y, Keeko," he went on, with real seriousness,
"I couldn't quit this camp here without setting up a monument. Do you
know why?"

Keeko sat herself on the old tree-trunk. She made no reply. She simply
waited for whatever he had to say.

"It's to commemorate something," he went on quickly, gazing out over the
canyon. "I've found something I've been looking for--years. And I just
didn't know I was looking for it. Well, that old moose found it for me.
So I'm going to set his skull up, with his proud antlers a-top of it, in
the best and highest place I can set it, so his old dead eye sockets can
just look out over the territory he reigned over till Fate reckoned it
was time to set a human queen reigning in his stead. I don't guess he'll
worry about things. He'll just feel proud that it wasn't a feller of his
own sex ever beat him, and, if I know a thing, he'll feel sort of
content and pleased watching over things for us."

The whim of the man, intended to be so light, was full of real feeling.
Keeko was torn between tears and laughter. In the end she trusted
herself only to a simple question.

"Where are you going to fix him up?" she demanded.

The spell was broken. Marcel promptly became the man of action. He
pointed at the gnarled and broken head of a stunted tree growing at the
very edge of the canyon, with its battered crest reaching out at a
perilous angle over the abyss.

"At the head of that," he said, "so he can watch for your coming up out
of the south, and--tell me about it."

"But----!"

A sickening apprehension had seized upon Keeko as she contemplated the
overhang of the tree. It was almost at right angles to the face of the
cliff. It projected out nearly thirty feet, and below--Her woman's heart
could not repress a shudder at the thought of the three hundred feet
drop to the rocky shoals in the waters below.

"You don't mean that?" she demanded a little desperately.

Marcel nodded.

"It's plumb easy."

There was no showiness, no bravado. Marcel had no thought to dazzle the
girl. His purpose was a simple, boyish act.

He moved off into the forest while Keeko looked after him. From her
heart she could have begged him to abandon, or modify his plan. But she
refrained, and, somehow, sick at the thought of his purpose, she still
realized a thrill at the object of it all. She looked at the roots of
the overhanging tree and shuddered. They were partly torn out of the
ground.

Marcel returned with his