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

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

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

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

It had had a glorious past, this little city lost in the northern
reaches of the Selkirks. In the man's own boyhood it had been one of
the flourishing gold camps of the North; and miners had come from all
over the continent to wash the gravel of its streams.