.
In all else there remained nothing in common, unless it were that
common asset of all pioneers, a sturdy courage. They certainly lacked
nothing of this. But whereas the courage of their predecessors,
judging them by all historical records, in quality belonged largely to
the more brutal side of life, these men had no such inspiration. Their
calling was something in the nature of a passionate craving for the
exercise of wits and instincts in a hard field where the creatures of
the wild meet the human upon almost equal terms.

Isolation was nothing new to these men. The remotenesses of the back
world had been their life for years. They understood its every mood,
and met them with nerves in perfect tune. The mountains filled their
whole outlook. They desired nothing better, nothing more.

Yet it seemed strange that this should be. For the Padre had not
always lived beyond the fringes of civilization. He was a man of
education, a man of thought and even culture. These things must have
been obvious to the most casual observer. In Buck's case it was easier
to understand. He had known no other life than this. And yet he, too,
might well have been expected to look askance at a future lost to all
those things which he knew to lay beyond. Was he not at the threshold
of life? Were not his veins thrilling with the rich, red tide of
youth? Were not all those instincts which go to make up the sum of
young human life as much a part of him as of those others who haunted
the banks of Yellow Creek? The whole scheme was surely unusual. The
Padre's instinct was to roam deeper and deeper into the wild, and
Buck, offered his release from its wondrous thrall, had refused it.

Thus they embraced this new home. The vast and often decaying timbers,
hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old
associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained
within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and
worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored
men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house,
whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued,
and the sentence of life and death had been handed out with scant
regard for justice. Then there were the ruined walls of the
common-room, where the fighting men had caroused and slept. The scenes
of frightful orgies held in this place were easy to conjure. All these
things counted in a manner