arn whether he might be of assistance to him in his evident stress.
He was ready to forgive much of what had passed between them, blaming
it to Reid's chafing against the restraint that was whetting him down
to a bone.

Mackenzie felt now that he had not handled Reid in the right way. Reid
was not of the slow, calculative, lead-balanced type of himself. He
was a wolf of civilization, to whom these wilds were more galling than
the bars of a prison. The judge who had agreed to this sentence had
read deeply in the opaque soul of the youth.

Prison would not have been much of a penance for Reid. There he would
have found intrigue, whispering, plottings; a hundred shadowy
diversions to keep his perverted mind clear and sharp. Here he met
only the silence of nature, the sternest accuser of a guilty soul.
Reid could not bear the accusation of silence. Under it his mind grew
irritable with the inflammation of incipient insanity. In a little
while it would break. Even now he was breaking; that was plain in his
disordered eyes.

Still Mackenzie hesitated to speak to him, watching him as he went
with increasing frequency to the open door to listen. It was not his
affair; Joan could not be there. Even if she were there, she must have
come for a purpose good and justifiable, and of her own free will. But
she was not there, and Reid was waiting for somebody to come. Swan
Carlson or his wife, it must be, and what business they had before
them in this unrighteous hour Mackenzie could not imagine. But plainly
it had nothing to do with Joan.

Mackenzie's thoughts reverted to the night he came to that cabin among
the trees, guided thither by the plaintive melody of Hertha Carlson's
song. What a fool he had been to linger on there that night waiting to
see Swan, in the mistaken kindness to the woman the wild fellow had
made his slave. If he had gone on that night, leaving the still waters
of trouble unstirred, he would have walked in peace through his
apprenticeship. Surely his crowding of trouble at Swan Carlson's door
that night was the beginning of it all.

There was that door closed now on the inner room; on that night it
stood open, the long chain that bound the Swede's wife running through
it from the staple driven into the log. Mackenzie had not noticed the
thickness of the door's planks that night, or the crudity of its
construction. The handiwork of Swan Carlson was proclaimed from that
door; it was rough and strong, like hi