t ever downward until they pressed to the very edge of the channel
that held the waters of the Tepee fifty weeks of the year.

It was evening. Clear as lines on a white sheet the woods on the other
side stood out in the dustless air against the flaming sky. The wide
band of water that intervened gleamed in the setting sun, scarce
revealing the existence of a current. Save for the low chatter of
nesting birds and the gentle gurgle of water beneath the bank there was
not a sound. The wind was against the camp. For all the solitary man
could hear he might have been the only human within the northland.

About him was a furtiveness of the wilds, not guilty but protective.
In such surroundings he had been born, there he had spent most of his
days. You could read it in the crouch, the quiet, unwasted movements,
the unconscious attitudes.

His face told much of his story. Those bright, darting eyes, crooked
though they were, missed nothing; those sudden spaces of
motionlessness, the peculiar, utterly still tilt of the head, were the
natural impulses of one ever listening; the calm immobility of the
dusky face was bred of a life of self-sufficiency, where muscle and eye
were ever-active guardians. The coarse black hair that straggled from
beneath a dirty Stetson, the high cheek bones, the swarthy complexion;
these the outward signals of his half-breed origin. Yet from Stetson
to high-heeled boots he was a cowboy, with the individual
eccentricities in dress that scorned hairy chaps for leather, and
walked with an arch of leg that craved the back of a horse to fill it.

The half breed was whittling, yet even in that simple recreation of the
careless he bent to his surroundings. No crackling of hasty knife, no
splashing about of shavings. Already one capacious pocket was filled
with them, and those just made lay in a neat heap for hasty collection.

Often his hand held to listen, and always as he listened his eyes
sought the shadows among the trees on the far shore. A scowl was
twisting his face, of worry, not of anger; sometimes the knife bit into
the soft stick with muscular response to his thoughts.

Presently he pushed the dirty Stetson back and ran a sleeve across his
forehead, though it was not warm. Raising himself to his feet within
the limited range of the clump of trees, he peered anxiously across the
river, searching the opposite bank from the east to where it curved
southward above the camp.

"Gor sw