hs for every trapped mink or otter he
filched; he heard the game protector's tread as he slunk from the bagged
trout brook or crawled away, belly dragging, and pockets full of snared
grouse.

Always he had dreamed of the day when, through some sudden bold and
savage stroke, he could deliver himself from a life of fear and live in
a city, grossly, replete with the pleasures of satiation, never again to
see a tree or a lonely lake or the blue peaks which, always, he had
hated because they seemed to spy on him from their sky-blue heights.

They were spying on him now as he moved lightly, furtively at Jake
Kloon's heels, meditating once more that swift, bold stroke which
forever would free him from all care and fear.

He looked at the back of Kloon's massive head. One shot would blow that
skull into fragments, he thought, shivering.

One shot from behind, -- and twenty thousand dollars, -- or, if it
proved a better deal, the contents of the packet. For, if Quintana's
bribery had dazzled them, what effect might the contents of that secret
packet have if revealed?

Always in his mean and busy brain he was trying to figure to himself
what that packet must contain. And, to make the bribe worth while,
Leverett had concluded that only a solid packet of thousand-dollar bills
could account for the twenty thousand offered.

There might easily be half a million in bills pressed together in that
heavy, flat packet. Bills were absolutely safe plunder. But Kloon had
turned a deaf ear to his suggestions, -- Kloon, who never entertained
ambitions beyond his hootch rake-off, -- whose miserable imagination
stopped at a wretched percentage, satisfied.

One shot! There was the back of Kloon's bushy head. One shot! -- and
fear, which had shadowed him from birth, was at an end forever. Ended,
too, privation, -- the bitter rigour of black winters; scorching days;
bodily squalor; ills that such as he endured in a wilderness where, like
other creatures of the wild, men stricken died or recovered by chance
alone.

A single shot would settle all problems for him. ... But if he missed?
At the mere idea he trembled as he trotted on, trying to tell himself
that he couldn't miss. No use; always the coward's "if" blocked him;
and the coward's rage, -- fiercest of all fury, -- ravaged him, almost
crazing him with his own impotence.

* * * * *

Tamaracks, sphagnum, crimson pitcher-plants grew thicker; wet woods set
with little black p