r hunting costume and with her knowledge of tree
climbing, the rest of the way, from limb to limb, might be difficult
but would certainly not be impossible or fraught with unaccustomed
danger.

The cub had climbed until coming to a limb which like the lowest one
scraped against the rock not half a dozen feet from the tapering trunk,
he had crept out on it and was lying upon a ledge of rock. Wanda hoped
that here was the opportunity of a lifetime. She would climb as high
as that limb, and find the cub's flight shut off by the sheer wall
rising perpendicularly behind him. Then she would make him pose for
her, whether he liked it or not.

Flushed and panting the girl made her way upward until finally she
caught with both hands the big lower limb. Field glasses and camera in
their cases strapped to her belt in no way interfered with the free
play of her muscles. She tested the branch a moment, smiled at herself
for hesitating to trust her light weight to a thing which would have
carried tons, gripped a firmer hold and swung free of the rocks. Here
would have been a picture for her mother had she come with her this
morning; the lithe graceful body swinging twenty feet high in air, only
hard slab and broken boulder beneath her. Then she drew herself up as
a boy does "chinning himself," threw a heel over the limb, and in a
flash lay breathing deeply and triumphantly, the most difficult step of
her climb achieved.

Slowly, steadily she made her way upward. In the main it was simple
enough for Wanda for it was the sort of thing she did over and over
week in and week out. Once, already fifty feet from the ground, she
did something that would have been simple enough under other
circumstances and yet which put a quick flutter in her heart. It was
something which would have made the heart grow still in the breast of
Wayne Shandon had he seen, which would have brought a paralysing fear
for her to a man who loved life for the gamble in it and who took his
chances recklessly.

She was perched fearlessly upon a sturdy horizontal limb, her body
tight pressed against the trunk, her hands gripping at the roughened
bark, steadying her as she balanced. A quick glance upward showed her
a bare stretch of bole with the nearest limb on her side of the tree
just barely beyond her reach. Slowly she straightened, lengthening her
pliant body the imperceptible fraction of an inch, gradually thrusting
her two arms up high above her he