clock, and
before dawn it brought him groaning out of the blankets to cook a hasty
breakfast and go slowly up to the tunnel. In short, he wedded himself to
his work; he stepped into a routine which took the place of thought, and
the change in him was so gradual that he did not see the danger.

A mirror might have shown it to him as he stood this morning at the door
of his lean-to, for the wind fluttered the shirt around his labor-dried
body, and his forehead puckered in a frown, grown habitual. It was a
narrow face, with rather close-set eyes and a slanted forehead which
gave token of a single-track mind, a single-purposed nature with one
hundred and eighty pounds of strong sinews and iron-hard muscle to give
it significance. Such was Vic Gregg as he stood at the door waiting for
the coffee he had drunk to brush away the cobwebs of sleep, and then he
heard the eagle scream.

A great many people have never heard the scream of an eagle. The only
voice they connect with the kind of the air is a ludicrously feeble
squawk, dim with distance, but in his great moments the eagle has a
war-cry like that of the hawk, but harsher, hoarser, tenfold in volume.
This sound cut into the night in the gulch, and Vic Gregg started and
glanced about for echoes made the sound stand at his side; then he
looked up, and saw two eagles fighting in the light of the morning. He
knew what it meant--the beginning of the mating season, and these two
battling for a prize. They darted away. They flashed together with
reaching talons and gaping beaks, and dropped in a tumult of wings,
then soared and clashed once more until one of them folded his wings and
dropped bulletlike out of the morning into the night. Close over Gregg's
head, the wings flirted out--ten feet from tip to tip--beat down with
a great washing sound, and the bird shot across the valley in a level
flight. The conqueror screamed a long insult down the hollow. For a
while he balanced, craning his bald head as if he sought applause, then,
without visible movement of his wings, sailed away over the peaks. A
feather fluttered slowly down past Vic Gregg.

He looked down to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his
neck. All about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a
green-mottled face of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked
with veins of glittering silicate, and in this corner, still misted with
the last delicate shades of night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-p