e had liked sawing wood best. Once he had quit a job
of branding cattle because the smell of burning hide, the bawl of the
terrified calf, had sickened him. If men were honest there would be no
need to scar cattle. He had never in the least desired to own land and
droves of stock, and make deals with ranchmen, deals advantageous to
himself. Why should a man want to make a deal or trade a horse or do a
piece of work to another man's disadvantage? Self-preservation was the
first law of life. But as the plants and trees and birds and beasts
interpreted that law, merciless and inevitable as they were, they had
neither greed nor dishonesty. They lived by the grand rule of what was
best for the greatest number.

But Dale's philosophy, cold and clear and inevitable, like nature
itself, began to be pierced by the human appeal in Helen Rayner's words.
What did she mean? Not that he should lose his love of the wilderness,
but that he realize himself! Many chance words of that girl had depth.
He was young, strong, intelligent, free from taint of disease or the
fever of drink. He could do something for others. Who? If that mattered,
there, for instance, was poor old Mrs. Cass, aged and lame now; there
was Al Auchincloss, dying in his boots, afraid of enemies, and wistful
for his blood and his property to receive the fruit of his labors; there
were the two girls, Helen and Bo, new and strange to the West, about to
be confronted by a big problem of ranch life and rival interests. Dale
thought of still more people in the little village of Pine--of others
who had failed, whose lives were hard, who could have been made happier
by kindness and assistance.

What, then, was the duty of Milt Dale to himself? Because men preyed on
one another and on the weak, should he turn his back upon a so-called
civilization or should he grow like them? Clear as a bell came the
answer that his duty was to do neither. And then he saw how the little
village of Pine, as well as the whole world, needed men like him. He had
gone to nature, to the forest, to the wilderness for his development;
and all the judgments and efforts of his future would be a result of
that education.

Thus Dale, lying in the darkness and silence of his lonely park, arrived
at a conclusion that he divined was but the beginning of a struggle.

It took long introspection to determine the exact nature of that
struggle, but at length it evolved into the paradox that Helen Rayner
had o