ire-scald" in the woods at the lonely cabin in the cove, but it gave
him so keen a pain that he would not look again. The trail was slippery
and several times he had to stop to let his horse rest and to slow the
beating of his own heart. But the sunlight leaped gladly from wet leaf
to wet leaf until the trees looked decked out for unseen fairies, and
the birds sang as though there was nothing on earth but joy for all its
creatures, and the blue sky smiled above as though it had never bred a
lightning flash or a storm. Hale dreaded the last spur before the little
Gap was visible, but he hurried up the steep, and when he lifted his
apprehensive eyes, the gladness of the earth was as nothing to the
sudden joy in his own heart. The big Pine stood majestic, still
unscathed, as full of divinity and hope to him as a rainbow in an
eastern sky. Hale dropped his reins, lifted one hand to his dizzy head,
let his transit to the ground, and started for it on a run. Across the
path lay a great oak with a white wound running the length of its mighty
body, from crest to shattered trunk, and over it he leaped, and like a
child caught his old friend in both arms. After all, he was not alone.
One friend would be with him till death, on that border-line between the
world in which he was born and the world he had tried to make his own,
and he could face now the old one again with a stouter heart. There
it lay before him with its smoke and fire and noise and slumbering
activities just awakening to life again. He lifted his clenched fist
toward it:

"You got ME once," he muttered, "but this time I'll get YOU." He turned
quickly and decisively--there would be no more delay. And he went back
and climbed over the big oak that, instead of his friend, had fallen
victim to the lightning's kindly whim and led his horse out into the
underbrush. As he approached within ten yards of the path, a metallic
note rang faintly on the still air the other side of the Pine and down
the mountain. Something was coming up the path, so he swiftly knotted
his bridle-reins around a sapling, stepped noiselessly into the path
and noiselessly slipped past the big tree where he dropped to his
knees, crawled forward and lay flat, peering over the cliff and down
the winding trail. He had not long to wait. A riderless horse filled the
opening in the covert of leaves that swallowed up the path. It was gray
and he knew it as he knew the saddle as his old enemy's--Dave. Dave ha