that
you can anger Marc and Captain Sefton this way?"

"That, too, we can talk about at dinner, if you like."

For a moment she looked at him, gravely thoughtful, her brows puckered
into a thoughtful frown. Then she put back her head with a gesture
indefinably suggestive of recklessness, and laughed as she had laughed
when she had first come upon him.

"The novel invitation is accepted," she said lightly. "I must hurry
down to dress for the grand occasion, Mr. Drennen."

Before she could flash about and turn from him David Drennen did a
thing he had done for no woman in many years. He rose to his feet,
making her a sweeping bow as he lifted his hat with the old grace which
the years had not taken from him. And as she went down the mountain
side he dropped back to his rock, his teeth again hard, clamped upon
his pipe stem, his eyes steely and bitter and filled with cynical irony.

CHAPTER VIII

DUST OF IDOLS

David Drennen's statement concerning the two powerful motives
responsible for the presence in the North Woods of the greater portion
of her hardy denizens had been essentially truthful. The shadow of
prison bars or perhaps the gaunt silhouette of the gallows, vivid in an
overstimulated fancy, has sent many a man roving; the whisper down the
world of yellow gold to be taken from the earth, transforming the
blackened claw gripping it into the potent fingers of a money king, has
entered the ear of many a wanderer and drawn him to such a land as
this. An evil nature, a flare of temper, a wrong done and redressed in
hot wrath and red blood, a mistake or a weakness or a wild spirit born
a hundred years too late, any of these things might send a man into the
North Woods. But Drennen, who made the statement to Ygerne Bellaire,
was in himself an exception to it.

For half a score of years this land of hard trails, this far out place
where man met man without veneer, where nature's breasts lay stripped
of covering and naked, where life was the old life of things elemental,
where primal laws were good laws, where there was room enough for the
strong and scant room for the weak, David Drennen had found a spacious
walled home. Half of the year his house had the lofty, snow-capped
mountains for its only walls, the sweeping blue arch for its roof, sun,
moon and stars for its lamps. There were months when he knew of no
other footfall than his own throughout the vastness of his house.
There had been times wh