ive on nothing."

"And the Lord knows when he'll pay you," said the storekeeper. "It's a
good twelve months since he sent a dollar to me."

Alton laughed a little. "I can wait," he said. "Fill that bag up
again. Get hold of the truck, Charley."

Charles Seaforth, who was apparently younger, and certainly a trifle
more fastidious about his attire than his comrade, shouldered a flour
bag, and twenty minutes later he and Alton tramped out of the
settlement with three loaded beasts splashing and floundering in front
of them. It was almost dark now, though a line of snow still glimmered
white and cold high up beyond the trees until the trail plunged into
the blackness of the forest. Then the lights of the settlement were
blotted out behind them, the hum of voices ceased, and they were alone
in the primeval silence of the bush. The thud and splash of tired
hoofs only served to emphasize it, the thin jingle of steel or creak of
pack-rope was swallowed up and lost, for the great dim forest seemed to
mock at anything man could do to disturb its pristine serenity. It had
shrouded all that valley, where no biting gale ever blew, from the
beginning, majestic in its solitary grandeur and eternally green. Pine
and hemlock, balsam and cedar, had followed in due succession others
that had grown to the fulness of their stature only in centuries, and
their healing essence, which brings sound sleep to man's jaded body and
tranquillity to his mind, had doubtless risen like incense when all was
made very good.

Now Alton loved the wilderness, partly because he had been born in it,
and because he had a large share of the spirit of his race. He had
also seen the cities, and they did not greatly please him, though he
had watched their inhabitants curiously and been taught a good deal
about them by what he read in books, which to the wonder of his
associates he would spend hardly-earned dollars upon. It was more
curious that he understood all he read, and sometimes more than the
writer apparently did, for Alton was not only the son of a clever man,
but had seen Nature in her primitive nakedness and the human passions
that usually lie beneath the surface, for man reverts a little and the
veneer of his civilization wears through in the silent bush.

Thus he plodded on contentedly on his twelve-mile march, with the snow
and the mire beneath it reaching now and then to his knee, until his
companion stopped beside a little bark shant