minutes more.

Then he opened his eyes. The light had grown around him. His hands were quite plain. Slowly, as a man raises his eyes to a miracle, he lifted his face.

The forest was no longer obscured in darkness. The great trees had emerged, and only the dusk as of twilight was left between. He saw them plainly,—their symmetrical forms, their declining limbs, their tall tops piercing the sky. He saw them as they were,—those ancient, eternal symbols and watchmen of the wilderness. And he knew them at last, acquaintances long forgotten but remembered now.

"The pines!" he cried. He leaped to his feet with flashing eyes. "I have come back to the pines!"

V

The dawn revealed a narrow road along the bank of Deer Creek,—a brown little wanderer which, winding here and there, did not seem to know exactly where it wished to go. It seemed to follow the general direction of the creek bed; it seemed to be a prying, restless little highway, curious about things in general as the wild creatures that sometimes made tracks in its dust, thrusting now into a heavy thicket, now crossing the creek to examine a green and grassy bank on the opposite side, now taking an adventurous tramp about the shoulder of a hill, circling back for a drink in the creek and hurrying on again. It made singular loops; it darted off at a right and left oblique; it made sudden spurts and turns seemingly without reason or sense, and at last it dimmed away into the fading mists of early morning. Bruce didn't know which direction to take, whether up or down the creek.

He gave the problem a moment's thought. "Take the road up the Divide," Barney Wegan had said; and at once Bruce knew that the course lay up the creek, rather than down. A divide means simply the high places between one water-shed and another, and of course Trail's End lay somewhere beyond the source of the stream. The creek itself was apparently a sub-tributary of the Rogue, the great river to the south.

There was something pleasing to his spirit in the sight of the little stream, tumbling and rippling down its rocky bed. He had no vivid memories of seeing many waterways. The river that flowed through the city whence he had come had not been like this at all. It had been a great, slow-moving sheet of water, the banks of which were lined with factories and warehouses. The only lining of the banks of this little stream were white-barked trees, lovely groves with leaves of glossy green. It was a cheery, eager little waterway, and more than once—as he went around a curve in the road—it afforded him glimpses of really striking beauty. Sometimes it was just a shimmer of its waters beneath low-hanging bushes, sometimes a distant cataract, and once or twice a long, still place on which the shadows were still deep.

These sloughs were obviously the result of dams, and at first he could not understand what had been the purpose of dam-building in this lonely region. There seemed to be no factories needing water power, no slow-moving mill wheels. He left the road to investigate. And he chuckled with delight when he knew the truth.

These dams had not been the work of men at all. Rather they were structures laid down by those curious little civil engineers, the beavers. The cottonwood trees had been felled so that the thick branches had lain across the waters, and in their own secret ways the limbs had been matted and caked until no water could pass through. True, the beavers themselves did not emerge for him to converse with. Perhaps they were busy at their under-water occupations, and possibly the trappers who sooner or later penetrate every wilderness had taken them all away. He looked along the bank for further evidence of the beavers' work.

Wonderful as the dams were, he found plenty of evidence that the beavers had not always used to advantage the crafty little brains that nature has given them. They had made plenty of mistakes. But these very blunders gave Bruce enough delight almost to pay for the extra work they had occasioned. After all, he considered, human beings in their works are often just as short-sighted. For instance, he found tall trees lying rotting and out of reach, many feet back from the stream. The beavers had evidently felled them in high water, forgetting that the stream dwindled in summer and the trees would be of no use to them. They had been an industrious colony! He found short poles of cottonwood sharpened at the end, as if the little fur bearers had intended them for braces, but which—through some wilderness tragedy—had never been utilized.

But Bruce was in a mood to be delighted, these early morning hours. He was on the way to Linda; a dream was about to come true. The whole adventure was of the most thrilling and joyous anticipations. He did not feel the load of his heavy suitcase. It was nothing to his magnificent young strength. And all at once he beheld an amazing change in the appearance of the stream.

It had abruptly changed to a stream of melted, shimmering silver. The waters broke on the rocks with opalescent spray; the whole coloring was suggestive of the vivid tints of a Turner landscape. The waters gleamed; they danced and sparkled as they sped about the boulders of the river bed; the leaves shimmered above them. And it was all because the sun had risen at last above the mountain range and was shining down.

At first Bruce could hardly believe that just sunlight could effect such a transformation. For no other reason than that he couldn't resist doing so, he left his bag on the road and crept down to the water's edge.

He stood very still. It seemed to him that some one had told him, far away and long ago, that if he wished to see miracles he had only to stand very still. Not to move a muscle, so that his vivid shadow would not even waver. It is a trait possessed by all men of the wilderness, but it takes time for city men to learn it. He waited a long time. And all at once the shining surface of a deep pool below him broke with a fountain of glittering spray.

Something that was like light itself flung into the air and down again with a splash. Bruce shouted then. He simply couldn't help it. And all the time there was a strange straining and travail in his brain, as if it were trying to give birth to a memory from long ago. He knew now what had made that glittering arc. Such a common thing,—it was singular that it should yield him such delight. It was a trout, leaping for an insect that had fallen on the waters.

It was strange that he had such a sense of familiarity with trout. True, he had heard Barney Wegan tell of them. He had listened to many tales of the way they seized a fly, how the reel would spin, and how they would fight to absolute exhaustion before they would yield to the landing net. "The King among fish," Barney had called them. Yet the tales seemingly had meant little to him then. His interest in them had been superficial only; and they had seemed as distant and remote as the marsupials of Australia. But it wasn't this way now. He had a sense of long and close acquaintance, of an interest such as men have in their own townsmen.

He went on, and the forest world opened before him. Once a flock of grouse—a hen and a dozen half-grown chickens—scurried away through the underbrush at the sound of his step. One instant, and he had a clear view of the entire covey. The next, and they had vanished like so many puffs of smoke. He had a delicious game of hide-and-seek with them through the coverts, but he was out-classed in every particular. He knew that the birds were all within forty feet of him, each of them pressed flat to the brown earth, but in this maze of light and shadow he could not detect their outline. Nature has been kind to the grouse family in the way of protective coloration. He had to give up the search and continue up the creek for further adventure.

Once a pair of mallards winged by on a straight course above his head. Their sudden appearance rather surprised him. These