from the skulls of Valhalla. Great God, I love it!"

Brent rose at last and sought refuge under the insufficient roof of one
of the shacks, for a down-pour had come with the wind and in key with
all the extravagance of the night's mood, it was a cloud-burst.

The city man tossed restlessly and once looking out across the stretch
of the rafted logs, he saw a single figure stripped to the skin in the
sheeted down-pour of cold rain. He saw it only when the lightning
flashed with the spectral effect of beauty. It stood straight with
back-flung shoulders and head upturned into the rain like some wild
high-priest of storm worship. When a flare, brighter than the others
limned the whole prospect into a dazzling instant, the features burst
into clarity with eyes glowing like madness, and lips parted in wild
exaltation.

"He'll have a chill before morning," growled Brent, but his
astonishment at the hardihood of such a shower-bath would have been
more severely taxed had he been able to see behind the screening walls
of Alexander's shack.

For if the colossal man standing there as God made him, reveling in the
sluicing of icy sheets of water, was a picture for a painter's delight,
the figure of the woman, sheltered from any eye, but likewise stripped
to the flesh was one almost as heroic and far lovelier. Alexander too,
was availing herself of that strong tonic which would have brought
collapse to a weakling. She stood tall, beautiful, a Diana with her
wet and flowing hair loosed about her white shoulders and her bosom
rising and falling to the elation of the storm-bath.

The hurricane passed in the forenoon of that day leaving the ridges wet
and inert, with the dejection of spent violence, but from gray clouds
that hung in trailing wisps along the upper slopes a steady rain sobbed
down. After breakfast Bud Sellers who had after all not availed
himself of Alexander's permission to spend the night on the raft, came
aboard and diffidently approached the girl.

He wore a hang-dog air but in his eyes was that same wistfulness of
unspoken worship. Brent knew that he was trying to explain to
Alexander his torture of self accusation because of the disaster born
of his moment of drunken frenzy.

The girl stood looking at him, entirely oblivious to the devotion that
was clear-writ in his eyes. While he talked she accorded him a
hearing, but with lips tight pressed and the unforgettable picture in
her mind of the stricke