d fallen asleep. This night he found
different. Though he was tired, sleep would not soon come. The
wilderness, the mountains, the park, the camp--all seemed to have lost
something. Even the darkness seemed empty. And when at length Dale fell
asleep it was to be troubled by restless dreams.

Up with the keen-edged, steely-bright dawn, he went at the his tasks
with the springy stride of the deer-stalker.

At the end of that strenuous day, which was singularly full of the old
excitement and action and danger, and of new observations, he was bound
to confess that no longer did the chase suffice for him.

Many times on the heights that day, with the wind keen in his face, and
the vast green billows of spruce below him, he had found that he was
gazing without seeing, halting without object, dreaming as he had never
dreamed before.

Once, when a magnificent elk came out upon a rocky ridge and, whistling
a challenge to invisible rivals, stood there a target to stir any
hunter's pulse, Dale did not even raise his rifle. Into his ear just
then rang Helen's voice: "Milt Dale, you are no Indian. Giving yourself
to a hunter's wildlife is selfish. It is wrong. You love this lonely
life, but it is not work. Work that does not help others is not a real
man's work."

From that moment conscience tormented him. It was not what he loved,
but what he ought to do, that counted in the sum of good achieved in the
world. Old Al Auchincloss had been right. Dale was wasting strength and
intelligence that should go to do his share in the development of the
West. Now that he had reached maturity, if through his knowledge of
nature's law he had come to see the meaning of the strife of men for
existence, for place, for possession, and to hold them in contempt, that
was no reason why he should keep himself aloof from them, from some work
that was needed in an incomprehensible world.

Dale did not hate work, but he loved freedom. To be alone, to live with
nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb
and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty
interests of men--this had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys,
riders, sheep-herders, farmers--these toiled on from one place and
one job to another for the little money doled out to them. Nothing
beautiful, nothing significant had ever existed in that for him. He had
worked as a boy at every kind of range-work, and of all that humdrum
waste of effort h