woods and the gentle spring zephyr swinging past and singing as it went.
Now and again he noted how the sun slowly dropped down the skies that
were so fine, so fair, so blue that it seemed loath to go and leave the
majestic peace of the zenith. The stars scintillated in the dark night
as if a thousand bivouac fires were kindled in those far spaces of the
heavens responsive to the fire which he kept aglow to cook the supper
that his rifle fetched him and to ward off the approach of wolf or
panther while he slept. He was doubtless in jeopardy often enough, but
chance befriended him and he encountered naught inimical till the fourth
day when he came in at the gate of the station and met the partners of
the hunt, themselves not long since arrived.

They waited for no reproaches for their desertion. They were quick to
upbraid. As they hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment,
and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust
back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he
listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and
leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an
intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how
the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of
the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the
misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, fires could
be seen aglow on the hearths within; the long slant of the red sunset
rays fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of
the palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the
colors of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a
second arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley.
The frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly
wrangling--and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the
embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown