p, and pitied them. So many miles daily in a dreary waste of snow;
nights when the frost thrust its keen-pointed lances into their tired
bodies; food cooked with numbed fingers; the dismal howling of wolves;
white frost and clinging icicles upon their beards as they trudged
across trackless areas; and over all that awesome hush which she had
learned to dread--breathless, brooding silence. Gold madness or trail
madness, or simply adventurous unrest? She could not say. She knew
only that a certain type of man found pleasure in such mad
undertakings, bucked hard trails and plunged headlong into vast
solitudes, and permitted no hardship nor danger to turn him back.

Bill was tinged with that madness for unbeaten trails. But surely when
a man mated, and had a home and all that makes home desirable, he
should forsake the old ways? Once when she found him studying the map,
traversing a route with his forefinger and muttering to himself, she
had a quick catch at her heart--as if hers were already poised to go.
And she could not follow him. Once she had thought to do that, and
gloried in the prospect. But his trail, his wilderness trail, and his
trail gait, were not for any woman to follow. It was too big a job for
any woman. And she could not let him go alone. He might never come
back.

Not so long since she and Kitty Brooks had been discussing a certain
couple who had separated. Vesta Lorimer sat by, listening.

"How could they help but fail in mutual flight?" the Lorimer girl had
demanded. "An eagle mated to a domestic fowl!"

And, watching Bill stare at the map, his body there but the soul of him
tramping the wild woods, she recalled Vesta Lorimer's characterization
of that other pair. Surely this man of hers was of the eagle brood.
But there, in her mind, the simile ended.

In early March came a telegram from Whitey Lewis saying that he had
staked the claims, both placer and lode; that he was bound out by the
Telegraph Trail to file at Hazleton. Bill showed her the
message--wired from Station Six.

"I wish I could have been in on it--that was some trip," he said--and
there was a trace of discontent in his tone. "I don't fancy somebody
else pawing my chestnuts out of the coals for me. It was sure a man's
job to cross the Klappan in the dead of winter."

The filing completed, there was ample work in the way of getting out
and whipsawing timber to keep the five men busy till spring--the five
who were o