patter of rain filled the forest stillness.



CHAPTER II

Milt Dale quietly sat up to gaze, with thoughtful eyes, into
the gloom.

He was thirty years old. As a boy of fourteen he had run off
from his school and home in Iowa and, joining a wagon-train
of pioneers, he was one of the first to see log cabins built
on the slopes of the White Mountains. But he had not taken
kindly to farming or sheep-raising or monotonous home toil,
and for twelve years he had lived in the forest, with only
infrequent visits to Pine and Show Down and Snowdrop. This
wandering forest life of his did not indicate that he did
not care for the villagers, for he did care, and he was
welcome everywhere, but that he loved wild life and solitude
and beauty with the primitive instinctive force of a savage.

And on this night he had stumbled upon a dark plot against
the only one of all the honest white people in that region
whom he could not call a friend.

"That man Beasley!" he soliloquized. "Beasley -- in cahoots
with Snake Anson! . . . Well, he was right. Al Auchincloss
is on his last legs. Poor old man! When I tell him he'll
never believe ME, that's sure!"