including my friends the two mountaineers.



I. THE TWO SPRINGS


High above Sierra's peaks stands grim Mount Tallac. Ten thousand feet
above the sea it rears its head to gaze out north to that vast and
wonderful turquoise that men call Lake Tahoe, and northwest, across a
piney sea, to its great white sister, Shasta of the Snows; wonderful
colors and things on every side, mast-like pine trees strung with
jewelry, streams that a Buddhist would have made sacred, hills that an
Arab would have held holy. But Lan Kellyan's keen gray eyes were
turned to other things. The childish delight in life and light for
their own sakes had faded, as they must in one whose training had been
to make him hold them very cheap. Why value grass? All the world is
grass. Why value air, when it is everywhere in measureless immensity?
Why value life, when, all alive, his living came from taking life? His
senses were alert, not for the rainbow hills and the gem-bright lakes,
but for the living things that he must meet in daily rivalry, each
staking on the game, his life. Hunter was written on his leathern
garb, on his tawny face, on his lithe and sinewy form, and shone in
his clear gray eye.

The cloven granite peak might pass unmarked, but a faint dimple in the
sod did not. Calipers could not have told that it was widened at one
end, but the hunter's eye did, and following, he looked for and found
another, then smaller signs, and he knew that a big Bear and two
little ones had passed and were still close at hand, for the grass in