made his tiptoe
preparations, and lifted his face, letting the light, soft fingers of
the wind, cooler and softer even than Sylvie's, smooth out the knots of
suffering from his tired brain. He shook his shoulders before settling
them under the load of pelts. He would, he swore, just for this day,
be a boy again. He sprang lightly up from the hollow and strode forward
with long, swift steps, swinging a companionable stick in his free hand.

Loneliness and the dawn and love had made a poet of the young man, so
that he had the release of poetry and forgot reality in its translation
into a tale that is told. He thought of Sylvie, but he thought of her as
a man thinks of a lovely memory. He went through the wood with his chin
lifted, half smiling, almost happy, an integral part of the wild, glad,
wistful spring.

It was not until the afternoon when he was nearing the station--just, in
fact, before he left the wood-trail for the rutted, frontier road--that
his mind was caught as sharply as a cloth by a needle, by the light
sound of following steps. In the solitude of that trail which his feet
alone had worn, the sound brought him to a stop with a sense of terror
and suspense. His mind leaped to Hugh, and for the first time in his
loyal life Pete remembered, and remembering, felt a creeping on his
skin, that this brother of his, who had grown harsh and jealous and
suspicious, had been a murderer. The cold, unkindly memory slid along
his senses like a snake. On the edge of the sloping road-bank, studded
with little yellow flowers, just where the trees stopped, Pete set down
his load and waited, instinctively bracing his body, drawing it back
beneath the shelter of one of the big pines.

The steps were light and swift and stealthy. In the purplish confusion
of the distance, a tangled and yet ordered regiment of trunks and
boughs, sun-splotches and shadow-blots, through which the uncertain
trail seemed to rise like a slender thread of smoke to the pale, flecked
sky, Pete made out a moving shape. It slipped in and out; it hesitated,
hurried, paused, moved on. With a shudder of relief and of surprise,
Pete saw it; out from behind the great, close trunks came Sylvie,
her chin lifted, her hands stretched out on either side, brushing the
swinging branches along the trail, her small head turning from this side
to that, as though she listened in suspense.

Pete called out her name and ran quickly to meet her. Forgetting
his part of