air, drifting downward.

"Nell, do you miss anythin'?" asked Dale.

"No. Nothing in all the world," she murmured. "I am happier than I ever
dared pray to be."

"I don't mean people or things. I mean my pets."

"Ah! I had forgotten.... Milt, where are they?"

"Gone back to the wild," he said. "They had to live in my absence. An'
I've been away long."

Just then the brooding silence, with its soft murmur of falling water
and faint sigh of wind in the pines, was broken by a piercing scream,
high, quivering, like that of a woman in exquisite agony.

"That's Tom!" exclaimed Dale.

"Oh--I was so--so frightened!" whispered Helen.

Bo came running, with Las Vegas at her heels.

"Milt, that was your tame cougar," cried Bo, excitedly. "Oh, I'll never
forget him! I'll hear those cries in my dreams!"

"Yes, it was Tom," said Dale, thoughtfully. "But I never heard him cry
just like that."

"Oh, call him in!"

Dale whistled and called, but Tom did not come. Then the hunter stalked
off in the gloom to call from different points under the slope. After
a while he returned without the cougar. And at that moment, from far
up the dark ravine, drifted down the same wild cry, only changed by
distance, strange and tragic in its meaning.

"He scented us. He remembers. But he'll never come back," said Dale.

Helen felt stirred anew with the convictions of Dale's deep knowledge of
life and nature. And her imagination seemed to have wings. How full and
perfect her trust, her happiness in the realization that her love and
her future, her children, and perhaps grandchildren, would come under
the guidance of such a man! Only a little had she begun to comprehend
the secrets of good and ill in their relation to the laws of nature.
Ages before men had lived on the earth there had been the creatures of
the wilderness, and the holes of the rocks, and the nests of the trees,
and rain, frost, heat, dew, sunlight and night, storm and calm, the
honey of the wildflower and the instinct of the bee--all the beautiful
and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To know
something of them and to love them was to be close to the kingdom of
earth--perhaps to the greater kingdom of heaven. For whatever breathed
and moved was a part of that creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen
on the mossy rock, the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the
waterfall, the ever-green and growing tips of the spruces, and the
thunderbolts alo