him. So he felt his way
instinctively, while a crash of thunder broke over his head. The forces
of the night were unleashing. He could hear a gathering tumult in the
mountains hidden beyond the wall of blackness, and there came a sudden
glare of lightning that illumined his way. It helped him. He saw a white
reach of sand ahead and quickened his steps. And out of the sea he heard
more distinctly an increasing sound. It was as if he walked between two
great armies that were setting earth and sea atremble as they advanced
to deadly combat.

The lightning came again, and after it followed a discharge of thunder
that gave to the ground under his feet a shuddering tremor. It rolled
away, echo upon echo, through the mountains, like the booming of
signal-guns, each more distant than the other. A cold breath of air
struck Alan in the face, and something inside him rose up to meet the
thrill of storm.

He had always loved the rolling echoes of thunder in the mountains and
the fire of lightning among their peaks. On such a night, with the crash
of the elements about his father's cabin and the roaring voices of the
ranges filling the darkness with tumult, his mother had brought him into
the world. Love of it was in his blood, a part of his soul, and there
were times when he yearned for this "talk of the mountains" as others
yearn for the coming of spring. He welcomed it now as his eyes sought
through the darkness for a glimmer of the light that always burned from
dusk until dawn in Olaf Ericksen's cabin.

He saw it at last, a yellow eye peering at him through a slit in an inky
wall. A moment later the darker shadow of the cabin rose up in his face,
and a flash of lightning showed him the door. In a moment of silence he
could hear the patter of huge raindrops on the roof as he dropped his
bags and began hammering with his fist to arouse the Swede. Then he
flung open the unlocked door and entered, tossing his dunnage to the
floor, and shouted the old greeting that Ericksen would not have
forgotten, though nearly a quarter of a century had passed since he and
Alan's father had tramped the mountains together.

He had turned up the wick of the oil lamp on the table when into the
frame of an inner door came Ericksen himself, with his huge, bent
shoulders, his massive head, his fierce eyes, and a great gray beard
streaming over his naked chest. He stared for a moment, and Alan flung
off his hat, and as the storm broke, beating upon