Discovery of the plot meant to Dale that he must hurry down
to Pine.

"A girl -- Helen Rayner -- twenty years old," he mused.
"Beasley wants her made off with. . . . That means -- worse
than killed!"

Dale accepted facts of life with that equanimity and
fatality acquired by one long versed in the cruel annals of
forest lore. Bad men worked their evil just as savage wolves
relayed a deer. He had shot wolves for that trick. With men,
good or bad, he had not clashed. Old women and children
appealed to him, but he had never had any interest in girls.
The image, then, of this Helen Rayner came strangely to
Dale; and he suddenly realized that he had meant somehow to
circumvent Beasley, not to befriend old Al Auchincloss, but
for the sake of the girl. Probably she was already on her
way West, alone, eager, hopeful of a future home. How little
people guessed what awaited them at a journey's end! Many
trails ended abruptly in the forest -- and only trained
woodsmen could read the tragedy.

"Strange how I cut across country to-day from Spruce Swamp,"
reflected Dale. Circumstances, movements, usually were not
strange to him. His methods and habits were seldom changed
by chance. The matter, then, of his turning off a course out
of his way for no apparent reason, and of his having
overheard a plot singularly involving a young girl, was
indeed an adventure to provoke thought. It provoked more,
for Dale grew conscious of an unfamiliar smoldering heat