ow anything is possible."

Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy.... "When that
message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings
of peace but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war."

"You are tired and hot," he found himself saying. "Let's go inside."

Later the mountain man reminded his guest: "But you came on another
errand. What was it?"

Morgan, who had been seated, rose and paced the floor with his mouth
tight drawn, and then stopping before his host, he broke out bluntly:
"Once before, Boone, we talked about _her_. Now we must do it again."

Boone's shoulders stiffened, and his face froze into an unresponsive
reserve. Even with McCalloway he had not been able to discuss Anne, and
with Morgan it was impossible.

"Morgan," he answered very deliberately and guardedly, "it was Anne's
wish to eliminate me from her scheme of things. To that wish I bowed,
and what is sealed must remain sealed. In all candour--I can't talk of
her."

"Can't talk of her!" Through the strained composure of Morgan's manner
darted a flash of the old electric force. "When she may be suffering
actual hunger, and you might help! Can you afford to say you can't talk
of her?"

"Hunger? Help?" Boone's voice was one of deadly tenseness. "My God, man,
don't bait me with words like that unless you mean them--and, if you do,
don't waste time!"

For the first time the mountain man learned how Anne had burned her
bridges behind her and disappeared from her own world; how so
resourceful a lawyer as Morgan, employing every agency at his command,
had failed to learn anything of her or her circumstances.

"It is as if," went on the lawyer desperately, "she had gone out of some
cabin in a frozen wilderness--without provisions, without even matches
or an axe, and God knows what she found there!"

The two Kentuckians stood gazing into each other's eyes across the table
that lay between them. Upon the temples of each glistened beads of
terror sweat. With the suddenness of revelation, Boone Wellver saw the
falsity of all his bitter and fallacious judgments, and the love that he
had denied swept over him with the onrush of an avalanche. Then he heard
Morgan again:

"Between us--somehow we managed to do this for her. From babyhood she
was under a coercion that neither of us appreciated. I don't know what
parted you--but I know that I love her enough to be happy if I could see
her married to y