ifficult for Philip to restrain the joy his words
produced, which, coming from the lips of Jeanne's father, lifted him
suddenly into a paradise of hope. For many reasons he had come to
expect a none too warm reception at Fort o' God; he had looked ahead to
the place with a grim sort of fear, scarcely definable; and here
Jeanne's father was opening his arms to him. Pierre was unapproachable;
Jeanne herself was a mystery, filling him alternately with hope and
despair; D'Arcambal had accepted him as a son. He could find no words
adequate to his emotion; none that could describe his own happiness,
unless it was in a bold avowal of his love for the girl he had saved.
And this his good sense told him not to make, at the present moment.

"Any man would have done as much for your daughter," he said at last,
"and I am happy that I was the fortunate one to render her assistance."

"You are wrong," said D'Arcambal, taking him by the arm. "You are one
out of a thousand. It takes a MAN to go through the Big Thunder and
come out at the other end alive. I know of only one other who has done
that in the last twenty years, and that other is Henry d'Arcambal
himself. We three, you, Jeanne, and I, have alone triumphed over those
monsters of death. All others have died. It seems like a strange
pointing of the hand of God."

Philip trembled.

"We three!" he exclaimed.

"We three," said the old man, "and for that reason you are a part of
Fort o' God."

He led Philip deeper into the great room, and Philip saw that almost
all the space along the walls of the huge room was occupied by shelves
upon shelves of books, masses of papers, piles of magazines
shoulder-high, scores of maps and paintings. The massive table was
covered with books; there were piles on smaller tables; chairs, and the
floor itself, covered with the skins of a score of wild beasts, were
littered with them. At the far end of the room he saw deeper and darker
shelves, where gleamed faintly in the lamplight row upon row of vials
and bottles and strange instruments of steel and glass. A scientist in
the wilderness--a student exiled in a desolation! These were the
thoughts that leaped into his mind, and he knew that in this room
Jeanne had been created; that here, between these centuries-old walls,
amid an environment of strange silence, of whispering age, her visions
of the world had come. Here, separated from all her kind, God, Nature,
and a father had made her of their h