hen the fire had sunk to dull embers, and the stars were peeping
shyly in the open flap of their tent, she whispered in his ear:

"You mustn't think I'm complaining or lonesome or anything, Billy-boy,
when I make remarks like I did to-day. I love you a heap, and I'd be
happy anywhere with you. And I'm really and truly at home in the
wilderness. Only--only sometimes I have a funny feeling; as if I were
afraid. It seems silly, but this is all so different from our little
cabin. I look up at these big mountains, and they seem to be
scowling--as if we were trespassers or something."

"I know." Bill drew her close to him. "But that's just mood. I've
felt that same sensation up here--a foolish, indefinable foreboding.
All the out-of-the-way places of the earth produce that effect, if one
is at all imaginative. It's the bigness of everything, and the eternal
stillness. I've caught myself listening--when I knew there was nothing
to hear. Makes a fellow feel like a small boy left by himself in some
big, gloomy building--awesome. Sure, I know it. It would be hard on
the nerves to live here always. But we're only after a stake--then all
the pleasant places of the earth are open to us; with that little, old
log house up by Pine River for a refuge whenever we get tired of the
world at large. Cuddle up and go to sleep. You're a dead-game sport,
or you'd have hollered long ago."

And, next day, to Hazel, sitting by watching him swing the heavy,
double-bitted ax on the foundation logs of their winter home, it all
seemed foolish, that heaviness of heart which sometimes assailed her.
She was perfectly happy. In each of them the good, red blood of youth
ran full and strong, offering ample security against illness. They had
plenty of food. In a few brief months Bill would wrest a sack of gold
from the treasure house of the North, and they would journey home by
easy stages. Why should she brood? It was sheer folly--a mere ebb of
spirit.

Fortune favored them to the extent of letting the October storms remain
in abeyance until Bill finished his cabin, with a cavernous fireplace
of rough stone at one end. He split planks for a door out of raw
timber, and graced his house with two windows--one of four small panes
of glass carefully packed in their bedding all the way from Hazleton,
the other a two-foot square of deerskin scraped parchment thin; opaque
to the vision, it still permitted light to enter. The floor was pla