we say."

Frale could not make out the words, but his face burned red with rage.
Had he been in hiding down below, he would have wreaked vengeance on the
man; as it was, he stood up and boldly watched them ride away in the
opposite direction from which they had come.

He sank back and waited, and again the hours passed. All was still but
the rushing water and the gentle soughing of the wind in the tops of the
towering pines. At last he heard a rustling and sniffing here and there.
His heart stood still, then pounded again in terror. They had--they had
set Nig to track him. Of course the dog would seek for his old friend
and comrade, and they--they would wait until they heard his bark of joy,
and then they would seize him.

He crept close to the rock where the water rushed, not a foot away, and
clinging to the tough laurel behind him, leaned far over. To drop down
there would mean instant death on the rocks below. It would be
terrible--almost as horrible as the strangling rope. He would wait until
they were on him, and then--nearer and nearer came the erratic trotting
and scratching of the dog among the leaves--and then, if only he could
grapple with the man who had struck his little brother, he would drag
him over with him. A look of fierce joy leaped in his eyes, which were
drawn to a narrow blue gleam as he waited.

Suddenly Nig burst through the undergrowth and sprang to his side, but
before the dog could give his first bark of delight the yelp was crushed
in his throat, and he was hurled with the mighty force of frenzy, a
black, writhing streak of animate nature into the rushing water, and
there swept down, tossed on the rocks, taken up and swirled about and
thrown again upon the rocks, no longer animate, but a part of nature's
own, to return to his primal elements.

It was done, and Frale looked at his hands helplessly, feeling himself a
second time a murderer. Yet he was in no way more to blame for the first
than for this. As yet a boy untaught by life, he had not learned what to
do with the forces within him. They rose up madly and mastered him. With
a man's power to love and hate, a man's instincts, his untamed nature
ready to assert itself for tenderness or cruelty, without a man's
knowledge of the necessity for self-control, where some of his kind
would have been inert and listless, his inheritance had made him intense
and fierce. Loving and gentle and kind he could be, yet when stirred by
liquor, or ang