and all manner of furred and feathered things; and it all was his. He had
seen the yellow flashes of gold in the stream called Pipi, and he had not
gathered it, for his life was simple, and he was young enough to cherish
in his heart the love of the open world, beyond the desire of cities and
the stir of the market-place. In those days there was not a line in his
face, not an angle in his body--all smoothly rounded and lithe and alert,
like him that was called "the young lion of Dedan." Day by day he drank
in the wisdom of the hills and the valleys, and he wrote upon the dried
barks of trees the thoughts that came as he lay upon the bearskin in his
tent, or cooled his hands and feet, of a hot summer day, in the moist
sandy earth, and watched the master of the deer lead his cohorts down the
passes of the hills.

But by-and-by mule-trains began to crawl along the ledges of Margath
Mountain, and over Shaknon came adventurers, and after them, wandering
men seeking a new home, women and children coming also. But when these
came he had passed the spring-time of his years, and had grown fixed in
the love of the valley, where his sole visitors had been passing tribes
of Indians, who knew his moods and trespassed not at all on his domain.
The adventurers hungered for the gold in the rivers, and they made it one
long washing-trough, where the disease that afflicted them passed on from
man to man like poison down a sewer. Then the little city grew, and with
the search for gold came other seekings and findings and toilings, and
men who came as one stops at an inn to feed, stayed to make their home,
and women made the valley cheerful, and children were born, and the pride
of the place was as great as that of some village of the crimson East,
where every man has ancestors to Mahomet and beyond.

And he, Felion, who had been lord and master of the valley, worked with
them, but did not seek for riches, and more often drew away into the