The Man of the Forest | Page 7

ways for Sunday," replied Wilson.
"A-huh! . . . Wal, let's get back to camp." And he led the way out.
Low voices drifted into the cabin, then came snorts of horses and
striking hoofs, and after that a steady trot, gradually ceasing. Once
more the moan of wind and soft 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!"
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 along his veins.
He who had little to do with the strife of men, and nothing to do with
anger, felt his blood grow hot at the cowardly trap laid for an innocent
girl.
"Old Al won't listen to me," pondered Dale. "An' even if he did, he
wouldn't believe me. Maybe nobody will. . . . All the same, Snake
Anson won't get that girl."
With these last words Dale satisfied himself of his own position, and
his pondering ceased. Taking his rifle, he descended from the loft and
peered out of the door. The night had grown darker, windier, cooler;
broken clouds were scudding across the sky; only a few stars showed;
fine rain was blowing from the northwest; and the forest seemed full of
a low, dull roar.

"Reckon I'd better hang up here," he said, and turned to the fire. The
coals were red now. From the depths of his hunting-coat he procured a
little bag of salt and some strips of dried meat. These strips he laid for a
moment on the hot embers, until they began to sizzle and curl; then
with a sharpened stick he removed them and ate like a hungry hunter
grateful for little.
He sat on a block of wood with his palms spread to the dying warmth
of the fire and his eyes fixed upon the changing, glowing, golden
embers. Outside, the wind continued to rise and the moan of the forest
increased to a roar. Dale felt the comfortable warmth stealing over him,
drowsily lulling; and he heard the storm-wind in the trees, now like a
waterfall, and anon like a retreating