Part 21 (2/2)

Then s...o...b..rd s.n.a.t.c.hed her pistol from her father's hand and opened fire. The two sh.e.l.ls were no longer needed to free herself and her father from the agony of fangs. She took careful aim, and although a pistol is never as accurate or as powerful as a rifle, she killed one wolf and wounded another.

Frenzied in their savagery, three or four of the remaining wolves leaped at the body of one of the wounded; but the others scattered in all directions. Still Dan fired with the same unbelievable accuracy, and still the wolves died in the snow. The girl and the man were screaming now in the frenzied joy of deliverance. The wolves scurried frantically among the trees; and some of them unknowingly ran full in the face of their enemy, to be shot down without mercy. And few indeed were those that escaped,--to collect on a distant ridge, and, perhaps, to be haunted in dreams by a Death that came out of the shadows to blast the pack.

Again the pack-song would be despairing and strange in the winter nights,--that age-old chant of Famine and Fear and the long war of existence with only Death and Darkness in the end. And because it is the voice of the wilderness itself, the tenderfoot that camps in the evergreen forest will listen, and his talk will die at his lips, and he will have the beginnings of knowledge. And perhaps he will wonder if G.o.d has given him the thews and fiber to meet the wilderness breast to breast as Dan had met it: to remain and to fight and to conquer. And thereby his metal will be tested in the eyes of the Red G.o.ds.

s...o...b..rd stood waiting in the snow, arms stretched to her forester as Dan came running through the wood. But his arms were wider yet, and she went softly into them.

”We will take it easy from now on,” Dan Failing told them, after the camp was cleared of its dead and the fire was built high. ”We have plenty of food; and we will travel a little while each day and make warm camps at night. We'll have friends.h.i.+p fires, just as sometimes we used to build on the ridge.”

”But after you get down into the valleys?” Lennox asked anxiously. ”Are you and s...o...b..rd coming up here to live?”

The silence fell over their camp; and a wounded wolf whined in the darkness. ”Do you think I could leave it now?” Dan asked. By no gift of words could he have explained why; yet he knew that by token of his conquest, his spirit was wedded to the dark forests forever. ”But heaven knows what I'll do for a living.”

s...o...b..rd crept near him, and her eyes shone in the bright firelight.

”I've solved that,” she said. ”You know you studied forestry--and I told the supervisor at the station how much you knew about it. I wasn't going to tell you until--until certain things happened--and now they have happened, I can't wait another instant. He said that with a little more study you could get into the Forest Service--take an examination and become a ranger. You're a natural forester if one ever lived, and you'd love the work.”

”Besides,” Lennox added, ”it would clip my s...o...b..rd's wings to make her live on the plains. My big house will be rebuilt, children. There will be fires in the fireplace on the fall nights. There is no use of thinking of the plains.”

”And there's going to be a smaller house--just a cottage at first--right beside it,” Dan replied. He could go back to his forests, after all. He wouldn't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the forest rangers,--those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and keepers of its keys.

For a long time s...o...b..rd and he stood together at the edge of the firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts br.i.m.m.i.n.g with words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted to the yearning of his arms.

”We're made for each other, s...o...b..rd darling,” he told her breathlessly at last. ”And at last I can claim what I've been waiting for all these months.”

He claimed it; and in open defiance to all civil law, he collected fully one hundred times in the next few minutes. But it didn't particularly matter, and s...o...b..rd didn't even turn her face. ”Maybe you've forgotten you claimed it when you first came back too,” she said.

So he had. It had completely slipped his mind, in the excitement of his fight with the wolf pack. And then while Lennox pretended to be asleep, they sat, breathless with happiness, on the edge of the sled and watched the dawn come out.

They had never seen the snow so lovely in the sunlight.

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