e air. A dreamy roar of water rushing over
rocks rang in the traveler's ears. It receded at times, then grew
louder. Presently the forest shade ahead lightened and he rode out into
a wide space where green moss and flags and flowers surrounded a
wonderful spring-hole. Sunset gleams shone through the trees to color
the wide, round pool. It was shallow all along the margin, with a deep,
large green hole in the middle, where the water boiled up. Trout were
feeding on gnats and playing on the surface, and some big ones left
wakes behind them as they sped to deeper water. Wade had an appreciative
eye for all this beauty, his gaze lingering longest upon the flowers.

"Wild woods is the place for me," he soliloquized, as the cool wind
fanned his cheeks and the sweet tang of evergreen tingled his nostrils.
"But sure I'm most haunted in these lonely, silent places."

Bent Wade had the look of a haunted man. Perhaps the consciousness he
confessed was part of his secret.

Twilight had come when again he rode out into the open. Trapper's Lake
lay before him, a beautiful sheet of water, mirroring the black slopes
and the fringed spruces and the flat peaks. Over all its gray,
twilight-softened surface showed little swirls and boils and splashes
where the myriads of trout were rising. The trail led out over open
grassy shores, with a few pines straggling down to the lake, and clumps
of spruces raising dark blurs against the background of gleaming lake.
Wade heard a sharp crack of hoofs on rock, and he knew he had disturbed
deer at their drinking; also he heard a ring of horns on the branch of a
tree, and was sure an elk was slipping off through the woods. Across the
lake he saw a camp-fire and a pale, sharp-pointed object that was a
trapper's tent or an Indian's tepee.

Selecting a camp-site for himself, he unsaddled his horse, threw the
pack off the other, and, hobbling both animals, he turned them loose.
His roll of bedding, roped in canvas tarpaulin, he threw under a
spruce-tree. Then he opened his oxhide-covered packs and laid out
utensils and bags, little and big. All his movements were methodical,
yet swift, accurate, habitual. He was not thinking about what he was
doing. It took him some little time to find a suitable log to split for
fire-wood, and when he had started a blaze night had fallen, and the
light as it grew and brightened played fantastically upon the
isolating shadows.

Lid and pot of the little Dutch oven he