he light wind that whispered over the
snowy stretches of rolling meadowlands. For a long time Terry stood
facing toward the invisible village, his face moody and inscrutable.
As the sound of the bells died away he shook off the spell with
conscious, humorous effort and picking up his rifle and the fox he
went into the thicket to secure and adjust his snowshoes.

Ignoring paths and sleighroads he made his way toward the town. The
crisp pine-laden air charged his muscles with exuberant excess of the
fine energy of youth and he made his way swiftly across the sparkling
snow that blanketed the gentle landscape, through the thickets of
evergreens and across the tiny, ice-edged creeks that flowed in swift
escape from winter's frozen grip.

Keen-eyed, he stopped a moment in study of a group of pheasants that
huddled in a clump of underbrush. They played possum till he passed
on. A rabbit, reared up in nervous-nosed inquiry, watched him
furtively as he approached the rock behind which it had vainly sought
concealment. Terry laughed at its ridiculous plight.

"You'd better improve your strategy, you young scamp, or you'll wind
up in the pot of some one who hunts rabbits!"

He watched its jumpy flight into a distant copse of young pines, then
went on swiftly. In an hour he paused at the top of a last steep
grade. Lake Champlain stretched her flat-frozen bosom to the north and
south of him. The more level timbered areas of the opposite shore were
broken here and there by clearings in which white farm houses and red
barns nestled like doll houses.

At the foot of the slope directly beneath him a village lay primly
along the lake shore. It was a square-built town, its limits almost
rectangular, its breadth and width checkered into exact squares by
wide, straight streets. It was an old town: a score of its flat-roofed
structures had been built while the Mohawks still guarded the Western
Gate of the Long House, and many of the great, old-fashioned homes had
stood when Ethan Allen strutted through its streets.

It was not a snug little town, there was no air of hospitality to
encourage strangers to tarry within its gates, but seemed to promise
"value received" for any who came, paid their way and attended
strictly to their own affairs.

Thus Terry saw the town in which he had been born and had spent all
of his twenty-six years except the four at Princeton. He tarried, his
eyes fixed upon the cemetery which limited the eastern e