t. A battle against such odds would be madness now. So, without taking
the treatment, he turned and swung along the bench away from the direction
taken by the stranger--the first time since his cubhood that he had
declined to fight.

That was a turning-point in Wahb's life. If he had followed up the
stranger he would have found the miserable little craven trembling,
cowering, in an agony of terror, behind a log in a natural trap, a
walled-in glade only fifty yards away, and would surely have crushed him.
Had he even taken the bath, his strength and courage would have been
renewed, and if not, then at least in time he would have met his foe, and
his after life would have been different. But he had turned. This was the
fork in the trail, but he had no means of knowing it.

[Illustration]

He limped along, skirting the lower spurs of the Shoshones, and soon came
on that horrid smell that he had known for years, but never followed up or
understood. It was right in his road, and he traced it to a small, barren
ravine that was strewn over with skeletons and dark objects, and Wahb, as
he passed, smelled a smell of many different animals, and knew by its
quality that they were lying dead in this treeless, grassless hollow. For
there was a cleft in the rocks at the upper end, whence poured a deadly
gas; invisible but heavy, it filled the little gulch like a brimming poison
bowl, and at the lower end there was a steady overflow. But Wahb knew only
that the air that poured from it as he passed made him dizzy and sleepy,
and repelled him, so that he got quickly away from it and was glad once
more to breathe the piny wind.

Once Wahb decided to retreat, it was all too easy to do so next time; and
the result worked double disaster. For, since the big stranger was allowed
possession of the sulphur-spring, Wahb felt that he would rather not go
there. Sometimes when he came across the traces of his foe, a spurt of his
old courage would come back. He would rumble that thunder-growl as of old,
and go painfully lumbering along the trail to settle the thing right then
and there. But he never overtook the mysterious giant, and his rheumatism,
growing worse now that he was barred from the cure, soon made him daily
less capable of either running or fighting.

Sometimes Wahb would sense his foe's approach when he was in a bad place
for fighting, and, without really running, he would yield to a wish to be
on a better footing, where he wo