have
touched them by stretching out a tentacle.
Only on the fourth side was there space—but a
space of gloom and inexplicable moving confusion
from which he shrank. In this direction
the floor of sand and stones and weeds ended
with a mysterious abruptness; and the vague
openness beyond filled him with uneasiness.
Pale-colored shapes, with eyes, would drift up,
sometimes in crowds, and stare in at him
fixedly. It daunted him as nothing else had
ever done, this drift of peering faces. It was
long before he could teach himself to ignore
them. When food came to him,—small fish
and crabs, descending suddenly from the top
of the water,—at such times the faces would
throng tumultuously in that open space, and for
a long time the many peering eyes would so
disconcert him as almost to spoil his appetite.
But at last he grew accustomed even to the
faces and the eyes, and disregarded them as if
they were so much passing seaweed, borne by
187
the tide. His investigating tentacles had shown
him that between him and the space of confusion
there was an incomprehensible barrier
fixed, which he could see through but not pass;
and that if he could not get out, neither could
the faces get in to trouble him.

Thus, well fed and undisturbed, the octopus
grew fairly content in his glass house, and
never guessed the stormy life of the great city
beyond his walls. For all he knew, his comfortable
prison might have been on the shore
of one of his own Bahaman Keys. He was
undisputed lord of his domain, narrow though
it was; and the homage he received from the
visitors who came to pay him court was untiring.

His lordship had been long unthreatened,
when one day, had he not been too indifferent
to notice them, he might have seen that the
faces in the outer gloom were unusually numerous,
the eyes unusually intent. Suddenly there
was the accustomed splash in the water above
him. That splash had come to him to mean
just food, unresisting victims, and his tentacles
were instantly alert to seize whatever should
come within reach.

This time the splash was unusually heavy,
and he was surprised to see a massive, roundish
188
creature, with a little, pointed tail sticking out
behind, a small, snake-like head stretched out in
front, and two little flippers outspread on each
side. With these four flippers the stranger
came swimming down calmly towards him.
He had never seen anything at all like this
daring stranger; but without the slightest hesitation
he whipped up two writhing tentacles
and seized him. The faces beyond the glass
surged with excitement.

When that abrupt and uncompromising clutch
laid hold upon the turtle, his tail, head, and
flippers vanished as if they had never been,
and his upper and lower shells closed tight
together till he seemed nothing more than a
lifeless box of horn. Absolutely unresisting,
he was drawn down to the impassive eyes and
gaping beak of his captor. The tentacles
writhed all over him, stealthily but eagerly
investigating. Then the great parrot-beak laid
hold on the shell, expecting to crush it. Making
no impression, however, it slid tentatively
all over the exasperating prize, seeking, but in
vain, for a weak point.

“Without the slightest hesitation he whipped up two writhing tentacles and seized him.”

This went on for several minutes, while the
watching faces outside the glass gazed in tense
expectancy. Then at last the patience of the
octopus gave way. In a sudden fury he threw
himself upon the exasperating shell, tumbling
it over and over, biting at it madly, wrenching
it insanely with all his tentacles. And the
faces beyond the glass surged thrillingly, wondering
how long the turtle would stand such
treatment.

Shut up within his safe armor, the turtle all
at once grew tired of being tumbled about, and
his wise discretion forsook him. He did not
mind being shut up, but he objected to being
knocked about. Some prudence he had, to be
sure, but not enough to control his short
temper. Out shot his narrow, vicious-looking
head, with its dull eyes and punishing jaws, and
fastened with the grip of a bulldog upon the
nearest of the tentacles, close to its base. A
murmur arose outside the glass.

The rage of the octopus swelled to a frenzy,
and in his contortions the locked fighters
bumped heavily against the glass, making the
faces shrink back. The small stones on the
bottom were scattered this way and that, and
the fine silt rose in a cloud that presently obscured
the battle.

Had the turtle had cunning to match his
courage, the lordship of the glass house might
have changed holders in that fight. Had he
fixed his unbreakable grip in the head of his
190
foe, just above the beak, he would have conquered
in the end. But as it was, he had now
a vulnerable point, and at last the octopus
found it. His beak closed upon the exposed
half of the turtle’s head, and slowly, inexorably,
sheared it clean off just behind the eyes. The
stump shrank instantly back into the shell;
and the shell became again the unresisting
plaything of the tentacles, which presently, as
if realizing that it had no more power to retaliate,
flung it aside. In a few minutes the silt
settled. Then the eager faces beyond the glass
saw the lord of the tank crouching motionless
before his lair, his ink-like eyes as impassive
and implacable as ever, while the turtle lay
bottom side up against the glass, no more to
be taken account of than a stone.

Back to the Water World

CHAPTER I

An iron coast, bleak, black, and desolate,
without harborage for so much as a catboat
for leagues to north or south. A coast so
pitiless, so lashed forever by the long, sullen
rollers of the North Atlantic, so tormented by
the shifting and treacherous currents of the tide
between its chains of outlying rocky islets, that
no ship ever ventured willingly within miles of
its uncompromising menace. A coast so little
favored by summer that even in glowing August
the sun could reach it seldom through its
cold and drenching fogs.

Perhaps half a mile off shore lay the islands—some
of them, indeed, mere ledges, deathtraps
for ships, invisible except at low tide, but
others naked hills of upthrust rock, which the
highest tides and wildest hurricanes could not
overwhelm. Even on the loftiest of them there
was neither grass, bush, nor tree to break the
jagged outlines, but day and night, summer and
194
winter long, the sea-birds clamored over them,
and brooded by the myriad on their upper
ledges.

These islands were fretted, on both their
landward and their seaward sides, by innumerable
caves. In one of these caves, above the
reach of the highest tide, and facing landward,
so that even in the wildest storms no waves
could invade it, the pup of the seal first opened
his mild eyes upon the misty northern daylight.

Of all the younglings of the wild, he was perhaps
the most winsome, with his soft, whitish,
shadowy-toned, close, woolly coat, his round,
babyish head, his dark, gentle eyes wide with
wonder at everything to be seen from the cave
mouth. He lay usually very near the entrance,
but partly hidden from view by a ragged horn
of rock. While alone—which was a good
part of the time, indeed, like most fishermen’s
children—he would lie so still that his woolly
little form was hardly to be distinguished from
the rock that formed his couch. He had no
desire to attract public attention—for the only
public that might have been attracted to attend
consisted of the pair of great sea eagles whose
shadows sometimes swooped aross the ledge,
or of an occasional southward-wandering white
bear. As for the innumerable gulls, and gannets,
195
and terns, and lesser auks, which made
the air forever loud about these lonely islets,
nothing could have induced them to pay him
any attention whatever. They knew him, and
his people, to be harmless; and that was all
their winged and garrulous companies were
concerned to know.

But to the little seal, on the other hand, the
noisy birds were incessantly interesting. Filled
with insatiable curiosity, his mild eyes gazed
out upon the world. The sea just below the
cave was, of course, below his line of vision;
but at a distance of some hundred yards or so—a
distance which varied hugely with the
rising and falling of the tide—he caught sight
of the waves, and felt himself strangely drawn
to them. Whether leaden and menacing under
the drift of rain and the brooding of gray
clouds, or green-glinting under the sheen of
too rare sunshine, he loved them and found
them always absorbing. The sky, too, was
worth watching, especially when white fleeces
chased each other across a patch of blue, or
wonderful colors, pallid yet intense, shot up
into it at dawn from behind a far-off line of
saw-toothed rocks.

The absences of the mother seal were sometimes
long, for it required many fish to satisfy
196
her appetite and keep warm her red blood in
those ice-cold arctic currents. Fish were abundant,
to be sure, along that coast, where the
invisible fruitfulness of the sea made compensation
for the blank barrenness of the land; but
they were swift and wary, and had to be caught,
one at a time, outwitted and outspeeded in their
own element. The woolly cub, therefore, was
often hungry before his mother returned. But
when, at last, she came, flopping awkwardly up
the rocky slope, and pausing for an instant to
reconnoitre, as her round, glistening head appeared
over the brink of the ledge, the youngster’s
delight was not all in the satisfying of his
hunger and in the mothering of his loneliness.
As he snuggled under her caress, the salty drip
from her wet, sleek sides thrilled him with a
dim sense of anticipation. He connected it
vaguely with that endless, alluring dance of the
waves beyond his threshold.

When he had grown a few days older, the
little seal began to turn his attention from the
brighter world outside to the shadows that
surrounded him in his cave. His interest was
caught at once by a woolly gray creature like
himself, only somewhat smaller, which lay perhaps
seven or eight feet away, at the other side
of the cave, and farther back. He had not
197
realized before that his narrow retreat was the
home of two families. Being of a companionable
disposition, he eyed his newly discovered
neighbor with immense good-will. Finding no
discouragement in the mild gaze that answered
his, he presently raised himself on his flippers,
and with laborious, ungainly effort flopped himself
over to make acquaintance. Both youngsters
were too unsophisticated for ceremony, too
trusting for shyness, so in a very few minutes
they were sprawling over each other in great
content.

In this baby comradeship the stranger’s
mother, returning to her household duties,
found them. She was smaller and younger
than our Pup’s dam, but with the same kindly
eyes and the same salty-dripping coat. So,
when her own baby fell to nursing, the Pup
insisted confidently on sharing the entertainment.
The young mother protested, and drew
herself away uneasily, with little threatening
grunts; but the Pup, refusing to believe she was
in earnest, pressed his point so pertinaciously
that at length he got his way. When, half an
hour later, the other mother returned to her
charge, well filled with fish and well disposed
toward all the world, she showed no discontent
at the situation. She belonged to the tribe of
198
the “Harbor Seals,” and, unlike her pugnacious
cousins, the big “Hoods,” she was always
inclined towards peace and a good understanding.
There was probably nothing that could
have brought the flame of wrath into her confiding
eyes, except an attack upon her young,
on whose behalf she would have faced the sea-serpent
himself. Without a moment’s question,
she joined the group; and henceforth the cave
was the seat of a convenient partnership in
mothers.

It was perhaps a week or two later, when the
islands were visited by a wonderful spell of sun
and calm. It was what would have been called,
farther south, Indian summer. All along the
ledges, just above the mark of the diminished
surf, the seals lay basking in the glow. The
gulls and mews clamored rapturously, and
squabbled with gay zest over the choicer prizes
of their fishing. It appeared to be generally
known that the bears, displeased at the warmth,
had withdrawn farther north. The sea took
on strange hues of opal and lilac and thrice-diluted
sapphire. Even the high black cliffs
across the charmed water veiled their harshness
in a skyey haze. It was a time for delicious indolence,
for the slackening of vigilance, for the
forgetfulness of peril. And it was just at this
199
very time that it came the young seal’s way to
get his first lesson in fear.

He was lying beside his mother, about a
dozen feet out from the mouth of the cave. A
few steps away basked his little cave-mate—alone
for the moment, because its mother had
flung herself vehemently down the slope to capture
a wounded fish which had just been washed
ashore. As she reached the water’s edge, a
wide shadow floated across the rocks. She
wheeled like a flash and scrambled frantically
up the steep. But she was too late. She saw
the other mothers near by throw their bodies
over those of their young, and lift their faces skyward
with bared, defiant fangs. She saw her
own little one, alone in the bright open, gaze
around in helpless bewilderment and alarm. He
saw her coming, and lifting himself on his weak
flippers, started towards her with a little cry.
Then came a terrible hissing of wings in the
air above, and he cowered, trembling. The
next instant, with a huge buffet of wind in all
the upturned faces, a pair of vast, dark pinions
were outspread above the trembler; great
clutching talons reached down and seized him
by neck and back; and his tiny life went out
in a throttled whimper. The nearest seal, the
mother of the Pup, reared on her flippers and
200
lunged savagely at the marauder. But all she got
was a blinding slash of rigid wing-tips across her
face. Then, launching himself from the brink
of the slope, the eagle flapped scornfully away
across the water toward the black cliffs, his victim
hanging limply from his claws. And all along
the ledges the seals barked furiously after him.

The Pup, whom death had brushed so closely,
could not be persuaded for hours to leave the
shelter of his mother’s side, even after she had
led him back to the cave. But now he found
himself the exclusive proprietor of two mothers;
for the bereaved dam, thenceforth, was no less
assiduously devoted to him than his own parent.
With such care, and with so abundant
nourishment, he throve amazingly, outstripping
in growth all the other youngsters of his age
along the ledges. His terror quickly passed
away from him; but the results of the lesson
long remained, in the vigilance with which his
glance would sweep the sky, and question every
approach of wings more wide than those of
gull or gannet.

It was not long after this grim chance that
the Pup’s woolly coat began to change. A
straight, close-lying under-fur pushed swiftly
into view, and the wool dropped out—a process
which a certain sense of irritation in his
201
skin led him to hasten by rubbing his back
and sides against the rock. In an astonishingly
short time his coat grew like his mother’s—a
yellowish gray, dotted irregularly with blackish
spots, and running to a creamy tone under the
belly. As soon as this change was completed
to his mother’s satisfaction, he was led down
close to the water’s edge, where he had never
been allowed before.

Eagerly as he loved the sight of the waves,
and the salty savor of them, when the first thin
crest splashed up and soused him he shrank
back daunted. It was colder, too, that first slap
in his face, than he had expected. He turned,
intending to retreat a little way up the rocks
and consider the question, in spite of the fact
that there was his little mother in the water,
swimming gayly a few feet out from shore and
coaxing him with soft cries. He was anxious to
join her—but not just yet. Then, all at once
the question was decided for him. His real
mother, who was just behind him, suddenly
thrust her muzzle under his flank, and sent him
rolling into deep water.

He came up at once, much startled. Straightway
he found that he could move in the water
much more easily and naturally than on shore—and
he applied the discovery to getting ashore
202
again with all possible haste. But his mother,
awaiting him at the edge, shoved him off relentlessly.

Feeling much injured, he turned and swam
out to his other mother. Here the first one
joined him; and in a few minutes amazement
and resentment alike were lost in delight, as
he began to realize that this, at last, was life.
Here, and not sprawling half helplessly on the
rocks, was where he belonged. He swam, and
dived, and darted like a fish, and went wild
with childish ecstasy. He had come to his own
element. After this, he hardly ever returned
to the cave, but slept close at the side of
one or the other of his mothers, on the open
rocks just a few feet above the edge of tide.

A little later came a period of mad weather,
ushering in the autumn storms. Snow and
sleet drove down out of the north, and lay in
great patches over the more level portions of
the islets above tide. The wind seemed as if
it would lift the islets bodily and sweep them
away. The vast seas, green and black and
lead-color, thundered down upon the rocks as
if they would batter them to fragments. The
ledges shuddered under the incessant crashing.
When the snow stopped, on its heels came the
vanguard of the arctic cold. The ice formed
203
instantly in all the pools left by the tide. Along
the edges of the tide it was ground to a bitter
slush by the perpetual churning of the waves.

After a week or two of this violence, the
seals—who, unlike their polar cousins, the
“Harps” and the “Hoods,” were no great lovers
of storm and the fiercer cold—began to feel
discontented. Presently a little party of them,
not more than a score in all, with a few of the
stronger youngsters of that season, on a sudden
impulse left their stormy ledges and started
southward. The Pup, who, thanks to his double
mothering, was far bigger and more capable
than any of his mates, went with his partner-mothers
in the very forefront of the migration.

Straight down along the roaring coast they
kept, usually at a distance of not more than
half a mile from shore. They had, of course,
no objection to going farther out, but neither
had they any object in doing so, since the fish-life
on which they fed as they journeyed was
the more abundant where the sea began to
shoal. With their slim, sleek, rounded bodies,
thickest at the fore flippers and tapering finely
to tail and muzzle, each a lithe and close-knit
structure of muscle and nerve-energy, they could
swim with astounding speed; and therefore, although
there was no hurry whatever, they went
along at the pace of a motor-boat.
204

All this time the gale was lashing the coast,
but it gave them little concern. Down in the
black troughs of the gigantic rollers there was
always peace from the yelling of the wind—a
tranquillity wherein the gulls and mews would
snatch their rest after being buffeted too long
about the sky. Near the tops of the waves, of
course, it was not good to be, for the gale would
rip the crests off bodily and tear them into
shreds of whipping spray. But the seals could
always dive and slip smoothly under these tormented
regions. Moreover, if weary of the
tossing surfaces and the tumult of the gale,
they had only to sink themselves down, down,
into the untroubled gloom beneath the wave-bases,
where greenish lights gleamed or faded
with the passing of the rollers overhead, and
where strange, phosphorescent shapes of life
crawled or clung among the silent rocks.
Longer than any other red-blooded animal,
except the whale, could their lungs go without
fresh oxygen; so, though they knew nothing of
those great depths where the whales sometimes
frequent, it was easy for them to go deep
enough to get below the storm.

Sometimes a break in the coast-line, revealing
the mouth of an inlet, would tempt the little
band of migrants. Hastening shoreward, they
205
would push their way inland between the
narrowing banks, often as far as the head of
tide, gambolling in the quiet water, and chasing
the salmon fairly out upon the shoals. Like
most discriminating creatures, they were very
fond of salmon, but it was rarely, except on such
occasions as this, that they had a chance to
gratify their taste.

After perhaps a week of this southward
journeying, the travellers found themselves one
night at the head of a little creek where the tide
lapped pleasantly on a smooth, sandy beach.
They were already getting into milder weather,
and here, a half mile inland, there was no wind.
The sky was overcast, and the seals lay in contented
security along the edge of the water.
The blacker darkness of a fir forest came down
to within perhaps fifty paces of their resting-place.
But they had no anxieties. The only
creatures that they had learned to fear on shore
besides man were the polar bears; and they
knew they were now well south of that deadly
hunter’s range. As for eagles, they did not
hunt at night; and, moreover, they were a terror
only in the woolly-coated, baby stage of a
seal’s existence.

But it often enough happens that wild animals,
no less than human beings, may be ignorant
206
of something which their health requires
them to know. There was another bear in
Labrador—a smallish, rusty-coated, broad-headed,
crafty cousin of the ordinary American
black bear. And one of these, who had acquired
a taste for seal, along with some cleverness
in gratifying that taste, had his headquarters,
as it chanced, in that near-neighboring
fir wood.

The Pup lay crowded in snugly between his
two mothers. He liked the warmth of being
crowded; for the light breeze, drawing up from
the water, was sharp with frost. There is such
a thing, however, as being just a little too
crowded, and presently, waking up with a protest,
he pushed and wriggled to get more space.
As he did so, he raised his head. His keen
young eyes fell upon a black something a little
blacker than the surrounding gloom.

The black something was up the slope halfway
between the water and the wood. It
looked like a mass of rock. But the Pup had
a vague feeling that there had been no rock
thereabouts when he went to sleep. A thrill of
apprehension went up and down his spine,
raising the stiffish hairs along his neck. Staring
with all his eyes through the dimness, he presently
saw the black shape move. Yes, it was
207
drawing nearer. With a shrill little bark of
terror he gave the alarm, at the same time
struggling free and hurling himself toward the
water.

In that same instant the bear rushed, coming
down the slope as it were in one plunging
jump. The seals, light sleepers all, were already
awake and floundering madly back to the water.
But for one of them, and that one the Pup’s
assistant mother, the alarm came too late.
Just as she was turning, bewildered with terror
of she knew not what, the dark bulk of the bear
landed upon her, crushing her down. A terrific
blow on the muzzle broke her skull, and she
collapsed into a quivering mass. The rest of
the band, after a moment of loud splashing,
swam off noiselessly for the safe retreat of the
outer ledges. And the bear, after shaking the
body of his victim to make sure it was quite
dead, dragged it away with a grunt of satisfaction
into the fir wood.

After this tragedy, though the travellers continued
to ascend the creeks and inlets when the
whim so moved them, they took care to choose
for sleep the ruder security of outlying rocks
and islands, and cherished, by night and by
day, a wholesome distrust of dark fir woods.
But for all their watchfulness their journeying
208
was care-free and joyous, and from time to time,
as they went, their light-heartedness would
break out into aimless gambols, or something
very like a children’s game of tag. Nothing,
however, checked their progress southward,
and presently, turning into the Belle Isle Straits,
they came to summer skies and softer weather.
At this point, under the guidance of an old
male who had followed the southward track
before, they forsook the Labrador shore-line
and headed fearlessly out across the strait till
they reached the coast of Newfoundland. This
coast they followed westward till they gained
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then, turning south,
worked their way down the southwest coast
of the great Island Province, past shores still
basking in the amethystine light of Indian
summer, through seas so teeming with fish that
they began to grow lazy with fatness. Here
the Pup and other younger members of the
company felt inclined to stay. But their elders
knew that winter, with the long cold, and the
scanty sun, and the perilous grinding of tortured
ice-floes around the shore-rocks, would
soon be upon them; so the journey was continued.
On they pressed, across the wide gateway
of the Gulf, from Cape Ray to North Cape,
the eastern point of Nova Scotia. Good
209
weather still waited upon their wayfaring, and
they loitered onward gayly, till, arriving at the
myriad-islanded bay of the Tuskets, near the
westernmost tip of the peninsula, they could
not, for sheer satisfaction, go farther. Here
was safe seclusion, with countless inaccessible
retreats. Here was food in exhaustless plenty;
and here was weather benignant enough for
any reasonable needs.

It was just here, off the Tuskets, that the
Pup got another lesson. Hitherto his ideas
of danger had been altogether associated with
the land where eagles swooped out of a clear
sky and bears skulked in the darkness, and
where, moreover, he himself was incapable of
swift escape. But now he found that the sea,
too, held its menace for the gentle kindred of
the seals. It was a still, autumnal morning, blue
and clear, with a sunny sparkle on sea and air.
The seals were most of them basking luxuriously
on the seaward ledges of one of the outermost
islands, while half a dozen of the more
energetic were amusing themselves with their
game of tag in the deep water. Pausing for a
moment to take breath, after a sharp wrestling-match
far down among the seaweeds, the Pup’s
observant eyes caught sight of a small, black
triangular object cutting swiftly the smooth surface
210
of the swells. He stared at it curiously.
It was coming towards him, but it did not, to
his uninitiated eyes, look dangerous. Then he
became conscious of a scurrying of alarm all
about him; and cries of sharp warning reached
him from the sentinels on the ledge. Like a
flash he dived, at an acute angle to the line of
approach of the mysterious black object. Even
in the instant, it was close upon him, and he
caught sight of a long, terrible, gray shape,
thrice as long as a seal, which turned on one
side in its rush, showing a whitish belly, and a
gaping, saw-toothed mouth big enough to take
him in at one gulp. Only by a hair’s-breadth
did he avoid that awful rush, carrying with him
as he passed the sound of the snapping jaws
and the cold gleam of the shark’s small, malignant
eye.

Hideously frightened, he doubled this way
and that, with a nimbleness that his huge pursuer
could not hope to match. It took the shark
but a few seconds to realize that this was a
vain chase. An easier quarry caught his eye.
He darted straight shoreward, where the deep
water ran in abruptly to the very lip of the
ledge. The Pup came to the surface to watch.
One of the younger seals, losing its wits utterly
with fright, and forgetting that its safety lay in
211
the deep water where it could twist and dodge,
was struggling frantically to clamber out upon
the rocks. It had almost succeeded, indeed.
It was just drawing up its narrow, tail-like hind
flippers, when the great, rounded snout of the
shark shot into the air above it. The monstrous
shape descended upon it, and fell back
with it into the water, leaving only a splash and
trickle of blood upon the lip of the ledge. The
other seals tossed their heads wildly, jumped
about on their fore-flippers, and barked in lively
dismay; and in a few moments, as if the matter
had been put to vote and carried unanimously,
they betook themselves in haste to one of the
inner islands, where they knew that the shark,
who hates shoal water, would not venture to
follow them.

In this sheltered archipelago the little herd
might well have passed the winter. But after a
few weeks of content the southing spirit again
seized upon the old male who had hitherto been
the unquestioned leader. At this point, however,
his authority went to pieces. When he
resumed the southward wandering, less than
half the herd accompanied him. But among
those faithful were the Pup and his mild-eyed
mother.

Rounding the extremity of Nova Scotia, the
212
travellers crossed the wide mouth of the Bay of
Fundy, and lingered a few days about the lofty
headlands of Grand Manan. By this time they
had grown so accustomed to ships of all kinds,
from the white-sailed fishing-smack to the long,
black, churning bulk of the ocean liner, that
they no longer heeded them any more than
enough to give them a wide berth. One and
all, these strange apparitions appeared quite indifferent
to seals, so very soon the seals became
almost indifferent to them. Off the island of
Campobello, however, something mysterious
occurred which put an end to this indifference,
although none of the band could comprehend
it.

A beautiful, swift, white craft, with yellow
gleams flashing here and there from her deck
as the sun caught her polished brasswork, was
cleaving the light waves northward. The seals,
their round, dark heads bobbing above the
water at a distance of perhaps three hundred
yards from her port-quarter, gazed at the spectacle
with childlike interest. They saw a group
of men eying them from the deck of the swift
monster. All at once from this group spurted
two thin jets of flame. The Pup heard some
tiny vicious thing go close over his head with
a cruel whine, and zip sharply through a wave-crest
213
just beyond. On the instant, even before
the sharp clatter of the two reports came to
their ears, all the seals dived, and swam desperately
to get as far away as possible from the
terrifying bright monster. When they came
to the surface again, they were far out of range.
But the restless old male, their leader, was not
among them. The white yacht was steaming
away into the distance, with its so-called sportsmen
congratulating themselves that they had
almost certainly killed something. The little
band of seals waited about the spot for an hour
or two, expecting the return of their chief; and
then, puzzled and apprehensive, swam away
toward the green-crested shore-line of Maine.

Here, lacking a leader, their migration came
to an end. There seemed no reason to go
farther, since here was everything they wanted.
The Pup, by this time an expert pursuer of all
but the swiftest fish, was less careful now to
keep always within his mother’s reach, though
the affection between the two was still ardent.
One day, while he was swimming some little
distance apart from the herd, he noticed a
black-hulled boat rocking idly on the swells
near by. It was too near for his comfort, so he
dived at once, intending to seek a safer neighborhood.
But as luck would have it, he had
214
hardly plunged below the surface when he encountered
an enormous school of young herring.
What throngs of them there were!
And how crowded together! Never had he
seen anything like it. They were darting this
way and that in terrific excitement. He himself
went wild at once, dashing hither and
thither among them with snapping jaws, destroying
many more than he could eat. And
still they seemed to throng about him ever the
more closely. At last he got tired of it, and
dashed straight ahead to clear the shoal. The
next moment, to his immeasurable astonishment,
he was checked and flung back by a fine,
invisible barrier. No, it was not quite invisible.
He could see a network of meshes before him.
Puzzled and alarmed, he shot up to the surface
to reconnoitre.

As his head rose above the water, his heart
fairly stopped for a second with dismay. The
black side of the fishing boat was just above
him, and the terrifying eyes of men looked
straight down into his. Instantly he dived
again, through the ever thickening masses of
the herring. But straightway again he met the
fine, invincible barrier of the net. Frantically
he struggled to break through it, but only succeeded
in coiling it about him till he could not
215
move a flipper. And while he wriggled there
impotently, under the squirming myriads of the
fish, he was lifted out into the air and dragged
into the boat.

Seeing the damage he had wrought in their
catch, the fishermen were for knocking their
captive straightway on the nose. But as he
lay there, looking up with innocent eyes of
wonder and appeal through the meshes, something
in his baby helplessness softened the
captain’s heart.

“Hold hard, Jim,” he ordered, staying a big
sailor’s hand. “Blamed if the little varmint
ain’t got eyes most as soft as my Libby’s. I
reckon he’ll make a right purty pet fer the kid,
an’ kind of keep her from frettin’ after her
canary what died last Sunday.”

“He don’t much resemble a canary,
Ephraim,” laughed Jim, dropping the belaying-pin.

“I reckon he’ll fill the bill fine, all the same,”
said the captain.

So the Pup was carried prisoner to Eastport.

CHAPTER II

As it happened, Miss Libby was a child of
decided views. One of the most decided of her
views proved to be that a seal pup, with very
little voice and that little by no means melodious,
was no substitute for a canary. She refused
to look at the Pup at all, until her father,
much disappointed, assured her that she should
have a canary also without further delay. And
even then, though she could not remain quite
indifferent to the Pup’s soft eyes and confiding
friendliness, she never developed any real enthusiasm
for him. She would minister amiably
to his wants, and laugh at his antics, and praise
his good temper, and stroke his sleek, round
head, but she stuck resolutely to her first
notion, that he was quite too “queer” for her
to really love. She could never approve of his
having flippers instead of fore paws, and of his
lying down all the time even when he walked.
As for his hind feet, which stuck out always
straight behind him and close together, like a
sort of double-barrelled tail, she was quite sure
they had been fixed that way by mistake, and
217
she could not, in spite of all her father’s explanations
as to the advantages, for a seal, of that
arrangement, ever bring herself to accept them
as normal.

Miss Libby’s mother proved even less cordial.
Her notions of natural history being of
the most primitive, at first view she had jumped
to the conclusion that the Pup was a species of
fish; and in this opinion nothing could ever
shake her.

“Well, I never!” she had exclaimed. “If
that ain’t just like you, Eph Barnes. As if it
wa’n’t enough to have to eat fish, an’ talk fish,
an’ smell fish, year in an’ year out, but you must
go an’ bring a live fish home to flop aroun’ the
house an’ keep gittin’ under a body’s feet every
way they turn! An’ what’s he goin’ to eat,
anyways, I’d like to know?”

“He eats fish, but he ain’t no manner of fish
himself, mother, no more than you nor I be!”
explained Captain Ephraim, with a grin. “An’
he won’t be in your way a mite, for he’ll live
out in the yard, an’ I’ll sink the half of a molasses
hogshead out there an’ fill it with salt
water for him to play in. He’s an amusin’ little
beggar, an’ gentle as a kitten.”

“Well, I’d have you know that I wash my
hands of him, Ephraim!” declared Mrs. Barnes,
218
with emphasis. And so it came about that the
Pup presently found himself, not Libby’s special
pet, but Captain Ephraim’s.

Two important members of the Barnes family
were a large yellow cat and a small, tangle-haired,
blue-gray mop of a Skye terrier. At
the first glimpse of the Pup, the yellow cat had
fled, with tail as big as a bottle-brush, to the
top of the kitchen dresser, where she crouched
growling, with eyes like green full moons. The
terrier, on the other hand, whose name was
Toby, had shown himself rather hospitable to
the mild-eyed stranger. Unacquainted with fear,
and always inclined to be scornful of whatever
conduct the yellow cat might indulge in, he had
approached the newcomer with a friendly wagging
of his long-haired stump of a tail, and sniffed
at him with pleased curiosity. The Pup, his lonely
heart hungering for comradeship, had met this
civil advance with effusion; and thenceforward
the two were fast friends.

By the time the yellow cat and Mrs. Barnes
had both got over regarding the Pup as a
stranger, he had become an object of rather
distant interest to them. When he played at
wrestling matches with Toby in the yard,—which
always ended by the Pup rolling indulgently
on his back, while Toby, with yelps of
219
excitement, mounted triumphantly between his
fanning flippers,—the yellow cat would crouch
upon the woodpile close by and regard the proceedings
with intent but non-committal eye.
Mrs. Barnes, for her part, would open the kitchen
door and surreptitiously coax the Pup in, with
the lure of a dish of warm milk, which he
loved extravagantly. Then—this being while
Libby was at school and Captain Ephraim away
on the water—she would seat herself in the
rocking-chair by the window with her knitting
and watch the Pup and Toby at their play.
The young seal was an endless source of speculation
to her.

“To think, now,” she would mutter to herself,
“that I’d be a-settin’ here day after day
a-studyin’ out a critter like that, what’s no more’n
jest plain fish says I, if he do flop roun’ the
house an’ drink milk like a cat. He’s right uncanny;
but there ain’t no denyin’ but what he’s
as good as a circus when he gits to playin’ with
Toby.”

As Mrs. Barnes had a very good opinion of
Toby’s intelligence, declaring him to be the
smartest dog in Maine, she gradually imbibed
a certain degree of respect for Toby’s friend.
And so it came about that the Pup acquired a
taste which no seal was ever intended to acquire—a
220
taste for the luxurious glow of the kitchen
fire.

When at last the real Atlantic winter had
settled down upon the coast, binding it with
bitter frost and scourging it with storm, then
Captain Ephraim spent most of his time at
home in his snug cottage. He had once, on a
flying visit to New York, seen a troupe of performing
seals, which had opened his eyes to
the marvellous intelligence of these amphibians.
It now became his chief occupation, in the long
winter evenings, to teach tricks to the Pup.
And stimulated by abundant prizes in the
shape of fresh herrings and warm milk, right
generously did the Pup respond. He learned
so fast that before spring the accomplished
Toby was outstripped; and as for the canary,—an
aristocratic golden fellow who had come all
the way from Boston,—Miss Libby was constrained
to admit that, except when it came
to a question of singing, her pet was “not in
it” with her father’s. Mrs. Barnes’ verdict was
that “canaries seemed more natural-like, but
couldn’t rightly be called so interestin’.”

Between Libby and her father there was always
a lot of gay banter going on, and now
Captain Ephraim declared that he would teach
the Pup to sing as well as the canary. The
221
obliging animal had already acquired a repertoire
of tricks that would have made him something
of a star in any troupe. The new demand
upon his wits did not disturb him, so long as
it meant more fish, more milk, and more petting.
Captain Ephraim took a large tin bucket,
turned it upside down on the floor, and made
the Pup rest his chest upon the bottom. Then,
tying a tin plate to each flipper, he taught the
animal to pound the plates vigorously against
the sides of the bucket, with a noise that put the
shrill canary to shamefaced silence and drove
the yellow cat in frantic amazement from the
kitchen. This lesson it took weeks to perfect,
because the Pup himself always seemed mortified
at the blatant discords which he made. When
it was all achieved, however, it was not singing,
but mere instrumental music, as Libby triumphantly
proclaimed. Her father straightway
swore that he was not to be downed by any
canary. A few weeks more, and he had taught
the Pup to point his muzzle skyward and emit
long, agonizing groans, the while he kept flapping
the two tin plates against the bucket. It
was a wonderful achievement, which made Toby
retreat behind the kitchen stove and gaze forth
upon his friend with grieved surprise. But it
obliged Libby, who was a fair-minded child, to
222
confess to her father that she and her pet were
vanquished.

All this while the Pup was growing, as perhaps
no harbor seal of his months had grown
before. When spring came, he saw less of Captain
Ephraim, but he had compensation, for the
good captain now diverted into his modest
grounds a no-account little brook which was going
begging, and dug a snug little basin at the
foot of the garden for the Pup to disport himself
therein. All through the summer he continued
to grow and was happy, playing with
Toby, offending the yellow cat, amusing Miss
Libby, and affording food for speculation to
Mrs. Barnes over her knitting. In the winter
Captain Ephraim polished him up in his old
tricks, and taught him some new ones. But by
this time he had grown so big that Mrs. Barnes
began to grumble at him for taking up too much
room. He was, as ever, a model of confiding
amiability, in spite of his ample jaws and formidable
teeth. But one day toward spring he
showed that this good nature of his would not
stand the test of seeing a friend ill-used.

It happened in this way. Toby, who was an
impudent little dog, had managed to incur the
enmity of a vicious half-breed mastiff, which
lived on a farm some distance out of Eastport.
223
The brute was known to have killed several
smaller dogs; so whenever he passed the Barnes’
gate, and snarled his threats at Toby, Toby
would content himself with a scornful growl
from the doorstep.

But one morning, as the big mongrel went by
at the tail of his master’s sled, Toby chanced to
be very busy in the snow near the gate digging
up a precious buried bone. The big dog crept
up on tiptoe, and went over the gate with a
scrambling bound. Toby had just time to lift
his shaggy little head out of the snow and turn
to face the assault. His heart was great, and
there was no terror in the growl with which he
darted under the foe’s huge body and sank his
teeth strategically into the nearest hind paw.
But the life would have been crushed out of him
in half a minute, had not the Pup, at this critical
juncture, come flopping up awkwardly to see
how his little friend was faring.

Now the Pup, as we have seen, was simply
overflowing with good-will towards dogs, and
cats, and every one. But that was because he
thought they were all friendly. He was amazed
to find here a dog that seemed unfriendly. Then
all at once he realized that something very serious
was happening to his playmate. His eyes reddened
and blazed; and with one mighty lunge
224
he flung himself forward upon the enemy. With
that terrific speed of action which could snap up
a darting mackerel, he caught the mastiff in the
neck, close behind the jaw. His teeth were
built to hold the writhings of the biggest
salmon, and his grip was that of a bulldog—except
that it cut far deeper.

The mastiff yelped, snapped wildly at his
strange antagonist, and then, finding himself
held so that he could not by any possibility get
a grip, strove to leap into the air and shake his
assailant off. But the Pup held him down inexorably,
his long teeth cutting deeper and
deeper with every struggle. For perhaps half
a minute the fight continued, the mad contortions
of the entangled three (for Toby still clung
to his grip on the foe’s hind paw) tearing up the
snow for a dozen feet in every direction. The
snow was flecked with crimson,—but suddenly,
with a throbbing gush, it was flooded scarlet.
The Pup’s teeth had torn through the great
artery of his opponent’s neck. With a cough
the brute fell over, limp and unresisting as a
half-filled bran sack.

At this moment the mastiff’s owner, belatedly
aware that the tables were being turned on his vicious
favorite, came yelling and cursing over the
gate, brandishing a sled stake in his hands.
225
But at the same time arrived Captain Ephraim,
rushing bareheaded from the kitchen, and
stepped in front of the new arrival. One glance
had shown him that the fight was over.

“Hold hard there, Baiseley!” he ordered in
curt tones. Then he continued more slowly—“It
ain’t no use makin’ a fuss. That murderin’
brute of yourn begun it, an’ come into my yard
to kill my own little tike here. He’s got just
what he deserved. An’ if the Pup here hadn’t
’a’ done it, I’d ’a’ done it myself. See?”

Baiseley, like his mongrel follower, was a
bully. But he had discretion. He calmed
down.

“That there dog o’ mine, Captain Ephraim,
was a good dog, an’ worth money. I reckon
ye’ll hev to pay me ten dollars for that dog, an’
we’ll call it square.”

“Reckon I’ll have to owe it to ye, Hank!
Mebbe I’ll pay it some day when you git
han’somer ’n you are now!” laughed Captain
Ephraim dryly. He gave a piercing whistle
through his teeth. Straightway Toby, sadly
bedraggled, came limping up to him. The Pup
let go of his dead enemy, and lifted his head
to eye his master inquiringly. His whole front
was streaming with blood.

“Go wash yerself!” ordered the captain
226
picking up a chip and hurling it into the pond,
which was now half empty of ice.

The Pup floundered off obediently to get
the chip, and Baiseley, muttering inarticulate
abuse, slouched away to his sled.

CHAPTER III

Toward the end of April there came a great
change in the Pup’s affairs. Primarily, the
change was in Captain Ephraim’s. Promoted
to the command of a smart schooner engaged
in cod-fishing on the Grand Banks, he sold his
cottage at Eastport and removed his family to
Gloucester, Massachusetts. At the same time,
recognizing with many a pang that a city like
Gloucester was no place for him to keep a seal
in, he sold the Pup, at a most consoling price
indeed, to the agent of an English animal
trainer. With the prospect of shortly becoming
the cynosure of all eyes at Shepherd’s Bush
or Earl’s Court, the Pup was shipped on a
freighter for Liverpool.

With his pervasive friendliness, and seeking
solace for the absence of Toby and Captain
Ephraim, the Pup proved a most privileged
and popular passenger. All went well till the
ship came off Cape Race, Newfoundland.
Then that treacherous and implacable promontory
made haste to justify its reputation; and
in a blind sou’wester the ship was driven on the
228
ledges. While she was pounding to pieces, the
crew got away in their boats, and presently the
Pup found himself reviving half-forgotten
memories amid the buffeting of the huge Atlantic
rollers.

He felt amazingly at home, but very lonely.
Bobbing his head as high as he could above
the water, he stared about him in every direction,
dimly hoping to catch sight of Captain
Ephraim or Toby—or even of the unsociable
yellow cat. They were nowhere to be seen.
Well, company he must have. After fish, of
which there was no lack in those teeming
waters, company was his urgent demand. He
headed impatiently for the coast, which he
could not see indeed, but which he felt clearly
in the distance.

The first land he encountered was a high
hogback of rock which proved to be an island.
Swimming around under its lea, he ran into a
little herd of seals of his own kind, and hastened
confidently to fraternize with them.

The strangers, mostly females and young
males, met his advances with a good-natured
indifference. One of the herd, however, a big
dog-seal who seemed to consider himself the
chief, would have none of him, but grumbled
and showed his teeth in a most unpleasant
229
manner. The Pup avoided him politely, and
crawled out upon the rocks, about twenty feet
away, beside two friendly females. He wanted
to get acquainted, that was all. But the old
male, after grumbling for several minutes, got
himself worked up into a rage, and came
floundering over the rocks to do up the visitor.
Roughly he pushed the two complaisant females
off into the water, and then, with a savage
lunge, he fell upon the Pup.

But in this last step the old male was ill-advised.
Hitherto the Pup had felt diffident in
the face of such a reception, but now a sudden
red rage flared into his eyes. Young as he was,
he was as big as his antagonist, and, here on
land, a dozen times more nimble. Here came
in the advantage of Captain Ephraim’s training.
When the old male lunged upon him, he simply
wasn’t there. He had shot aside, and wheeled
like a flash, and secured a hold at the root of
his assailant’s flipper. Of course in this position
he too received some sharp punishment. But
he held on like a bulldog, worrying, worrying
mercilessly, till all at once the other squealed,
and threw up his muzzle, and struggled to get
away. The Pup, satisfied with this sign of submission,
let him go at once, and he flounced
off furiously into the water.
230

As a prompt result of this victory, the Pup
found himself undisputed leader of the little
herd, his late antagonist, after a vain effort to
effect a division, having slipped indolently into
a subordinate place. This suited the Pup exactly,
who was happy himself, and wanted everybody
else to be so likewise.

As spring advanced, the herd worked their
way northward along the Newfoundland coast,
sometimes journeying hurriedly, sometimes lingering
for days in the uninhabited inlets and
creek mouths. The Pup was in a kind of ecstasy
over his return to the water world, and indulged
in antics that seemed perhaps frivolous
in the head of so important a family. But once
in a while a qualm of homesickness would come
over him, for Toby, and the Captain, and a big
tin basin of warm milk. And in one of these
moods he was suddenly confronted by men.

The herd was loitering off a point which
marked the entrance to a shallow cove, when
round the jutting rocks slid a row-boat, with
two fishermen coming out to set lines. They
had no guns with them, fortunately. They saw
the seals dive and vanish at the first glimpse of
them, as was natural. But to their amazement,
one seal—the biggest, to their astonished eyes,
in the whole North Atlantic—did not vanish
231
with the rest. Instead of that, after eying them
fearlessly at a distance of some fifty feet, he
swam deliberately straight toward them.

Now there is nothing very terrifying, except
to a fish, in the aspect of even the biggest harbor
seal; but to these fishermen, who knew
the shyness of the seals, it was terrifying to the
last degree that one should conduct himself in
this unheard-of way. They stopped rowing,
and stared with superstitious eyes.

“Howly Mother!” gasped one, “that b’ain’t
no seal, Mike!”

“What d’ye s’pose he wants wid us, Barney,
annyhow?” demanded Mike, in an awed voice.

“Sure, an’ it’s a sign for the one or t’other of
us. It’s gittin’ back to shore we’d better be,”
suggested Barney, pulling round hard on the
bow oar.

As the mysterious visitor was still advancing,
this counsel highly commended itself to Mike,
who would have faced a polar bear with no
weapon but his oar, but had no stomach for
a parley with the supernatural. In another
moment the boat was rushing back up the cove
with all the speed their practised muscles could
impart. But still, swimming leisurely in their
wake, with what seemed to them a dreadful deliberation,
the Pup came after them.
232

“Don’t ye be comin’ nigh me!” cried Mike,
somewhat hysterically, “or I’ll bash yer face
wid the oar, mind!”

“Whisht!” said Barney, “don’t ye be after
talkin’ that way to a sperrit, or maybe he’ll blast
ye!”

“I’m thinkin’, now,” said Mike, presently, in
a hushed voice, “as maybe it be Dan Sheedy’s
sperrit, comin’ back to ha’nt me coz I didn’t
give up them boots o’ his to his b’y, accordin’
to me promise.”

“Shure an’ why not that?” agreed Barney,
cheered by the hope that the visitation was not
meant for him.

A moment more and the boat reached the
beach with an abruptness that hurled both
rowers from their seats. Scrambling out upon
the shingle, they tugged wildly at the boat to
draw her up. But the Pup, his eyes beaming
affection, was almost on their heels. With a
yell of dismay Mike dashed up the shore toward
their shack; but Barney, having less on
his conscience, delayed to snatch out of the bow
the precious tin pail in which they carried their
bait. Then he followed Mike. But looking
back over his shoulder, he saw his mysterious
pursuer ascend from the water and come flopping
up the shore at a pace which assuredly no
233
mortal seal could ever accomplish on dry land.
At that he fell over a boulder, dropped the pail
of bait, picked himself up with a startled yell,
and made a dash for the shack as if all the fiends
were chasing him.

Slamming the door behind them, the two
stared fearfully out of the window. Their guns,
loaded with slugs, leaned against the wall, but
they would never be guilty of such perilous impiety
as to use them.

When he came to the tin pail and the spilled
bait the Pup was pleased. He knew very well
what the pail was for, and what the men expected
of him. He had no objection to being
paid in advance, so he gobbled the bait at once.
It was not much, but he had great hopes that,
if he acquitted himself well, he might get a pan
of warm milk. Cheerfully he hoisted his massive
chest upon the pail, and then, pounding jerkily
with his flippers as hard as he could, he lifted
his muzzle heavenward and delivered himself
of a series of prolonged and anguished groans.

This was too much for his audience.

“Howly Mother, save us!” sobbed Barney,
dropping upon his knees, and scrabbling desperately
in his untidy memory for some fragments
of his childhood’s prayers.

“Don’t, Dan, don’t!” pleaded Mike, gazing
234
out with wild eyes at the Pup’s mystical performance.
“I’ll give back them boots to the
b’y. I’ll give ’em back, Dan! Let me be now,
won’t ’ee, old mate?”

Thus adjured, the Pup presently stopped,
and stared expectantly at the shack, awaiting
the pan of warm milk. When it did not come,
he was disgusted. He had never been kept
waiting this way before. These men were not
like Captain Ephraim. In a minute or two
he rolled off the pail, flopped heavily down the
beach, and plunged back indignantly into the
sea. As his dark head grew smaller and
smaller in the distance, the men in the shack
threw open the door, and came out as if they
needed fresh air.

“I always said as how Dan had a good
heart,” muttered Mike, in a shaken voice.
“An’ shure, now, ye see, Barney, he ain’t
after bearin’ no grudge.”

“But ye’ll be takin’ back them boots to
young Dan, this very day of our lives,” urged
Barney. “An’ ye’ll be after makin’ it all right
wid the Widdy Sheedy, afore ye’re a day older,
now.”

“Shure, an’ to wanst ain’t none too quick for
me, an’ me receavin’ a hint loike that!” agreed
Mike.
235

As for the Pup, after this shock to his faith
in man, he began to forget the days of his
comfortable captivity. His own kind proved
vastly interesting to him, and in a few weeks
his reversion was complete. By that time his
journeyings had led him, with his little herd,
far up the coast of Labrador. At last he
came to a chain of rocky islands, lying off a
black and desolate coast. The islands were
full of caves, and clamorous with sea-birds, and
trodden forever by a white and shuddering
surf. Here old memories stirred dimly but
sweetly within him—and here he brought his
wanderers to rest.

Lone Wolf

CHAPTER I

Not, like his grim ancestors for a thousand
generations, in some dark cave of the
hills was he whelped, but in a narrow iron
cage littered with straw. Two brothers and a
sister made at the same time a like inauspicious
entrance upon an alien and fettered existence.
And because their silent, untamable mother
loved too savagely the hereditary freedom of her
race to endure the thought of bearing her young
into a life of bondage, she would have killed
them mercifully, even while their blind baby
mouths were groping for her breasts. But
the watchful keeper forestalled her. Whelps
of the great gray timber wolf, born in captivity,
and therefore likely to be docile, were rare and
precious. The four little sprawlers, helpless
and hungrily whimpering, were given into the
care of a foster-mother, a sorrowing brown
spaniel bitch who had just been robbed of her
own puppies.

When old enough to be weaned, the two
240
brothers and the sister, sturdy and sleek as
any wolf cubs of the hills, were sold to a
dealer in wild animals, who carried them off
to Hamburg. But “Lone Wolf,” as Toomey,
the trainer, had already named him, stayed
with the circus. He was the biggest, the most
intelligent, and the most teachable cub of the
whole litter, and Toomey, who had an unerring
eye for quality in a beast, expected to make
of him a star performer among wolves.

Job Toomey had been a hunter and a trapper
in the backwoods of New Brunswick, where
his instinctive knowledge of the wild kindreds
had won him a success which presently sickened
him. His heart revolted against the
slaughter of the creatures which he found so
interesting, and for a time, his occupation gone,
he had drifted aimlessly about the settlements.
Then, at the performance of a travelling circus,
which boasted two trained bears and a little
trick elephant, he had got his cue. It was
borne in upon him that he was meant to be
an animal trainer. Then and there he joined
the circus at a nominal wage, and within six
months found himself an acknowledged indispensable.
In less than a year he had become
a well-known trainer, employed in one of the
biggest menageries of America. Not only for
241
his wonderful comprehension and command of
animals was he noted, but also for his pose, to
which he clung obstinately, of giving his performances
always in the homespun garb of a
backwoodsman, instead of in the conventional
evening dress.

“Lone Wolf!” It seemed a somewhat imaginative
name for the prison-born whelp, but
as he grew out of cub-hood his character and
his stature alike seemed to justify it. Influenced
by the example of his gentle foster-mother, he
was docility itself toward his tamer, whom he
came to love well after the reticent fashion of
his race. But toward all others, man and beast
alike, his reserve was cold and dangerous.
Toomey, apparently, absorbed all the affection
which his lonely nature had to spare. In return
for this singleness of regard, Toomey
trained him with a firm patience which never
forgot to be kind, and made him, by the time
he was three years old, quite the cleverest and
most distinguished performing wolf who had
ever adorned a show.

He was now as tall as the very tallest Great
Dane, but with a depth of shoulder and chest,
a punishing length and strength of jaw, that no
dog ever could boast. When he looked at
Toomey, his eyes wore the expression of a
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faithful and understanding follower; but when
he answered the stares of the crowd through
the bars of his cage, the greenish fire that flamed
in their inscrutable depths was ominous and
untamed. In all save his willing subjection to
Toomey’s mastery, he was a true wolf, of the
savage and gigantic breed of the Northwestern
timber. To the spectators this was aggressively
obvious; and therefore the marvel of seeing this
sinister gray beast, with the murderous fangs, so
submissive to Toomey’s gentlest bidding, never
grew stale. In every audience there were always
some spectators hopefully pessimistic, who
vowed that the great wolf would some day turn
upon his master and tear his throat. To be
sure, Lone Wolf was not by any means the only
beast whom the backwoodsman had performing
for the delectation of his audiences. But all
the others—the lions, the leopards, the tiger,
the elephant, the two zebras, and the white bear—seemed
really subdued, as it were hypnotized
into harmlessness. It was Lone Wolf only who
kept the air of having never yielded up his
spirit, of being always, in some way, not the slave
but the free collaborator.

Ordinarily, in spite of the wild fire smouldering
in his veins, Lone Wolf was well enough
content. The show was so big and so important
243
that it was accustomed to visit only the great
centres, and to make long stops at each place.
At such times his life contained some measure
of freedom. He would be given a frequent
chance of exercise, in some secure enclosure
where he could run, and jump, and stretch his
mighty muscles, and breathe deep. And not
infrequently—after dark as a rule—his master
would snap a massive chain upon his collar, and
lead him out, on leash like a dog, into the verdurous
freshness of park or country lane. But
when the show was on tour, then it was very
different. Lone Wolf hated fiercely the narrow
cage in which he had to travel. He hated the
harsh, incessant noise of the grinding rails, the
swaying and lurching of the trucks, the dizzying
procession of the landscape past the barred
slits which served as windows to his car. Moreover,
sometimes the unwieldy length of the circus
train would be halted for an hour or two on
some forest siding, to let the regular traffic of
the line go by. Then, as his wondering eyes
caught glimpses of shadowed glades, and mysterious
wooded aisles, and far-off hills and horizons,
or wild, pungent smells of fir thicket and
cedar swamp drew in upon the wind to his uplifted
nostrils, his veins would run hot with an
uncomprehended but savage longing for delights
244
which he had never known, for a freedom
of which he had never learned or guessed. At
such times his muscles would ache and quiver,
till he felt like dashing himself blindly against
his bars. And if the halt happened to take
place at night, with perhaps a white moon staring
in upon him from over a naked hill-top, he
would lift his lean muzzle straight up toward
the roof of his cage and give utterance to a terrible
sound of which he knew not the meaning,
the long, shrill gathering cry of the pack. This
would rouse all the other beasts to a frenzy of
wails and screeches and growls and roars; till
Toomey would have to come and stop his performance
by darkening the cage with a tarpaulin.
At the sound of Toomey’s voice,
soothing yet overmastering, the great wolf
would lie down quietly, and the ghostly summons
of his far-ravaging fathers would haunt his
spirit no more.

After one of these long journeys, the show
was halted at an inland city for a stop of many
weeks; and to house the show a cluster of
wooden shanties was run up on the outskirts of
the city, forming a sort of mushroom village
flanked by the great white exhibition tents. In
one of these shanties, near the centre of the
cluster, Lone Wolf’s cage was sheltered, along
245
with the cages of the puma, the leopard, and
the little black Himalayan bear. Immediately
adjoining this shanty was the spacious open
shed where the elephants were tethered.

That same night, a little before dawn, when
the wearied attendants were sleeping heavily,
Lone Wolf’s nostrils caught a strange smell
which made him spring to his feet and sniff
anxiously at the suddenly acrid air. A strange
reddish glow was dispersing the dark outside
his window. From the other cages came uneasy
mutterings and movements, and the little black
bear, who was very wise, began to whine. The
dull glow leaped into a glare and then the elephants
trumpeted the alarm. Instantly the
night was loud with shoutings, and tramplings,
and howlings, and rushings to and fro. A cloud
of choking smoke blew into Lone Wolf’s cage,
making him cough and wonder anxiously why
Toomey didn’t come. The next moment
Toomey came, with one of the keepers, and an
elephant. Frantically they began pushing and
dragging out the cages. But there was a wind;
and before the first cage, that of the puma, was
more than clear of the door, the flames were on
top of them like a leaping tiger. Panic-stricken,
the elephant screamed and bolted. The keeper,
shouting, “We can’t save any more in this
246
house. Let’s git the lions out!” made off with
one arm over his eyes, doggedly dragging the
heavy cage of the puma. The keeper was right.
He had his work cut out for him, as it was, to
save the screeching puma. As for Toomey,
his escape was already almost cut off. But he
could not endure to save himself without giving
the imprisoned beasts a chance for their lives.
Dashing at the three remaining cages, he tore
them open; and then, with a summons to Lone
Wolf to follow him, he threw his arms over his
face and dashed through the flames.

The three animals sprang out at once into
the middle of the floor, but their position
seemed already hopeless. The leopard, thoroughly
cowed, leaped back into his cage and
curled up in the farthest corner, spitting insanely.
Lone Wolf dashed at the door by
which Toomey had fled, but a whirl of flame
in his face drove him back to the middle of the
floor, where the little bear stood whimpering.
Just at this moment a massive torrent of water
from a fire engine crashed through the window,
drenching Lone Wolf, and knocking the bear
clean over. The beneficent stream was whisked
away again in an instant, having work to do
elsewhere than on this already doomed and
hopeless shed. But to the wise little bear it
247
had shown a way of escape. Out through the
window he scurried, and Lone Wolf went after
him in one tremendous leap just as the flames
swooped in and licked the floor clean, and slew
the huddled leopard in its cage.

Outside, in the awful heat, the alternations of
dazzling glare and blinding smoke, the tumult
of the shouting and the engines, the roar of
the flames, the ripping crash of the streams,
and the cries of the beasts, Lone Wolf found
himself utterly confused. But he trusted, for
some reason, to the sagacity of the bear, and
followed his shaggy form, bearing diagonally
up and across the wind. Presently a cyclone
of suffocating smoke enveloped him, and he
lost his guide. But straight ahead he darted,
stretched out at top speed, belly to the ground,
and in another moment he emerged into the
clear air. His eyes smarting savagely, his nose
and lips scorched, his wet fur singed, he hardly
realized at first his escape, but raced straight on
across the fields for several hundred yards.
Then, at the edge of a wood, he stopped and
looked back. The little bear was nowhere to
be seen. The night wind here blew deliciously
cool upon his face. But there was the mad red
monster, roaring and raging still as if it would
eat up the world. The terror of it was in his
248
veins. He sprang into the covert of the wood,
and ran wildly, with the one impulse to get as
far away as possible.

Before he had gone two miles, he came out
upon an open country of fields, and pastures,
and farmyards, and little thickets. Straight on
he galloped, through the gardens and the farmyards
as well as the open fields. In the pastures
the cattle, roused by the glare in the sky,
stamped and snorted at him as he passed, and
now and then a man’s voice yelled at him
angrily as his long form tore through flowerbeds
or trellised vines. He had no idea of
avoiding the farmhouses, for he had at first no
fear of men; but at length an alert farmer got
a long shot at him with a fowling-piece, and
two or three small leaden pellets caught him
in the hind quarters. They did not go deep
enough to do him serious harm, but they hurt
enough to teach him that men were dangerous.
Thereupon he swerved from the uncompromising
straight line of his flight, and made for the
waste places. When the light of the fire had
quite died out behind him, the first of the dawn
was creeping up the sky; and by this time he
had come to a barren region of low thickets,
ragged woods, and rocks thrusting up through
a meagre, whitish soil.
249

Till the sun was some hours high Lone Wolf
pressed on, his terror of the fire now lost in a
sense of delighted freedom. By this time he
was growing hungry, and for an instant the
impulse seized him to turn back and seek his
master. But no, that way lay the scorching of
the flames. Instead of turning, he ran on all
the faster. Suddenly a rabbit bounded up, almost
beneath his nose. Hitherto he had never
tasted living prey, but with a sure instinct he
sprang after the rabbit. To his fierce disappointment,
however, the nimble little beast was
so inconsiderate as to take refuge in a dense
bramble thicket which he could not penetrate.
His muzzle, smarting and tender from the fire,
could not endure the harsh prickles, so after
prowling about the thicket for a half-hour in
the wistful hope that the rabbit might come
out, he resumed his journey. He had no idea,
of course, where he wanted to go, but he felt
that there must be a place somewhere where
there were plenty of rabbits and no bramble
thickets.

Late in the afternoon he came upon the
fringes of a settlement, which he skirted with
caution. In a remote pasture field, among
rough hillocks and gnarled, fire-scarred stumps,
he ran suddenly into a flock of sheep. For
250
a moment he was puzzled at the sight, but the
prompt flight of the startled animals suggested
pursuit. In a moment he had borne down the
hindermost. To reach for its throat was a
sure instinct, and he feasted, with a growing
zest of savagery, upon the hot flesh. Before
he realized it, he was dragging the substantial
remnant of his meal to a place of hiding under
an overhanging rock. Then, well content with
himself, he crept into a dark thicket and slept
for several hours.

When he awoke, a new-risen moon was shining,
with something in her light which half
bewildered him, half stung him to uncomprehended
desires. Skulking to the crest of a
naked knoll, he saw the landscape spread out
all around him, with the few twinkling lights
of the straggling village below the slopes of
the pasture. But not for lights, or for villages,
or for men was his concern. Sitting up very
straight on his gaunt haunches, he stretched
his muzzle toward the taunting moon, and began
to sound that long, dreadful gathering cry
of his race.

It was an unknown or a long-forgotten voice
in those neighborhoods, but none who heard
it needed to have it explained. In half a minute
every dog in the settlement was howling,
251
barking, or yelping, in rage or fear. To Lone
Wolf all this clamor was as nothing. He
paid no more attention to it than as if it had
been the twittering of sparrows. Then doors
opened, and lights flashed as men came out to
see what was the matter. Clearly visible, silhouetted
against the low moon, Lone Wolf
kept up his sinister chant to the unseen. But
presently, out of the corner of his eye, he noted
half a dozen men approaching up the pasture,
with the noisy dogs at their heels. Men!
That was different! Could it be that they
wanted him? All at once he experienced a
qualm of conscience, so to speak, about the
sheep he had killed. It occurred to him that
if sheep belonged to men, there might be trouble
ahead. Abruptly he stopped his serenading of
the moon, slipped over the crest of the knoll,
and made off at a long, tireless gallop which
before morning had put leagues between himself
and the angry villagers.

After this he gave a wide berth to settlements;
and having made his first kill, he suddenly
found himself an accomplished hunter.
It was as if long-buried memories had sprung
all at once to life,—memories, indeed, not of
his own but of his ancestors’,—and he knew,
all at once, how to stalk the shy wild rabbits, to
252
run down and kill the red deer. The country
through which he journeyed was well stocked
with game, and he fed abundantly as he went,
with no more effort than just enough to give
zest to his freedom. In this fashion he kept
on for many days, working ever northward just
because the wild lands stretched in that direction;
and at last he came upon the skirts of
a cone-shaped mountain, ragged with ancient
forest, rising solitary and supreme out of a
measureless expanse of wooded plain. From a
jutting shoulder of rock his keen eyes noted
but one straggling settlement, groups of scattered
clearings, wide apart on the skirts of the
great hill. They were too far off to mar the
vast seclusion of the height; and Lone Wolf,
finding a cave in the rocks that seemed exactly
designed for his retreat, went no farther. He
felt that he had come into his own domain.

CHAPTER II

The settlers around the skirts of Lost Mountain
were puzzled and indignant. For six weeks
their indignation had been growing, and the
mystery seemed no nearer a solution. Something
was slaughtering their sheep—something
that knew its business and slaughtered
with dreadful efficiency. Several honest dogs
fell under suspicion, not because there was anything
whatever against their reputations, but
simply because they had the misfortune to be
big enough and strong enough to kill a sheep
if they wanted to, and the brooding backwoods
mind, when troubled, will go far on the flimsiest
evidence.

Of all the wrathful settlers the most furious
was Brace Timmins. Not only had he lost in
those six weeks six sheep, but now his dog, a
splendid animal, half deerhound and half collie,
had been shot on suspicion by a neighbor, on
no better grounds, apparently, than his long
legs and long killing jaws. Still the slaughtering
of the flocks went on with undiminished
254
vigor. And a few days later Brace Timmins
avenged his favorite by publicly thrashing his
too hasty neighbor in front of the cross-roads
store. The neighbor, pounded into exemplary
penitence, apologized, and as far as the murdered
dog was concerned, the score was wiped clean.
But the problem of the sheep killing was no
nearer solution. If not Brace Timmins’ dog,
as every one made prudent haste to acknowledge,
then whose dog was it? The life of every
dog in the settlement, if bigger than a wood-chuck,
hung by a thread, which might, it seemed,
at any moment turn into a halter. Brace Timmins
loved dogs; and not wishing that others
should suffer the unjust fate which had overtaken
his own, he set his whole woodcraft to
the discovery of the true culprit.

Before he had made any great progress, however,
on this trail, a new thing happened, and
suspicion was lifted from the heads of all the
dogs. Joe Anderson’s dog, a powerful beast,
part sheep-dog and part Newfoundland, with a
far-off streak of bull, and the champion fighter
of the settlements, was found dead in the
middle of Anderson’s sheep pasture, his whole
throat fairly ripped out. He had died in defence
of his charges, and it was plainly no
dog’s jaws that had done such mangling. What
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dog indeed could have mastered Anderson’s
“Dan”?

“It’s a bear, gone mad on mutton,” pronounced
certain of the wise ones, idling at
the cross-roads store. “Ye see as how he
hain’t et the dawg, noways, but jest bit him
to teach him not to go interferin’ as regards
sheep.”

“Ye’re all off,” contradicted Timmins, with
authority. “A bear’d hev’ tore him an’ batted
him an’ mauled him more’n he’d hev’ bit him.
A bear thinks more o’ usin’ his fore paws than
what he does his jaws, if he gits into any kind
of an onpleasantness. No, boys, our unknown
friend up yonder’s a wolf, take my word for
it.”

Joe Anderson snorted, and spat accurately
out through the door.

“A wolf!” he sneered. “Go chase yerself,
Brace Timmins. I’d like to see any wolf
as could ’a’ done up my Dan that way!”

“Well, keep yer hair on, Joe,” retorted
Timmins, easily. “I’m a-goin’ after him, an’
I’ll show him to you in a day or two, as like
as not!”

“I reckon, Joe,” interposed the storekeeper,
leaning forward across the counter, “as how
there be other breeds of wolf besides the
256
sneakin’ little gray varmint of the East here,
what’s been cleaned out of these parts fifty
year ago. If Brace is right,—an’ I reckon
he be,—then it must sure be one of them
big timber wolves we read about, what the
Lord’s took it into His head to plank down
here in our safe old woods to make us set
up an’ take notice. You better watch out,
Brace. If ye don’t git the brute first lick, he’ll
git you!”

“I’ll watch out!” drawled Timmins, confidently;
and selecting a strong, steel trap-chain
from a box beside the counter, he
sauntered off to put his plans in execution.

These plans were simple enough. He knew
that he had a wide-ranging adversary to deal
with. But he himself was a wide ranger, and
acquainted with every cleft and crevice of Lost
Mountain. He would find the great wolf’s
lair, and set his traps accordingly, one in the
runway, to be avoided if the wolf was as clever
as he ought to be, and a couple of others a little
aside to really do the work. Of course, he
would carry his rifle, in case of need, but he
wanted to take his enemy alive.

For several arduous but exciting days Timmins
searched in vain alike the dark cedar
swamps and the high, broken spurs of the
257
mountain. Then, one windless afternoon, when
the forest scents came rising to him on the
clear air, far up the steep he found a climbing
trail between gray, shelving ledges. Stealthy
as a lynx he followed, expecting at the next
turn to come upon the lair of the enemy. It
was a just expectation, but as luck would have
it, that next turn, which would have led him
straight to his goal, lay around a shoulder of
rock whose foundations had been loosened
by the rains. With a kind of long growl, rending
and sickening, the rock gave way, and
sank beneath Timmins’ feet.

Moved by the alert and unerring instinct
of the woodsman, Timmins leaped into the
air. Both high and wide he sprang, and so
escaped being engulfed in the mass which he
had dislodged. On the top of the ruin he
fell, but he fell far and hard; and for some
fifteen or twenty minutes after that fall he
lay very still, while the dust and débris settled
into silence under the quiet flooding of the sun.

At last he opened his eyes. For a moment
he made no effort to move, but lay wondering
where he was. A weight was on his
legs, and glancing downward, he saw that he
was half covered with earth and rubbish.
Then he remembered. Was he badly hurt?
258
He was half afraid, now, to make the effort
to move, lest he should find himself incapable
of it. Still, he felt no serious pain. His
head ached, to be sure; and he saw that his
left hand was bleeding from a gash at the
base of the thumb. That hand still clutched
one of the heavy traps which he had been
carrying, and it was plainly the trap that had
cut him, as if in a frantic effort to escape.
But where was his rifle? Cautiously turning
his head, he peered around for it, but in
vain, for during the fall it had flown far aside
into the thickets. As he stared solicitously,
all at once his dazed and sluggish senses
sprang to life again with a scorching throb,
which left a chill behind it. There, not ten
paces away, sitting up on its haunches and
eying him contemplatively, was a gigantic
wolf, much bigger, it seemed to him, than
any wolf had any right to be.

Timmins’ first instinct was to spring to his
feet, with a yell that would give the dreadful
stranger to understand that he was a fellow it
would not be well to tamper with. But his
woodcraft stayed him. He was not by any
means sure that he could spring to his feet.
Still less was he sure that such an action would
properly impress the great wolf, who, for the
259
moment at least, seemed not actively hostile.
Stillness, absolute immobility, was the trump-card
to be always played in the wilderness
when in doubt. So Timmins kept quite still,
looking inquiringly at Lone Wolf. And Lone
Wolf looked inquiringly at him.

For several minutes this waiting game went
on. Then, with easy nonchalance, Lone Wolf
lifted one huge hind paw and vigorously
scratched his ear. This very simple action
was a profound relief to Timmins.

“Sartain,” he thought, “the crittur must be
in an easy mood, or he’d never think to scratch
his ear like that. Or mebbe he thinks I’m so
well buried I kin wait, like an old bone!”

Just then Lone Wolf got up, stretched himself,
yawned prodigiously, came a couple of
steps nearer, and sat down again, with his head
cocked to one side, and a polite air of asking,
“Do I intrude?”

“Sartain sure, I’ll never ketch him in a
better humor!” thought Timmins. “I’ll try
the human voice on him.”

“Git to H–– out of that!” he commanded
in a sharp voice.

Lone Wolf cocked his head to the other side
interrogatively. He had been spoken to by
Toomey in that voice of authority, but the
260
words were new to him. He felt that he was
expected to do something, but he knew not
what. He liked the voice—it was something
like Toomey’s. He liked the smell of Timmins’
homespun shirt—it, too, was something like
Toomey’s. He became suddenly anxious to
please this stranger. But what was wanted of
him? He half arose to his feet, and glanced
around to see if, perchance, the inexplicable
order had been addressed to some one else.
As he turned, Timmins saw, half hidden in the
heavy fur of the neck, a stout leather collar.

“I swear!” he muttered, “if tain’t a tame
wolf what’s got away!” With that he sat up;
and pulling his legs, without any very serious
hurt, from their covering of earth and sticks
he got stiffly to his feet. For a moment the
bright landscape reeled and swam before him,
and he had a vague sense of having been hammered
all over his body. Then he steadied
himself. He saw that the wolf was watching
him with the expression of a diffident but
friendly dog who would like to make acquaintance.
As he stood puzzling his wits, he remembered
having read about the great fire which had
recently done such damage to Sillaby and Hopkins’
Circus, and he concluded that the stranger
was one of the fugitives from that disaster.
261

“Come here, sir! Come here, big wolf!”
said he, holding out a confident hand.

“Wolf”—that was a familiar sound to Lone
Wolf’s ears! it was at least a part of his name!
And the command was one he well understood.
Wagging his tail gravely, he came at once, and
thrust his great head under Timmins’ hand for
a caress. He had enjoyed his liberty, to be
sure, but he was beginning to find it lonely.

Timmins understood animals. His voice, as
he talked to the redoubtable brute beside him,
was full of kindness, but at the same time
vibrant with authority. His touch was gentle,
but very firm and unhesitating. Both touch
and voice conveyed very clearly to Lone Wolf’s
disciplined instinct the impression that this
man, like Toomey, was a being who had to
be obeyed, whose mastery was inevitable and
beyond the reach of question. When Timmins
told him to lie down, he did so at once, and
stayed there obediently while Timmins gathered
himself together, shook the dirt out of
his hair and boots, recovered his cap, wiped his
bleeding hand with leaves, and hunted up his
scattered traps and rifle. At last Timmins
took two bedraggled but massive pork sandwiches,
wrapped in newspaper, from his pocket,
and offered one to his strange associate. Lone
262
Wolf was not hungry, being full of perfectly
good mutton, but being too polite to refuse,
he gulped down the sandwich. Timmins took
out the steel chain, snapped it on to Lone
Wolf’s collar, said, “Come on!” and started
homeward. And Lone Wolf, trained to a
short leash, followed close at his heels.

Timmins’ breast swelled with exultation.
What was the loss of one dog and half a dozen
no-account sheep to the possession of this
magnificent captive and the prestige of such a
naked-handed capture? He easily inferred, of
course, that his triumph must be due, in part
at least, to some resemblance to the wolf’s
former master, whose dominance had plainly
been supreme. His only anxiety was as to
how the great wolf might conduct himself
toward Settlement Society in general. Assuredly
nothing could be more lamb-like than the
animal’s present demeanor, but Timmins remembered
the fate of Joe Anderson’s powerful
dog, and had his doubts. He examined Lone
Wolf’s collar, and congratulated himself that
both collar and chain were strong.

It was getting well along in the afternoon
when Timmins and Lone Wolf emerged from
the thick woods into the stumpy pastures and
rough burnt lands that spread back irregularly
263
from the outlying farms. And here, while
crossing a wide pasture known as Smith’s Lots,
an amazing thing befell. Of course Timmins
was not particularly surprised, because his backwoods
philosophizing had long ago led him
to the conclusion that when things get started
happening, they have a way of keeping it up.
Days, weeks, months, glide by without event
enough to ripple the most sensitive memory.
Then the whimsical Fates do something different,
find it interesting, and proceed to do something
else. So, though Timmins had been
accustomed all his life to managing bulls, good-tempered
and bad-tempered alike, and had
never had the ugliest of them presume to turn
upon him, he was not astonished now by the
apparition of Smith’s bull, a wide-horned, carrot-red,
white-faced Hereford, charging down
upon him in thunderous fury from behind a
poplar thicket. In a flash he remembered that
the bull, which was notoriously murderous in
temper, had been turned out into that pasture
to act as guardian to Smith’s flocks. There
was not a tree near big enough for refuge.
There was not a stick big enough for a weapon.
And he could not bring himself to shoot so
valuable a beast as this fine thoroughbred.
“Shucks!” he muttered in deep disgust. “I
264
might ’a’ knowed it!” Dropping Lone Wolf’s
chain, he ran forward, waving his arms and
shouting angrily. But that red onrushing bulk
was quite too dull-witted to understand that it
ought to obey. It was in the mood to charge
an avalanche. Deeply humiliated, Timmins
hopped aside, and reluctantly ran for the
woods, trusting to elude his pursuer by timely
dodging.

Hitherto Lone Wolf had left all cattle severely
alone, having got it somehow into his
head that they were more peculiarly under
man’s protection than the sheep. Now, however,
he saw his duty, and duty is often a very
well-developed concept in the brain of dog and
wolf. His ears flattened, his eyes narrowed to
flaming green slits, his lips wrinkled back till
his long white fangs were clean bared, and
without a sound he hurled himself upon the red
bull’s flank. Looking back over his shoulder,
Timmins saw it all. It was as if all his life
Lone Wolf had been killing bulls, so unerring
was that terrible chopping snap at the great
beast’s throat. Far forward, just behind the
bull’s jaws, the slashing fangs caught. And
Timmins was astounded to see the bull, checked
in mid-rush, plunge staggering forward upon
his knees. From this position he abruptly
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rolled over upon his side, thrown by his own
impetus combined with a dexterous twist of his
opponent’s body. Then Lone Wolf bounded
backward, and stood expectant, ready to repeat
the attack if necessary. But it was not necessary.
Slowly the great red bull arose to his
feet, and stared about him stupidly, the blood
gushing from his throat. Then he swayed and
collapsed. And Lone Wolf, wagging his tail
like a dog, went back to Timmins’ side for congratulations.

The woodsman gazed ruefully at his slain
foe. Then he patted his defender’s head, recovered
the chain with a secure grip, and
said slowly:—

“I reckon, partner, ye did yer dooty as ye
seen it, an’ mebbe I’m beholden to ye fer a hul’
skin, fer that there crittur was sartinly amazin’
ugly an’ spry on his pins. But ye’re goin’ to be
a responsibility some. Ye ain’t no suckin’
lamb to hev aroun’ the house, I’m thinkin’.”

To these remarks, which he judged from
their tone to be approving, Lone Wolf wagged
assent, and the homeward journey was continued.
Timmins went with his head down,
buried in thought. All at once, coming to a
convenient log, he seated himself, and made
Lone Wolf lie down at his feet. Then he took
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out the remaining sandwich,—which he himself,
still shaken from his fall, had no desire to
eat,—and contemplatively, in small fragments,
he fed it to the wolf’s great blood-stained jaws.
At last he spoke, with the finality of one whose
mind is quite made up.

“Partner,” said he, “there ain’t no help for it.
Bill Smith’s a-goin’ to hold me responsible for
the killin’ o’ that there crittur o’ his’n, an’ that
means a pretty penny, it bein’ a thoroughbred,
an’ imported at that. He ain’t never a-goin’ to
believe but what I let you loose on to him a
purpose, jest to save my hide! Shucks! Moreover,
ye may’s well realize y’ain’t popular ’round
these parts; an’ first thing, when I wasn’t lookin’,
somebody’d be a-puttin’ somethin’ onhealthy into
yer vittles, partner! We’ve kind o’ took to each
other, you an’ me; an’ I reckon we’d git on together
fine, me always havin’ me own way, of
course. But there ain’t no help fer it. Ye’re too
hefty a proposition, by long odds, fer a community
like Lost Mountain Settlement. I’m
a-goin’ to write right off to Sillaby an’ Hopkins,
an’ let them have ye back, partner. An’ I
reckon the price they’ll pay’ll be enough to
let me square myself with Bill Smith.”

And thus it came about that, within a couple
of weeks, Lone Wolf and Toomey were once
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more entertaining delighted audiences, while
the settlement of Lost Mountain, with Timmins’
prestige established beyond assault, relapsed
into its uneventful quiet.

The Bear’s Face

CHAPTER I

“There ain’t no denying but what you
give us a great show, Job,” said the barkeeper,
with that air of patronage which befits
the man who presides over and autocratically
controls the varied activities of a saloon in a
Canadian lumber town.

“It is a good show!” assented Job Toomey,
modestly. He leaned up against the bar in
orthodox fashion, just as if his order had been
“whiskey fer mine!” but being a really great
animal trainer, whose eye must be always clear
and his nerve always steady as a rock, his glass
contained nothing stronger than milk and
Vichy.

Fifteen years before, Job Toomey had gone
away with a little travelling menagerie because
he loved wild animals. He had come back
famous, and the town of Grantham Mills, metropolis
of his native county, was proud of him.
He was head of the menagerie of the Sillaby
and Hopkins’ Circus, and trainer of one of the
finest troupes of performing beasts in all
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America. It was a great thing for Grantham
Mills to have had a visit from the Sillaby and
Hopkins’ Circus on its way from one important
centre to another. There had been two great
performances, afternoon and evening. And
now, after the last performance, some of
Toomey’s old-time acquaintances were making
things pleasant for him in the bar of the
Continental.

“I don’t see how ye do it, Job!” said Sanderson,
an old river-man who had formerly trapped
and hunted with Toomey. “I mind ye was
always kind o’ slick an’ understandin’ with the
wild critters; but the way them lions an’
painters an’ bears an’ wolves jest folly yer eye
an’ yer nod, willin’ as so many poodle dogs,
beats me. They seem to like it, too.”

“They do,” said Toomey. “Secret of it is,
I like them; so by an’ by they learn to like me
well enough, an’ try to please me. I make it
worth their while, too. Also, they know I’ll
stand no fooling. Fear an’ love, rightly mixed,
boys—plenty of love, an’ jest enough fear to
keep it from spilin’—that’s a mixture’ll carry
a man far—leastways with animals!”

The barkeeper smiled, and was about to say
the obvious thing, but he was interrupted by
a long, lean-jawed, leather-faced man, captain of
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one of the river tugs, whose eyes had grown
sharp as gimlets with looking out for snags
and sandbanks.

“The finest beast in the whole menagerie,
that big grizzly,” said he, spitting accurately
into a spacious box of sawdust, “I noticed
as how ye didn’t have him in your performance,
Mr. Toomey. Now, I kind o’ thought as how
I’d like to see you put him through his stunts.”

Toomey was silent for a moment. Then,
with a certain reserve in his voice, he answered—

“Oh, he ain’t exactly strong on stunts.”

The leather-faced captain grinned quizzically.

“Which does he go shy on, Mr. Toomey,
the love or the fear?” he asked.

“Both,” said Toomey, shortly. Then his
stern face relaxed, and he laughed good-humoredly.
“Fact is, I think we’ll have to be
sellin’ that there grizzly to some zoölogical
park. He’s kind of bad fer my prestige.”

“How’s that, Job?” asked Sanderson, expectant
of a story.

“Well,” replied Toomey, “to tell you the
truth, boys,—an’ I only say it because I’m here
at home, among friends,—it’s me that’s afraid
of him! An’ he knows it. He’s the only beast
that’s ever been able to make me feel fear—the
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real, deep-down fear. An’ I’ve never been
able to git quit of that ugly notion. I go an’
stand in front o’ his cage; an’ he jest puts that
great face of his up agin the bars an’ stares at
me. An’ I look straight into his eyes, an’ remember
what has passed between us, an’ I feel
afraid still. Yes, it wouldn’t be much use me
tryin’ to train that bear, boys, an’ I’m free to
acknowledge it to you all.”

“Tell us about it, Job!” suggested the barkeeper,
settling his large frame precariously on
the top of a small, high stool.

An urgent chorus of approval came from all
about the bar. Toomey took out his watch
and considered.

“We start away at 5.40 A.M.,” said he. “An’
I must make out to get a wink o’ sleep. But I
reckon I’ve got time enough. As you’ll see,
however, before I git through, the drinks are
on me, so name yer pison, boys. Meanwhile,
you’ll excuse me if I don’t join you this time.
A man kin hold jest about so much Vichy an’
milk, an’ I’ve got my load aboard.

“It was kind of this way,” he continued, when
the barkeeper had performed his functions.
“You see, for nigh ten years after I left Grantham
Mills, I’d stuck closer’n a burr to my
business, till I began to feel I knew ’most all
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there was to know about trainin’ animals.
Men do git that kind of a fool feelin’ sometimes
about lots of things harder than animal-trainin’.
Well, nothin’ would do me but I should go back
to my old business of trappin’ the beasts, only
with one big difference. I wanted to go in fer
takin’ them alive, so as to sell them to menageries
an’ all that sort of thing. An’ it was no
pipe dream, fer I done well at it from the first.
But that’s not here nor there. I was gittin’
tired of it, after a lot o’ travellin’ an’ some lively
kind of scrapes; so I made up my mind to
finish up with a grizzly, an’ then git back to
trainin’, which was what I was cut out fer, after
all.

“Well, I wanted a grizzly; an’ it wasn’t long
before I found one. We were campin’ among
the foothills of the upper end of the Sierra
Nevada range, in northern California. It was
a good prospectin’ ground fer grizzly, an’ we
found lots o’ signs. I wanted one not too big
fer convenience, an’ not so old as to be too set
in his ways an’ too proud to larn. I had three
good men with me, an’ we scattered ourselves
over a big bit o’ ground, lookin’ fer a likely
trail. When I stumbled on to that chap in the
cage yonder, what Captain Bird admires so, I
knew right off he wasn’t what I was after. But
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the queer thing was that he didn’t seem to feel
that way about me. He was after me before I
had time to think of anything jest suitable to
the occasion.”

“Where in thunder was yer gun?” demanded
the river-man.

“That was jest the trouble!” answered
Toomey. “Ye see, I’d stood the gun agin a tree,
in a dry place, while I stepped over a bit o’ boggy
ground, intendin’ to lay down an’ drink out of
a leetle spring. Well, the bear was handier to
that gun than I was. When he come fer me,
I tell ye I didn’t go back fer the gun. I ran
straight up the hill, an’ him too close at my
heels fer convenience. Then I remembered
that a grizzly don’t run his best when he goes
up hill on a slant, so on the slant I went. It
worked, I reckon, fer though I couldn’t say I
gained on him much, it was soothin’ to observe
that he didn’t seem to gain on me.

“Fer maybe well on to three hundred yards
it was a fine race, and I was beginnin’ to wonder
if the bear was gittin’ as near winded as I
was, when slap, I come right out on the crest
of the ridge, which jest ahead o’ me jutted out
in a sort of elbow. What there was on the
other side I couldn’t see, and couldn’t take time
to inquire. I jest had to chance it, hopin’ it might
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be somethin’ less than a thousand foot drop. I
ran straight to the edge, and jest managed to
throw myself flat on my face an’ clutch at the
grasses like mad to keep from pitchin’ clean out
into space. It was a drop, all right,—two
hundred foot or more o’ sheer cliff.

“An’ the bear was not thirty yards behind
me.

“I looked at the bear, as I laid there clutchin’
the grass-roots. Then I looked down over the
edge. I didn’t feel frightened exactly, so fur;
didn’t know enough, maybe, to be frightened of
any animal. But jest at this point I was mighty
anxious. You’ll believe, then, it was kind o’
good to me to see, right below, maybe twenty
foot down, a little pocket of a ledge full o’ grass
an’ blossomin’ weeds. There was no time to
calculate. I could let myself drop, an’ maybe,
if I had luck, I could stop where I fell, in the
pocket, instead of bouncin’ out an’ down, to be
smashed into flinders. Or, on the other hand,
I could stay where I was, an’ be ripped into
leetle frayed ravellin’s by the bear; an’ that
would be in about three seconds, at the rate he
was comin’. Well, I let myself over the edge
till I jest hung by the fingers, an’ then dropped,
smooth as I could, down the rock face, kind of
clutchin’ at every leetle knob as I went to check
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the fall. I lit true in the pocket, an’ I lit pretty
hard, as ye might know, but not hard enough
to knock the wits out o’ me, the grass an’ weeds
bein’ fairly soft. An’ clawin’ out desperate with
both hands, I caught, an’ stayed put. Some
dirt an’ stones come down, kind o’ smart, on my
head, an’ when they’d stopped I looked up.
There was the bear, his big head stuck down,
with one ugly paw hangin’ over beside it, starin’
at me. I was so tickled at havin’ fooled him, I
didn’t think o’ the hole I was in, but sez to him,
saucy as you please, ‘Thou art so near, an’ yet
so far.’ At this he give a grunt, which might
have meant anything, an’ disappeared.

“‘Ye know enough to know when you’re
euchred,’ says I. An’ then I turned to considerin’
the place I was in, an’ how I was to git
out of it.

“To git out of it, indeed! The more I considered,
the more I wondered how I’d ever
managed to stay in it. It wasn’t bigger than
three foot by two, or two an’ a half, maybe, in
width, out from the cliff-face. On my left, as I
sat with my back agin the cliff, a wall o’ rock
ran out straight, closin’ off the pocket to that
side clean an’ sharp, though with a leetle kind
of a roughness, so to speak—nothin’ more than
a roughness—which I calculated might do, on
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a pinch, fer me to hang on to if I wanted to try
to climb round to the other side. I didn’t want
to jest yet, bein’ still shaky from the drop, which,
as things turned out, was just as well for me.

“To my right a bit of a ledge, maybe six or
eight inches wide, ran off along the cliff-face
for a matter of ten or a dozen feet, then slanted
up, an’ widened out agin to another little pocket,
or shelf like, of bare rock, about level with the
top o’ my head. From this shelf a narrow crack,
not more than two or three inches wide, kind o’
zigzagged away till it reached the top o’ the
cliff, perhaps forty foot off. It wasn’t much,
but it looked like somethin’ I could git a good
finger-hold into, if only I could work my way
along to that leetle shelf. I was figurin’ hard
on this, an’ had about made up my mind to try
it, an’ was reachin’ out, in fact, to start, when I
stopped sudden.

“A good, healthy-lookin’ rattler, his diamond-pattern
back bright in the sun, come out of the
crevice an’ stopped on the shelf to take a look
at the weather.

“It struck me right off that he was on his
way down to this pocket o’ mine, which was
maybe his favorite country residence. I didn’t
like one bit the idee o’ his comin’ an’ findin’
me there, when I’d never been invited. I felt
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right bad about it, you bet; and I’d have got
away if I could. But not bein’ able to, there
was nothin’ fer me to do but try an’ make myself
onpleasant. I grabbed up a handful o’ dirt
an’ threw it at the rattler. It scattered all ’round
him, of course, an’ some of it hit him. Whereupon
he coiled himself like a flash, with head
an’ tail both lifted, an’ rattled indignantly.
There was nothin’ big enough to do him any
damage with, an’ I was mighty oneasy lest he
might insist on comin’ home to see who his
impident caller was. But I kept on flingin’
dirt as long as there was any handy, while he
kept on rattlin’, madder an’ madder. Then I
stopped, to think what I’d better do next. I
was jest startin’ to take off my boot, to hit him
with as he come along the narrow ledge, when
suddenly he uncoiled an’ slipped back into the
crevice.

“Either it was very hot, or I’d been a bit
more anxious than I’d realized, for I felt my
forehead wet with sweat; I drew my sleeve
across it, all the time keeping my eyes glued
on the spot where the rattler’d disappeared.
Jest then, seemed to me, I felt a breath on the
back o’ my neck. A kind o’ cold chill crinkled
down my backbone, an’ I turned my face ’round
sharp.
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