t. The waking dreams were vaguer, too, and more absurd.

He still tended the fire under the kettle--but he laughed scornfully at
the foolish need of keeping his face always in the shadow. Then
suddenly he dropped down close to the dark earth, let the cup splash
into the bucket, and thrust forward his rifle.

His ears had caught a sound which might have been a raccoon stirring in
the brush--or a fox slipping covertly through the fallen hemlock top.

But there was no repetition, so he laughed again and with the first
pallid hint of dawn on the ridges he shook the shoulder of his sleeping
companion. Then he himself sank down in the heavy torpor of exhaustion
and drunkenness.

At the same time, because it would soon be light, the living creature
which had made the sound began creeping away, and in doing so it
avoided any other alarms. It was the figure of a man who had learned
what he came there to determine.

When Lone Stacy plodded up to his still-house some hours later, he
exchanged nods with the squat mountaineer whom he found waiting.

"Whar's Turner?" was his brief inquiry and the reply matched it in
taciturnity. "In thar--a-layin' drunk."

The father went over and looked scowlingly down at the prostrate figure
stretched awkwardly in open-mouthed stupor.

"I reckon," he announced succinctly, "thar hain't nothin' fer hit but
ter suffer him ter sleep hit off."

With the toe of his boot Lone Stacy stirred the insensate body which
sprawled there; all its youthful vitality stilled into grotesque
stagnation. But when the hired man, Lee, was out of sight the bearded
face twitched with a spasm of distress.

Its eyes traveled in a silent pathos from the sight of sagging jaw and
hunched shoulders to the unresponsive majesty of the calm hills as if
beseeching comfort there. In his only son's spirit had seemed to burn a
fire of promise which even he could not understand. Was that fire to be
quenched into the stale ashes of habitual drunkenness?

A groan rumbled in his throat.

Yet, had he remembered his Scriptures, Samson, the Mighty, had
surrendered in his moment of weakness to the allurements and the shears
of Delilah! Afterward, he had pulled down the pillars of the temple.

These hills that had stood upright in days when the Alps and the
Himalayas had not yet stirred in conception, looked down placid, and
unsympathetic. Perhaps the eternal spirit of the range was not ashamed
of this erring child, asleep on its