s he entered. He stood among them an instant,
warming his hands.

They had few words at first. The lesson of silence is taught deeply and
sure in the North. The hostess went to her kitchen to order the man's
supper, the townsmen drew at their pipes.

"Well, Bill," one of them asked at last, "how's everything with you?"

It was not the usual how-d'ye-do of greeting. The words were spoken in
actual question, as if they had special significance.

The man straightened, turning sober eyes. "Nothing startling yet," he
replied.

"In after supplies?"

"Yes--and my mail."

There was a long pause. The conversation was apparently ended. Bill
turned to go. A stranger spoke from the other side of the fire.

"How's Grizzly River?" he asked. Bill turned to him with a smile.

"Getting higher and higher. All the streams are up. You know that
bald-faced bay of Fargo's?"

Fargo was the Bradleyburg merchant, and the stranger knew the
horse,--one of the little band that, after the frontier custom,
Fargo kept to rent. "Yes, I remember him."

"Well, I've got him this fall. You know he's a yellow cuss."

The stranger nodded. In this little community the dumb brutes were
almost as well known as the human inhabitants. The meaning was wholly
plain to him too, and the term did not apply to the horse's color.
Yellow, on the frontier, means just one thing: the most damning and
unforgivable thing of all. When one is yellow he gives up easily, he
dares not lift his arms to fight, and the wilderness claims him quickly.
"There's a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford,"
Bill went on. "All the horses got through but Baldy, and he could have
made it easy if he'd tried. But what did he do but just sit back on his
haunches in the mud, like an old man in a chair, his head up and his
front legs in his lap, and just give up? Quite a sight--that horse
sitting in the mud. I had to snag him out."

The others smiled, but none of them with the brilliance of the
story-teller himself. The wilderness picture--with the cowardly horse
sitting in the mud--was again before his eyes; and none of the
hardship of the journey could cost him his joy in it. Bill Bronson was
no longer just a dim form on the twilight hilltop. The lamplight showed
him plain. In this circle of townspeople he was a man to notice twice.

The forests had done well by him. Like the spruce themselves he had
grown straight and tall, but his