a tumult of wings, then soared and clashed once more until one of them
folded his wings and dropped bulletlike out of the morning into the night.
Close over Gregg's head, the wings flirted out--ten feet from tip to
tip--beat down with a great washing sound, and the bird shot across the
valley in a level flight. The conqueror screamed a long insult down the
hollow. For a while he balanced, craning his bald head as if he sought
applause, then, without visible movement of his wings, sailed away over the
peaks. A feather fluttered slowly down past Vic Gregg.

He looked down to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his neck. All
about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a green-mottled face
of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked with veins of glittering
silicate, and in this corner, still misted with the last delicate shades of
night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-pink. The single-jack dropped from the
hand of Gregg, and his frown relaxed.

When he stretched his arms, the cramps of labor unkinked and let the warm
blood flow, swiftly, and in the pleasure of it he closed his eyes and drew
a luxurious breath. He stepped from the door with his, head high and his
heart lighter, and when his hobnailed shoe clinked on the fallen hammer he
kicked it spinning from his path. That act brought a smile into his eyes,
and he sauntered to the edge of the little plateau and looked down into the
wide chasm of the Asper Valley.

Blue shadows washed across it, though morning shone around Gregg on the
height, and his glance dropped in a two-thousand-foot plunge to a single
yellow eye that winked through the darkness, a light in the trapper's
cabin. But the dawn was falling swiftly now, and while Gregg lingered the
blue grew thin, purple-tinted, and then dark, slender points pricked up,
which he knew to be the pines. Last of all, he caught the sheen of grass.