weightier sense of burden; in a few days he would begin to talk to himself.

From the first the evening pause after supper hurt him most, for a man
needs a talk as well as tobacco, and after a time he dreaded these evenings
so bitterly that he purposely spent himself every day, so as to pass from
supper into sleep at a stride. It needed a long day to burn out his
strength thoroughly, so he set his rusted alarm-clock, and before dawn it
brought him groaning out of the blankets to cook a hasty breakfast and go
slowly up to the tunnel. In short, he wedded himself to his work; he
stepped into a routine which took the place of thought, and the change in
him was so gradual that he did not see the danger.

A mirror might have shown it to him as he stood this morning at the door of
his lean-to, for the wind fluttered the shirt around his labor-dried body,
and his forehead puckered in a frown, grown habitual. It was a narrow face,
with rather close-set eyes and a slanted forehead which gave token of a
single-track mind, a single-purposed nature with one hundred and eighty
pounds of strong sinews and iron-hard muscle to give it significance. Such
was Vic Gregg as he stood at the door waiting for the coffee he had drunk
to brush away the cobwebs of sleep, and then he heard the eagle scream.

A great many people have never heard the scream of an eagle. The only voice
they connect with the kind of the air is a ludicrously feeble squawk, dim
with distance, but in his great moments the eagle has a war-cry like that
of the hawk, but harsher, hoarser, tenfold in volume. This sound cut into
the night in the gulch, and Vic Gregg started and glanced about for echoes
made the sound stand at his side; then he looked up, and saw two eagles
fighting in the light of the morning. He knew what it meant--the beginning
of the mating season, and these two battling for a prize. They darted away.
They flashed together with reaching talons and gaping beaks, and dropped in