whoop in reply. This
was followed by silence, when suddenly he heard the voice--the boy's
voice--once again, this time very near him, saying eagerly:--

"There he is!"

Then the Indian knew all. His face, however, did not change as he took
up his gun, and a man stepped out of the thicket into the trail:--

"Drop that gun, you d----d Injin."

The Indian did not move.

"Drop it, I say!"

The Indian remained erect and motionless.

A rifle shot broke from the thicket. At first it seemed to have missed
the Indian, and the man who had spoken cocked his own rifle. But the
next moment the tall figure of Jim collapsed where he stood into a mere
blanketed heap.

The man who had fired the shot walked towards the heap with the easy air
of a conqueror. But suddenly there arose before him an awful phantom,
the incarnation of savagery--a creature of blazing eyeballs, flashing
tusks, and hot carnivorous breath. He had barely time to cry out "A
wolf!" before its jaws met in his throat, and they rolled together on
the ground.

But it was no wolf--as a second shot proved--only Jim's slinking dog;
the only one of the outcasts who at that supreme moment had gone back to
his original nature.

A VISION OF THE FOUNTAIN

Mr. Jackson Potter halted before the little cottage, half shop, half
hostelry, opposite the great gates of Domesday Park, where tickets of
admission to that venerable domain were sold. Here Mr. Potter revealed
his nationality as a Western American, not only in his accent, but in
a certain half-humorous, half-practical questioning of the
ticket-seller--as that quasi-official stamped his ticket--which was
nevertheless delivered with such unfailing good-humor, and such frank
suggestiveness of the perfect equality of the ticket-seller and the
well-dressed stranger that, far from producing any irritation, it
attracted the pleased attention not only of the official, but his wife
and daughter and a customer. Possibly the good looks of the stranger had
something to do with it. Jackson Potter was a singularly handsome young
fellow, with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in
Western frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved
possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long
solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier. A
beardless, classical head, covered by short flocculent blonde curls,
poised on a shapely neck and shoulders, was more Greek i