m "No-luck" Drennen. And as though his
ill fortune were some ugly, contagious disease, they shunned him even
as invariably as he avoided them.

Men knew him in Wild Cat, two weeks hard going over an invisible trail
from MacLeod's; they knew him at Moosejaw, two hundred and fifty miles
westward of the Settlement; wherever there was news of gold found he
was known, generally coming silently with the first handful of
venturesome, restive spirits. But while his coming and his going were
marked and while eyes followed him interestedly men had given over
offering their hands in companionship. Now and then he moved among
them as a man must, but always was he aloof, standing stubbornly apart,
offering no man his aid in time of difficulty, flaring into blazing
wrath the few times on record when men showed sympathy and desire to
befriend him.

Superstition, abashed-eyed step daughter in the house of civilisation,
lifts her head defiantly in the wilderness. She is born of the
solitudes, a true daughter of the silent places. Here, where men were
few and scattered broadcast by the great hand of adventure across the
broken miles of all but impassable mountains, superstition is no longer
merely an incident but an essential factor in human life and destiny.
And here men long ago had come to frown when their questing eyes found
the great, gaunt form of David Drennen in the van of some mad rush to
new fields: He was unlucky; men who rubbed shoulders with him were
foredoomed to share his misfortune; the gold, glittering into their
eyes from a gash in the earth, would vanish when his shadow fell across
it.

In many things he had grown to be more like a wild beast than a man.
He had hunted with the human pack and he had found selfishness and
jealousy and treachery on every hand. He came to look upon these as
the essential characteristics of the human race. Even now that he was
wounded he saw but one sordid motive of greed under the hesitant offers
of help; even now he had been less like a wounded man than a stricken
wolf. The wolf would have withdrawn to his hidden lair; he would have
contented himself with scant food; he would have licked his wound clean
and have waited for it to heal; he would have snapped and snarled at
any intrusion, knowing the way of his fellows when they fall upon a
wounded brother. So Drennen.

CHAPTER IX

"TO THE GIRL I AM GOING TO KISS TO-NIGHT!"

An odd mood was upon him this afternoon. Pe