[Illustration]

It was Wahb. He had been failing in health of late; his old pains
were on him again, and, as well as his hind leg, had seized his right
shoulder, where were still lodged two rifle-balls. He was feeling very
ill, and crippled with pain. He came up the familiar bank at a jerky
limp, and there caught the odor of the foe; then he saw the track in the
mud--his eyes said the track of a _small_ Bear, but his eyes were dim
now, and his nose, his unerring nose, said, "This is the track of the
huge invader." Then he noticed the tree with his sign on it, and there
beyond doubt was the stranger's mark far above his own. His eyes and
nose were agreed on this; and more, they told him that the foe was close
at hand, might at any moment come.

Wahb was feeling ill and weak with pain. He was in no mood for a
desperate fight. A battle against such odds would be madness now. So,
without taking the treatment, he turned and swung along the bench away
from the direction taken by the stranger--the first time since his
cubhood that he had declined to fight.

That was a turning-point in Wahb's life. If he had followed up the
stranger he would have found the miserable little craven trembling,
cowering, in an agony of terror, behind a log in a natural trap, a
walled-in glade only fifty yards away, and would surely have crushed
him. Had he even taken the bath, his strength and courage would have
been renewed, and if not, then at least in time he would have met his
foe, and his after life would have been different. But he had turned.
This was the fork in the trail, but he had no means of knowing it.