friendship, for he had had hunter friends, but love, perhaps
of a sweetheart, surely love of a daughter.

For the rest the old trapper was glad to see the last of habitations,
and of men, and of the railroad. Slingerland hated that great,
shining steel band of progress connecting East and West. Every ringing
sledge-hammer blow had sung out the death-knell of the trapper's
calling. This railroad spelled the end of the wilderness. What one group
of greedy men had accomplished others would imitate; and the grass of
the plains would be burned, the forests blackened, the fountains dried
up in the valleys, and the wild creatures of the mountains driven and
hunted and exterminated. The end of the buffalo had come--the end of the
Indian was in sight--and that of the fur-bearing animal and his hunter
must follow soon with the hurrying years.

Slingerland hated the railroad, and he could not see as Neale did, or
any of the engineers or builders. This old trapper had the vision of
the Indian--that far-seeing eye cleared by distance and silence, and
the force of the great, lonely hills. Progress was great, but nature
undespoiled was greater. If a race could not breed all stronger men,
through its great movements, it might better not breed any, for the
bad over-multiplied the good, and so their needs magnified into greed.
Slingerland saw many shining bands of steel across the plains and
mountains, many stations and hamlets and cities, a growing and marvelous
prosperity from timber, mines, farms, and in the distant end--a gutted
West.

He made his first camp on a stream watering a valley twenty miles from
the railroad. There were Indian tracks on the trails. But he had nothing
to fear from Indians. That night, though all was starry and silent
around him as he lay, he still held the insupportable feeling.

Next day he penetrated deeper into the foothills, and soon he had gained
the fastnesses of the mountains. No longer did he meet trails except
those of deer and wildcat and bear. And so day after day he drove his
burros, climbing and descending the rocky ways, until he had penetrated
to the very heart of the great wild range.

In all his roaming over untrodden lands he had never come into such a
wild place. No foot, not--even an Indian's, had ever desecrated this
green valley with its clear, singing stream, its herds of tame deer, its
curious beaver, its pine-covered slopes, its looming, gray, protective
peaks. And at last he w