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they held all the things I'd ever thought
or dreamed in them. I looked away
from them, at her lips. Her lips were red
as poppies, heavy with redness. They
moved, and I heard them speaking:
"Poor boy, you love me so, and you
want to kiss me-don't you?"

"No," said I. But I couldn't turn
around. I looked at her hair. I'd always
thought it was stringy hair. Some hair
curls naturally with damp, they say,
and perhaps that was it, for there were
pearls of wet on it, and it was thick and
shimmering around her face, making soft
shadows by the temples. There was green
in it, queer strands of green like braids.
"What is it?" said I

"Nothing but weed," said she, with that slow, sleepy smile.

Somehow or other I felt calmer than I had any time. "Look here," said I. "I'm going to light this lamp." I took out a match, scratched it, and touched the third wick. The flame ran around, bigger than the other two together. But still her arms hung there. I bit my lip. "By God, I will!" said I to myself, and I lit the fourth.

It was fierce, sir, fierce! And yet those arms never trembled. I had to look around at her. Her eyes were still looking into mine, so deep and deep, and her red lips were still smiling with that queer sleepy droop; the only thing was that tears were raining down her cheeks —big, glowing, round, jewel tears. It wasn't human, sir. It was like a dream. "Pretty arms," she sighed, and then, as if those words had broken something in her heart, there came a great sob bursting from her lips. To hear it drove me mad. I reached to drag her away, but she was too quick, sir; she cringed from me and slipped out from between my hands. It was sir, and went down in a bundle, nursing like she faded away,

with those terrible, broken sobs.

her so, and she was afraid of me, of me, sir, who loved her so deep it drove me crazy.

I could see her down the stair, though it was dim and my eyes were filled with tears. I stumbled after her, crying, "Please! Please!" The little wicks I'd lit were blowing in the wind from the door and smoking the glass beside them black. One went out. I pleaded with them, the same as I would plead with a human being. I said I'd be back in a second. I promised. And I went on down the stair, crying like a baby because I'd hurt her, and she was afraid of me of me, sir.

The

She had gone into her room. door was closed against me and I could hear her sobbing beyond it, brokenhearted. My heart was broken, too. I beat on the door with my palms. I begged her to forgive me. I told her I loved her. And all the answer was that sobbing in the dark.

And then I lifted the latch and went in, groping, pleading. "Dearest—please! Because I love you!"

I heard her speak down near the floor. There wasn't any anger in her voice; nothing but sadness and despair.

"No," said she. "You don't love me, Ray. You never have."

"I do! I have!"

"No, no," said she, as if she was tired

out.

"Where are you?" I was groping for her. I thought, and lit a match. She

had got to the door and was standing there as if ready to fly. I went toward her, and she made me stop. She took my breath away. "I hurt your arms," said I, in a dream.

"No," said she, hardly moving her lips. She held them out to the match's light for me to look, and there was never a scar on them—not even that soft, golden down was singed, sir. "You can't hurt my body," said she, sad as any

The sound of them took the manhood thing. "Only my heart, Ray; my poor

out of me--you'd have been the same, sir. I knelt down beside her on the floor

"Please!

and covered my face.
"Please," I moaned.
Please!" That's all I could say.

I

wanted her to forgive me. I reached out a hand, blind, for forgiveness, and I

heart."

I tell you again, she took my breath away. I lit another match. "How can you be so beautiful?" I wondered.

She answered in riddles-but oh, the sadness of her, sir.

"Because," said she, "I've always so

couldn't find her anywhere. I had hurt wanted to be."

"How come your eyes so heavy?" said I.

"Because I've seen so many things I never dreamed of," said she.

"How come your hair so thick?" "It's the seaweed makes it thick," said she, smiling queer, queer.

"How come seaweed there?" "Out of the bottom of the sea." She talked in riddles, but it was like. poetry to hear her, or a song.

"How come your lips so red?" said I. "Because they've wanted so long to be kissed."

Fire was on me, sir. I reached out to catch her, but she was gone, out of the door and down the stair. I followed, stumbling. I must have tripped on the turn, for I remember going through the air and fetching up with a crash, and I didn't know anything for a spell-how long I can't say. When I came to, she was there, somewhere, bending over me, crooning, "My love-my love-" under her breath, like a song.

But then when I got up, she was not where my arms went; she was down the stair again, just ahead of me. I followed her. I was tottering and dizzy and full of pain. I tried to catch up with her in the dark of the store-room, but she was too quick for me, sir, always a little too quick for me. Oh, she was cruel to me, sir. I kept bumping against things, hurting myself still worse, and it was cold and wet and a horrible noise all the while, sir; and then, sir, I found the door was open, and a sea had parted the hinges.

I don't know how it all went, sir. I'd tell you if I could, but it's all so blurred -sometimes it seems more like a dream. I couldn't find her any more; I couldn't hear her; I went all over, everywhere. Once, I remember, I found myself hanging out of that door between the davits, looking down into those big black seas and crying like a baby. It's all riddles and blur. I can't seem to tell you much, sir. It was all-all-I don't know.

I was talking to somebody else—not her. It was the Inspector. I hardly knew it was the Inspector. His face was as gray as a blanket, and his eyes were bloodshot, and his lips were twisted. His left wrist hung down, awkward. It was broken coming aboard the Light in that sea. Yes, we were in the living

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room. Yes, sir, it was daylight-gray daylight. I tell you, sir, the man looked crazy to me. He was waving his good arm toward the weather windows, and what he was saying, over and over, was this: "Look what you done, damn you! Look what you done!"

And what I was saying was this:
"I've lost her!"

I didn't pay any attention to him, nor him to me. By and by he did, though. He stopped his talking all of a sudden, and his eyes looked like the devil's eyes. He put them up close to mine. He grabbed my arm with his good hand, and I cried, I was so weak.

"Johnson," said he, "is that it? By the living God-if you got a woman out here, Johnson!"

"No," said I. "I've lost her."
"What do you mean-lost her?"

"It was dark," said I-and it's funny how my head was clearing up-"and the door was open-the store-room doorand I was after her and I guess she stumbled, maybe and I lost her."

"Johnson," said he, "what do you mean? You sound crazy-downright crazy. Who?"

"Her," said I. "Fedderson's wife."
"Who?"

66

"Her," said I. And with that he gave my arm another jerk.

"Listen," said he, like a tiger. "Don't try that on me. It won't do any goodthat kind of lies-not where you're going to. Fedderson and his wife, too—the both of 'em's drowned deader 'n a door-nail." "I know," said I, nodding my head. I was so calm it made him wild.

"You're crazy! Crazy as a loon, Johnson!" And he was chewing his lip red. "I know, because it was me that found the old man laying on Back Water Flats yesterday morning-me! And she'd been with him in the boat, too, because he had a piece of her jacket tore off, tangled in his arm."

"I know," said I, nodding again, like that.

"You know what, you crazy, murdering fool?" Those were his words to me, sir. "I know," said I, "what I know." "And I know," said he, "what I know."

And there you are, sir. He's Inspector. I'm-nobody."

A Rocky Mountain Game Trail

BY WALTER PRICHARD EATON

ARIOUS animals have their individual trails, which they follow with considerable regularity, and some animals have communal highways from point to point. Last winter I found a fox's burrow far up a steep Berkshire hillside, and leading from it a narrow trail trodden about six or eight inches into the deep snow like a tiny ditch, which wound down through the thick laurel to a pasture edge above a farm where many chickens were kept. Since the last snow, at any rate, the fox had made every trip to and from his nest via this trail. In an alder and young pine thicket not a mile away I found a well-packed rabbit highroad with innumerable smaller cross streets. This street system was quite evidently used by at least a score of the animals. Deer have often their individual trails, and so have the otter. In the old days the buffalo followed beaten tracks from one pasturage to another. Even the migrating birds have charted the air. To the person who loves the wilds, and who especially enjoys practising self-forgetfulness in the wilderness, attempting to recreate the forest scene as it must appear to the eye of the unstartled animal, or as it might appear to man's eye could he render himself invisible and odorless, any game trail is a challenge to the imagination; some of us, indeed, find in this challenge sufficient excitement without being driven to up gun and after.

There are few more interesting game trails in the United States to-day than those in the high Rockies, generally far above timber-line and sometimes threading dizzy spines of rock along the Great Divide, remote and almost inaccessible. Naturally, they are coming to be most trodden in our National Parks, where the game is protected now and at least holding its own in numbers. It was my

good fortune recently to find and to follow several such game trails along the knife-blade ridge of "the backbone of the world" in Glacier National Park, at altitudes varying from seventy-five hundred to almost ten thousand feet. Above the timber, above the glaciers, but never above some patch of moss or tiny garden of alpine flowers, with the vast, tumbled world spread out below, the goats and sheep traverse their windy highways. They are the permanent residents of the peaks. Sometimes a deer may come, when the trail is easy of access; a Rocky Mountain white-tailed deer circled curiously around our camp for an hour one evening only five hundred feet below the Divide at Swift Current Pass. No doubt an occasional mountain lion or. coyote may prowl along, looking for a chance to fell a juicy kid or lamb. The whistling marmot, first cousin to our Eastern woodchuck, may not infrequently waddle over the path if it is not too lofty; and silver foxes traverse it. But the hoofs of the sheep and goats are the feet which have powdered the rock and scanty soil into a visible trail. It is their highway; and if you follow it far enough you will always see why. It ends at the jumping-off place. Not infrequently it begins there, also. Nothing without wings can follow a mountain sheep or goat when he comes to trail's end.

One, at least, of the game trails we visited is comparatively easy of access. It lies along the ridge of the Divide just south of Swift Current Pass. The Pass itself is a depression in the Divide, seven thousand one hundred and seventy-six feet above sea-level. It is reached by an extremely steep but excellent Government trail, and over it come hundreds of tourists in the summer, which possibly accounts for the fact that during the entire July day we spent on this game trail we saw neither goat nor sheep. The big game may seek a less populous

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neighborhood while the tourist season is on. The Pass itself is a grassy meadow almost, but not quite, above timber. It affords shelter for considerable groves of stunted fir, from four to eight feet high, and for a vast colony of ground-squirrels (Columbia River ground-squirrel, Citellus columbianus). În size and appearance they more nearly resemble a fat gray squirrel than any other rodent familiar in the East, though their fur is spotted rufous and green on the back; but they live in burrows in the ground, like prairie-dogs and gophers. Coming into an open glade in the Pass ahead of the pack-train, I counted twenty-three of these little creatures scurrying about in all directions or sitting up on their haunches and scolding at me, before they had become so mixed up that further counting was impossible. When a ground-squirrel is surprised by your presence he usually sits up on his hind quarters and clasps his forepaws against his whitish belly, as if he had a bad pain. Then he presses himself hard, his mouth opens, and, exactly like one of those mechanical toys you squeeze in the middle, out of his insides comes a shrill, almost birdlike cheep. Then, as often as not, he pops down into his hole. If you stand still and wait a moment, you will see his head emerge, either from the hole where he went in or from one not far away (for he seems to dig considerable subway systems), and his pretty, sharp, little squirrel eyes will peer cautiously and eagerly around the scene.

In such a spot as Swift Current Pass, however, where tourist travel is frequent and lunches are eaten almost every day in summer, these small animals become extremely fearless. You may lay a sandwich down beside you only to find it disappearing when you turn around. At one of our two-day camps I secured a photograph of a squirrel sitting up in the middle of a cold soup-kettle, and by the second day several of the little creatures would climb up on our knees and eat scraps from our hands. In such a frequented place the greedy old fellows are so fat they look like miniature woodchucks.

Directly south of the Swift Current Pass meadow rises a pyramid of tumbled rock and shale, about six hundred feet in

height. Timber ceases abruptly a few feet up its steep slope. You are in the sub-Arctic world characteristic of so many million acres of the upper reaches of our great Rocky Mountain chain. But the end of timber does not mean the end of life. Wherever the least little hollow has caught a soil deposit some wild flower or bunch of grass or bit of moss has taken root. From plants almost microscopic-not over half an inch high-to masses of low heather and gorgeous bouquets of pink moss campion the gardens range, a surprise awaiting you on the lee side of every boulder, or even on the tops of them. As we climbed this slope we startled a ptarmigan hen and six little chicks, that went scuttling off through the shale behind their mother. The ptarmigan is the largest bird which lives the year through near or above the timber-line. It is somewhat smaller than a ruffed grouse, or partridge, and it changes its color with the seasons like a varying hare. In winter it is white, and consequently inconspicuous on the snow; in summer, a brownish gray, so much like the rocks it runs between that it speedily becomes invisible as it scampers away from you. Protective coloration, too, seems to characterize the marmots of this upland world. To be sure, we saw a pair of them running over a snow-field three thousand feet below at the base of a cliff, as we were starting out for the day, and they were conspicuous enough. But up on the heights the mountain woodchuck crawls out on a rock to sun himself and looks a part of it. Much of the marmot's head, breast, and shoulders is dirty white, but he has a black muzzle and chin and dark eyes. From the shoulders he shades off into earthy brown, varying sometimes toward black. I pursued one of them around a rock with my camera, and finally got two pictures of him, one as he was peeping out at me around the side of the boulder, one as he was lifting up nearly his whole body over the top. Both pictures were taken with a small iris (in that rarefied atmosphere rapid photography of great definition is possible), and made clean, brilliant prints, yet I have to point out to people looking at them which is the rock and which the marmot. After

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