every claim of gun and rod, of moccasin and saucepan had been conscientiously discharged did the book-shelf come into its own with the hour of the fresh log on the fire, the refilled pipe and the spectacles skilfully supported by a leather shoestring. The quiver of a leaf at a hundred yards could not escape Isaac's small slit of an eye. The printed page was another matter. In the wood trail his step was confident and sure. Not so in the wilderness of words. To see him standing before his book-shelf, spectacles on nose and thumb on title, was to see a man in the agony of choice. There were dog-eared paper volumes teeming with lords and ladies, knights and villains. He loved them as the child loves Punch and Judyloved them, but did not believe in them. They were his theatre, stage puppets strutting through a brief existence. At the time he took them seriously, paid his entrance-fee of a tallow dip, and surrendered himself to the world of fantasybut cautiously, with many mental reservations. Deeply as he sympathized with the beleaguered heroine, her passivity under persecution vexed his soul. If the "foolish crittur" had but opened her window and shouted for the sheriff, all her woes would have been over; and when Jessica's life was threatened, he warned her audibly of her peril in ejaculations whispered or explosive, as circumstances demanded.

There were also adventures in Darkest Africa, and while the nearest relative in Caranac woods to the denizens of the jungle was a small black bear, contemptuously designated by Isaac as a "varmint," the gilded picture of a mane or tusk on the cover was a magnet to his outstretched hand.

Interspersed among these tales of adventure were also stories of homely characters of the common sort. They were not common to Isaac's experience. His earliest recollections did not reach back to a mother. But something within him responded to these gentler apparitions, and their presence in even purely literary forms had given to the lonely cabin on the Upper Snake River the illusive atmosphere of home.

But of all the magnets on the shelf above the smoke-stained fireplace the

most potent were certain ponderous volumes left by a patron of meditative tendencies who had proved as much of an enigma as the legacy left on departure. The Caranac woods were Isaac's Wall Street-a place to make one's living. To resort to them without gun or line, to be deaf to their day and night call, to weight a pack with books and not a single cartridge, was to earn the epithet of "the curiousest cuss I ever see." Isaac had pondered over this human phenomenon long and deep. Its incomprehensibility awed him. So did the incomprehensible books the Enigma left behind him. There was a "Genealogy of Morals," an "Essay on Woman," and, most alluring of all, "The Ego and His Own." Many a page had Isaac thumbed without comprehending a line.

To understand the spell of the bookshelf it must be remembered that such bare, naked events as birth, marriage, death, common in Caranac as elsewhere, were more common than books. Unadorned common things did not interest Isaac. He did the common things necessary to be done, as oiling his rifle or skinning a rabbit; the others, not directly in his path, did not concern him. If romance existed in Caranac, as undoubtedly it did, it was as an invisible undertow, obscured by the surface agitation of a monotonous life chiefly devoted to keeping the body warm and fed, and escaping the onset of black flies and midges. But books disclosed horizons hidden by Caranac woods, and emotions unknown to its hand-to-mouth inhabitants. Were they realities or phantoms? What the devil was the Ego anyway!

III

WITH Maggie's advent Reality crowded fiction from the place of honor and the lure of the book-shelf dwindled. Heretofore the loneliest spot on the Snake River was the interior of Isaac's cabin. Pleasure, Joy, Companionship dwelt in the wild. And now these dwelt with Maggie and the wild was a dreary waste.

That Maggie fell in with the ways of her new world must be set down to her credit. She was not afraid of a gun, as Mary was. She could sit straight in a

canoe and did not despise moccasins. Little by little her first short excursions on sunny days lengthened, till her smaller footprints became as familiar to the wary followers of the trail as those of her master. All through the autumn she sang on the Upper Snake as at Faraway, though she had no need to, from force of habit, and Isaac drank deeper at the wells of contentment. For the labor of life had been divided by two, its joy doubled, and this division of toil and multiplication of comfort was fast becoming an economic necessity. He had been a lonely man. He still loved silence and solitude. But in respect to Maggie he was growing gregarious. On that fateful night when she deserted Faraway Lake she was glad of the darkness. The triumph in her shining eyes was for Mary, not for the silent figure bending to the sweep of the paddle, revelling in the illusions of man's aggressiveness.

Then the winter settled down with a grasp of iron, Isaac made pilgrimages to still lonelier places to set his traps in the wood lanes and waterways of the fourfooted world, and the north wind tugged at Maggie's heart-strings and her pæan of victory disappeared with that of feathered creation. It was about this time that she turned to the neglected book-shelf and heard above the call of the wild the call of the world. With the breaking up of the ice the hold of winter loosened, the snow ran out of the creek, and down in Caranac the cows were turned out in search of scanty pasturage. Despite temporary relapses into freezing weather, the sap climbed higher, the willows grew more pliant, the buds swelled in their sheaths, the black flies arrived, smudges in the camps on Faraway sent up their blurs of smoke, and when the birds came Maggie sang again the irrepressible song of the Will to Live.

In his own reticent way Isaac also was dreaming. He had a secret, a momentous project, formed with his habitual prudence and deliberation. The season had been a prosperous one, as the pile of skins in the corner attested; and under the oak block serving as anvil were banknotes of unusual denominations. All this accumulation of wealth, the fruit of toiling years, once destined to a future of

rheumatism and failing eyesight, was to be laid at Maggie's feet. Memories of the book-shelf came to him as he trudged through the swamp-visions of strange lands, of palms and snow-clad peaks and cities. That he would be unhappy in cities he foresaw; palms were of doubtful reality, as bearing no resemblance to a real tree, and barren snow peaks were of no use to man or beast. But Maggie should see them, walk under the palms like the ladies in the picture, clothed in raiment of her own selection. Generous in his project, he was a miser with his secret. Not till leaves were falling, when Maggie's courage should falter, would he reveal it. Meanwhile, as day by day tired Nature yielded to the numbing touch of the north wind, the ferment of anticipation worked in Isaac's veins and the wine of the Indian summer mounted to Maggie's brain.

IV

DUSK was falling when after a long and last absence Isaac's canoe rounded the bend above the cabin. He had been away a week. Every trap had been collected, every pelt converted into cash. He was winding up his affairs. With every twist of his paddle's blade the beat of his sturdy heart quickened. Secrets of mighty import were to see the firelight before another sun rose.

Then his heart stood still.

From far away came the voice of Spot, always left behind to keep Maggie company. Every accent of inarticulate speech Isaac knew. Spot was on no trail of fox, had treed no coon. His cry was the cry of the lost, the forsaken. In the long centuries of man's companionship Spot had lost touch with his kin. Instinct was in the service of the master on whom, in spite of his canine teeth and carnivorous lineage, he depended for food as well as sympathy. Crouched at Isaac's feet, the ears of his fellow stiffened, his back bristling. Isaac listened.

Something had happened to Maggie!

Swift as an arrow the canoe leaped forward with the current. Overhead a flicker screamed. A muskrat plunged in the rushes. The wings of the fleeing duck beat on the water.