light breeze had died down
for a moment, and Aldous heard the old mountaineer's reply as it floated
faintly back to him through the forest. Continuing to hold his pistol, he
went on, this time more swiftly.

MacDonald did not signal again. The moon was climbing rapidly into the sky,
and with each passing minute the night was becoming lighter. He had gone
half a mile when he stopped again and signalled softly. MacDonald's voice
answered, so near that for an instant the automatic flashed in the
moonlight. Aldous stepped out where the trail had widened into a small open
spot. Half a dozen paces from him, in the bright flood of the moon, stood
Donald MacDonald.

The night, the moon-glow, the tense attitude of his waiting added to the
weirdness of the picture which the old wanderer of the mountains made as
Aldous faced him. MacDonald was tall; some trick of the night made him
appear almost unhumanly tall as he stood in the centre of that tiny moonlit
amphitheatre. His head was bowed a little, and his shoulders drooped a
little, for he was old. A thick, shaggy beard fell in a silvery sheen over
his breast. His hair, gray as the underwing of the owl whose note he
forged, straggled in uncut disarray from under the drooping rim of a
battered and weatherworn hat. His coat was of buckskin, and it was short at
the sleeves--four inches too short; and the legs of his trousers were cut
off between the knees and the ankles, giving him a still greater appearance
of height.

In the crook of his arm MacDonald held a rifle, a strange-looking,
long-barrelled rifle of a type a quarter of a century old. And Donald
MacDonald, in the picture he made, was like his gun, old and gray and
ghostly, as if he had risen out of some graveyard of the past to warm
himself in the yellow splendour of the moon. But in the grayness and
gauntness of him there was something that was mightier than the strength of
youth. He was alert. In the crook of his arm there was caution. His eyes
were as keen as the eyes of an animal. His shoulders spoke of a strength
but little impaired by the years. Ghostly gray beard, ghostly gray hair,
haunting eyes that gleamed, all added to the strange and weird
impressiveness of the man as he stood before Aldous. And when he spoke, his
voice had in it the deep, low, cavernous note of a partridge's drumming.

"I'm glad you've come, Aldous," he said. "I've been waiting ever since the
train come in. I was afraid you'd go to the cabi