f
long ago, for which he had yearned to the point of madness in his
exile--the soft cries of the birds that hunted and mated in the glow of
the moon, the friendly twit, twit, twit of the low-flying sand-pipers,
the hoot of the owls, and the splash and sleepy voice of wildfowl
already on their way up from the south. Out of that south, where in
places the plains swept the forest back almost to the river's edge, he
heard now and then the doglike barking of his little yellow friends of
many an exciting horseback chase, the coyotes, and on the wilderness
side, deep in the forest, the sinister howling of wolves. He was
traveling, literally, the narrow pathway between two worlds. The river
was that pathway. On the one hand, not so very far away, were the
rolling prairies, green fields of grain, settlements and towns and the
homes of men; on the other the wilderness lay to the water's edge with
its doors still open to him. The seventh day a new sound came to his
ears at dawn. It was the whistle of a train at Prince Albert.

There was no change in that whistle, and every nerve-string in his body
responded to it with crying thrill. It was the first voice to greet his
home-coming, and the sound of it rolled the yesterdays back upon him in
a deluge. He knew where he was now; he recalled exactly what he would
find at the next turn in the river. A few minutes later he heard the
wheezy chug, chug, chug of the old gold dredge at McCoffin's Bend. It
would be the Betty M., of course, with old Andy Duggan at the windlass,
his black pipe in mouth, still scooping up the shifting sands as he had
scooped them up for more than twenty years. He could see Andy sitting
at his post, clouded in a halo of tobacco smoke, a red-bearded,
shaggy-headed giant of a man whom the town affectionately called the
River Pirate. All his life Andy had spent in digging gold out of the
mountains or the river, and like grim death he had hung to the bars
above and below McCoffin's Bend. Keith smiled as he remembered old
Andy's passion for bacon. One could always find the perfume of bacon
about the Betty M., and when Duggan went to town, there were those who
swore they could smell it in his whiskers.

Keith left the river trail now for the old logging road. In spite of
his long fight to steel himself for what Conniston had called the
"psychological moment," he felt himself in the grip of an uncomfortable
mental excitement. At last he was face to face with the great g