had not taken kindly to farming or sheep-raising or
monotonous home toil, and for twelve years he had lived in the forest,
with only infrequent visits to Pine and Show Down and Snowdrop. This
wandering forest life of his did not indicate that he did not care for
the villagers, for he did care, and he was welcome everywhere, but
that he loved wild life and solitude and beauty with the primitive
instinctive force of a savage.
And on this night he had stumbled upon a dark plot against the only one
of all the honest white people in that region whom he could not call a
friend.
"That man Beasley!" he soliloquized. "Beasley--in cahoots with Snake
Anson!... Well, he was right. Al Auchincloss is on his last legs. Poor
old man! When I tell him he'll never believe ME, that's sure!"
Discovery of the plot meant to Dale that he must hurry down to Pine.
"A girl--Helen Rayner--twenty years old," he mused. "Beasley wants her
made off with.... That means--worse than killed!"
Dale accepted facts of life with that equanimity and fatality acquired
by one long versed in the cruel annals of forest lore. Bad men worked
their evil just as savage wolves relayed a deer. He had shot wolves for
that trick. With men, good or bad, he had not clashed. Old women and
children appealed to him, but he had never had any interest in girls.
The image, then, of this Helen Rayner came strangely to Dale; and he
suddenly realized that he had meant somehow to circumvent Beasley, not
to befriend old Al Auchincloss, but for the sake of the girl. Probably
she was already on her way West, alone, eager, hopeful of a future home.
How little people guessed what awaited them at a journey's end! Many
trails ended abruptly in the forest--and only trained woodsmen could
read the tragedy.
"Strange how I cut across country to-day from Spruce Swamp," reflected
Dale. Circumstances, movements, usually were not strange to him. His
methods and habits were seldom changed by chance. The matter, then, of
his turning off a course out of his way for no apparent reason, and
of his having overheard a plot singularly involving a young girl, was
indeed an adventure to provoke thought. It provoked more, for Dale grew
conscious of an unfamiliar smoldering heat along his veins. He who had
little to do with the strife of men, and nothing to do with anger, felt
his blood grow hot at the cowardly trap laid for an innocent girl.
"Old Al won't listen to me," pondered Dale. "An' even
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