ttle, rustling, whispered sounds of living things in the
thicket, the silence and the darkness and the savagery.

He knew perfectly the tone and spirit of these waste places: their
might, their malevolence, their sadness, their eternal beauty. He hated
them and yet he loved them, too. He had felt their hospitality, yet he
knew that often they rose in the still night and slew their guests.
They crushed the weak, but they lent their own strength to the strong.
And Bill felt that he was face to face with them as never before.

He was going to plumb their secret places,--not only for the missing
man, but for the lost mine he had sought so long. He must not only
fight his own battles, but he had in his charge a helpless, tender thing
of whom his body must be a shield. Never, it seemed to him, had he met
the wilderness night in just this mood,--threatening, vaguely
sinister, tremulous and throbbing with impending drama.

"You've got something planned for me, haven't you?" he asked his forest
gods. "You've got your trap all set, and you're going to test me as
never before. And Heaven give me strength to meet that test!"

At that instant he started and looked up. The stars were obscured, the
firelight died swiftly in unfathomable darkness, the tops of the spruce
were lost in gloom. A flake of wet snow had fallen and struck his hand.

* * * * *

All night long the storm raged over the spruce forest; lashing rain that
beat and roared on the cabin roof, then the unutterable silence of
falling snow. The camp fire hissed and went out, the tent sagged with
the load, the horses were wet and miserable in the glade below.
Virginia slept fitfully, waking often to listen to the clamor of the
storm, then falling into troubled dreams. Bill lay at the tent mouth
for long hours, staring into the darkness.

In the morning the face of the wilderness was changed. Every bough,
every spruce needle, every little grass blade had its load of snow. The
streams were higher, a cold and terrible beauty dwelt in the forest.
The sky was still full of snow, dark flakes against the gray sky, and
the clouds were sullen and heavy. Bill rose before daylight to build
the fire at the tent mouth.

This was no work for tenderfeet, striking a blaze in the snow-covered
grass. But Bill knew the exact course to pursue. He knew just how to
lay his kindling, to protect the blaze from the wind, to thrust a
fragment of burning candle under the shavin