rich odour of the cedar
swamp; the cry of the loon from the water; the flaming crane in the
fishing-boat; the fisherman, spear in hand, staring into the dark waters
tinged with sombre red; the voice of a lonely settler keeping time to
the ping of the axe as, lengthening out his day to nightly weariness, he
felled a tree; river-drivers' camps spotted along the shore; huge cribs
or rafts which had swung down the great stream for scores of miles, the
immense oars motionless, the little houses on the timbers blinking with
light; and from cheerful raftsmen coming the old familiar song of the
rivers:

"En roulant, ma boule roulant,
En roulant ma boule!"

Not once had Charley Steele turned his head as the horse sped on. His
face was kept straight along the line of the road; he seemed not to see
or to hear, to be unresponsive to sound or scene. The monocle at his eye
was like a veil to hide the soul, a defence against inquiry, itself
the unceasing question, a sort of battery thrown forward, a kind of
field-casemate for a lonely besieged spirit.

It was full of suggestion. It might have been the glass behind which
showed some mediaeval relic, the body of some ancient Egyptian king
whose life had been spent in doing wonders and making signs--the
primitive, anthropomorphic being. He might have been a stone man, for
any motion that he made. Yet looking at him closely you would have seen
discontent in the eye, a kind of glaze of the sardonic over the whole
face.

What is the good! the face asked. What is there worth doing? it said.
What a limitless futility! it urged, fain to be contradicted too, as the
grim melancholy of the figure suggested.

"To be an animal and soak in the world," he thought to himself--"that is
natural; and the unnatural is civilisation, and the cheap adventure of
the mind into fields of baffling speculation, lighted by the flickering
intelligences of dead speculators, whose seats we have bought in the
stock-exchange of mortality, and exhaust our lives in paying for. To
eat, to drink, to lie fallow, indifferent to what comes after, to roam
like the deer, and to fight like the tiger--"

He came to a dead stop in his thinking. "To fight like the tiger!" He
turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were
singing:

"And when a man in the fight goes down,
Why, we will carry him home!"

"To fight like the tiger!" Ravage--the struggle to possess f