ehind her. A moment later he heard through the sapling door a strange
cry--a woman's cry--a man's cry--and he turned and walked heavily back
into the spruce forest.

THE MOUSE

"Why, you ornery little cuss," said Falkner, pausing with a forkful of
beans half way to his mouth. "Where in God A'mighty's name did YOU come
from?"

It was against all of Jim's crude but honest ethics of the big
wilderness to take the Lord's name in vain, and the words he uttered
were filled more with the softness of a prayer than the harshness of
profanity. He was big, and his hands were hard and knotted, and his
face was covered with a coarse red scrub of beard. But his hair was
blond, and his eyes were blue, and just now they were filled with
unbounded amazement. Slowly the fork loaded with beans descended to his
plate, and he said again, barely above a whisper:

"Where in God A'mighty's name DID you come from?"

There was nothing human in the one room of his wilderness cabin to
speak of. At the first glance there was nothing alive in the room, with
the exception of Jim Falkner himself. There was not even a dog, for Jim
had lost his one dog weeks before. And yet he spoke, and his eyes
glistened, and for a full minute after that he sat as motionless as a
rock. Then something moved--at the farther end of the rough board
table. It was a mouse--a soft, brown, bright-eyed little mouse, not as
large as his thumb. It was not like the mice Jim had been accustomed to
see in the North woods, the larger, sharp-nosed, rat-like creatures
which sprung his traps now and then, and he gave a sort of gasp through
his beard.

"I'm as crazy as a loon if it isn't a sure-enough down-home mouse, just
like we used to catch in the kitchen down in Ohio," he told himself.
And for the third time he asked. "Now where in God A'mighty's name DID
YOU come from?"

The mouse made no answer. It had humped itself up into a little ball,
and was eyeing Jim with the keenest of suspicion.

"You're a thousand miles from home, old man," Falkner addressed it,
still without a movement. "You're a clean thousand miles straight north
of the kind o' civilization you was born in, and I want to know how you
got here. By George--is it possible--you got mixed up in that box of
stuff SHE sent up? Did you come from HER?"

He made a sudden movement, as if he expected an answer, and in a flash
the mouse had scurried off the table and had disappeared under his bunk.

"The litt