d be
the one to be trusted. "He was never able to go fifty rods into the
brush himself, without getting completely turned around, and he was
born in these hills, at that."

Then he had to tell her that it was Big Louie to whom he was referring,
before she understood quite what he meant. But he abandoned that
trend, freakishly, the very next moment.

"It doesn't seem complicated," he pondered. "To a man who has come
into the world with his sense of north and south and east and west all
safely relegated to his backbone instead of having to depend upon the
flighty functions of his brain for his guide, it's about the simplest
thing there is. He finds his way without thinking about the lay of the
land, or moss on the trees, or the sun or stars. But the other
one--the one who has to stop and reason that he must travel so many
miles to the west to reach home in the afternoon, because he came that
many in the morning--why, he even gets to doubting his compass, until
night catches him without a roof over his head and no wood collected
for a camp-fire."

Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his
spirit--and she wanted him to go on.

"It must be a terrible thing to--to know that one is lost." Her hands
were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with
his stride. "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."

It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his
smile was absent-minded.

"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating
it for a time. "It is always the one who can't trust his compass who
loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up. Big Louie was that way.
He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad
with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue. He had been running in
a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see
that we were friends. He'd been listening to the night noises, you
see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire,
until his brain was no longer any use to him."

"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was
waiting for her to speak. Yet his answer persisted in adding to that
word-image which his mind was molding.

"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything
is following you!" He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was
talking at himself. "Quit dwelling on the crackle in t