"But you're a gentleman, an' I thank you fer your kind
hospitality."

It was still early morning when Horner started to descend the
mountain. It was dusk when he reached the lake and flung himself down,
prostrated with fatigue and pain and strain of nerve, beside his
canoe. From moment to moment, through spells of reeling faintness and
spasmodic exhaustion, the silent gulfs of space had clutched at him,
as if the powers of the solitude and the peak had but spared him so
long to crush him inexorably in the end. At last, more through the
sheer indomitableness of the human spirit than anything else, he had
won. But never afterwards could he think of that awful descent without
a sinking of the heart. For three days more he made his camp by the
lake, recovering strength and nerve before resuming his journey down
the wild river to the settlements. And many times a day his
salutations would be waved upward to that great, snowy-headed,
indifferent bird, wheeling in the far blue, or gazing at the sun from
his high-set watch-tower of the pine.

CHAPTER III

Two or three years later, it fell in Horner's way to visit a great
city, many hundreds of miles from the gray peak of "Old Baldy." He was
in charge of an exhibit of canoes, snowshoes, and other typical
products of his forest-loving countrymen. In his first morning of
leisure, his feet turned almost instinctively to the wooded gardens
wherein the city kept strange captives, untamed exiles of the
wilderness, irreconcilable aliens of fur and hide and feather, for the
crowds to gape at through their iron bars.

He wandered aimlessly past some grotesque, goatish-looking deer which
did not interest him, and came suddenly upon a paddock containing a
bull moose, two cows, and a yearling calf. The calf looked ungainly
and quite content with his surroundings. The cows were faded and
moth-eaten, but well fed. He had no concern for them at all. But the
bull, a splendid, black-shouldered, heavy-muffled fellow, with the new
antlers just beginning to knob out from his massive forehead, appealed
to him strongly. The splendid, sullen-looking beast stood among his
family, but towered over and seemed unconscious of them. His long,
sensitive muzzle was held high to catch a breeze which drew coolly
down from the north, and his half-shut eyes, in Horner's fancy, saw
not the wires of his fence, but the cool, black-green fir thickets of
the north, the gray rampikes of the windy barrens,