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contracted fifteen hundred dollars' worth of mining for the Duncans, and

instead of taking a partner he went after that stake single handed. He is a

very rare man who can turn out that amount of labor in a single season, but

Gregg furnished that exception which establishes the rule: he did the

assessment work on fourteen claims and almost finished the fifteenth, yet

he paid the price. Week after week his set of drills was wife and child to

him, and for conversation he had only the clangor of the four-pound

single-jack on the drill heads, with the crashing of the "shots" now and

then as periods to the chatter of iron on iron. He kept at it, and in the

end he almost finished the allotted work, but for all of it he paid in

full.



The acid loneliness ate into him. To be sure, from boyhood he knew the

mountain quiet, the still heights and the solemn echoes, but towards the

close of the long isolation the end of each day found him oppressed by a

weightier sense of burden; in a few days he would begin to talk to himself.



From the first the evening pause after supper hurt him most, for a man

needs a talk as well as tobacco, and after a time he dreaded these evenings

so bitterly that he purposely spent himself every day, so as to pass from

supper into sleep at a stride. It needed a long day to burn out his

strength thoroughly, so he set his rusted alarm-clock, and before dawn it

brought him groaning out of the blankets to cook a hasty breakfast and go

slowly up to the tunnel. In short, he wedded himself to his work; he

stepped into a routine which took the place of thought, and the change in

him was so gradual that he did not see the danger.



A mirror might have shown it to him as he stood this morning at the door of

his lean-to, for the wind fluttered the shirt around his labor-dried body,

and his forehead puckered in a frown, grown habitual. It was a narrow face,

with rather close-set eyes and a slanted forehead which gave token of a

single-track mind, a single-purposed nature with one hundred and eighty

pounds of strong sinews and iron-hard muscle to give it significance. Such

was Vic Gregg as he stood at the door waiting for the coffee he had drunk

to brush away the cobwebs of sleep, and then he heard the eagle scream.



A great many people have never heard the scream of an eagle. The only voice

they connect with the kind of the air is a ludicrously feeble squawk, dim

with distance, but in his great moments the eagle has a war-cry like that

of the hawk, but harsher, hoarser, tenfold in volume. This sound cut into

the night in the gulch, and Vic Gregg started and glanced about for echoes

made the sound stand at his side; then he looked up, and saw two eagles

fighting in the light of the morning. He knew what it meant--the beginning

of the mating season, and these two battling for a prize. They darted away.

They flashed together with reaching talons and gaping beaks, and dropped in

a tumult of wings, then soared and clashed once more until one of them

folded his wings and dropped bulletlike out of the morning into the night.

Close over Gregg's head, the wings flirted out--ten feet from tip to

tip--beat down with a great washing sound, and the bird shot across the

valley in a level flight. The conqueror screamed a long insult down the

hollow. For a while he balanced, craning his bald head as if he sought

applause, then, without visible movement of his wings, sailed away over the

peaks. A feather fluttered slowly down past Vic Gregg.



He looked down to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his neck. All

about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a green-mottled face

of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked with veins of glittering

silicate, and in this corner, still misted with the last delicate shades of

night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-pink. The single-jack dropped from the

hand of Gregg, and his frown relaxed.



When he stretched his arms, the cramps of labor unkinked and let the warm

blood flow, swiftly, and in the pleasure of it he closed his eyes and drew

a luxurious breath. He stepped from the door with his, head high and his

heart lighter, and when his hobnailed shoe clinked on the fallen hammer he

kicked it spinning from his path. That act brought a smile into his eyes,

and he sauntered to the edge of the little plateau and looked down into the

wide chasm of the Asper Valley.



Blue shadows washed across it, though morning shone around Gregg on the

height, and his glance dropped in a two-thousand-foot plunge to a single

yellow eye that winked through the darkness, a light in the trapper's

cabin. But the dawn was falling swiftly now, and while Gregg lingered the

blue grew thin, purple-tinted, and then dark, slender points pricked up,

which he knew to be the pines. Last of all, he caught the sheen of grass.



Around him pressed a perfect silence, the quiet of night holding over into

the day, yet he cast a glance behind him as he heard a voice. Indeed, he

felt that some one approached him, some one for whom he had been waiting,

yet it was a sad expectancy, and more like homesickness than anything he

knew.



"Aw, hell," said Vic Gregg, "it's spring."



A deep-throated echo boomed back at him, and the sound went down the gulch,

three times repeated.



"Spring," repeated Gregg more softly, as if he feared to rouse that echo,

"damned if it ain't!"



He shrugged his shoulders and turned resolutely towards the lean-to,

picking up the discarded hammer on the way. By instinct he caught it at

exactly the right balance for his strength and arm, and the handle, polished

by his grip, played with an oiled, frictionless movement against the

callouses of his palm. From the many hours of drilling, fingers crooked, he

could only straighten them by a painful effort. A bad hand for cards, he

decided gloomily, and still frowning over this he reached the door. There

he paused in instant repugnance, for the place was strange to him.



In thought and wish he was even now galloping Grey Molly over the grass

along the Asper, and he had to wrench himself into the mood of the patient

miner. There lay his blankets, rumpled, brown with dirt, and he shivered at

sight of them; the night had been cold. Before he fell asleep, he had flung

the magazine into the corner and now the wind rustled its torn, yellowed

pages in a whisper that spoke to Gregg of the ten-times repeated stories,

tales of adventure, drifts of tobacco smoke in gaming halls, the chant of

the croupier behind the wheel, deep voices of men, laughter of pretty

girls, tatoo of running horses, shouts which only redeye can inspire. He

sniffed the air; odor of burned bacon and coffee permeated the cabin. He

turned to the right and saw his discarded overalls with ragged holes at the

knees; he turned to the left and looked into the face of the rusted alarm

clock. Its quick, soft ticking sent an ache of weariness through him.



"What's wrong with me," muttered Gregg. Even that voice seemed ghostly loud

in the cabin, and he shivered again. "I must be going nutty."



As if to escape from his own thoughts, he stepped out into the sun again,

and it was so grateful to him after the chill shadow in the lean-to, that

he looked up, smiling, into the sky. A west wind urged a scattered herd of

clouds over the peaks, tumbled masses of white which puffed into

transparent silver at the edges, and behind, long wraiths of vapor marked

the path down which they had traveled. Such an old cowhand as Vic Gregg

could not fail to see the forms of cows and heavy-necked bulls and running

calves in that drift of clouds. About this season the boys would be

watching the range for signs of screw worms in the cattle, and the

bog-riders must have their hands full dragging out cows which had fled into

the mud to escape the heel flies. With a new lonesomeness he drew his eyes

down to the mountains.



Ordinarily, strange fancies never entered the hard head of Gregg, but today

it seemed to him that the mountains found a solemn companionship in each

other.



Out of the horizon, where the snowy forms glimmered in the blue, they

marched in loose order down to the valley of the Asper, where some of them

halted in place, huge cliffs, and others stumbled out into foothills, but

the main range swerved to the east beside the valley, eastward out of his

vision, though he knew that they went on to the town of Alder.



Alder was Vic Gregg's Athens and Rome in one, its schoolhouse his

Acropolis, and Captain Lorrimer's saloon his Forum. Other people talked of

larger cities, but Alder satisfied the imagination of Vic; besides, Grey

Molly was even now in the blacksmith's pasture, and Betty Neal was teaching

in the school. Following the march of the mountains and the drift of the

clouds, he turned towards Alder. The piled water shook the dam, topped it,

burst it into fragments, and rushed into freedom; he must go to Alder, have

a drink, shake hands with a friend, kiss Betty Neal, and come back again.

Two days going, two days coming, three days for the frolic; a week would

cover it all. And two hours later Vic Gregg had cached his heavier equipment,

packed his necessaries on the burro, and was on the way.



By noon he had dropped below the snowline and into the foothills, and with

every step his heart grew lighter. Behind him the mountains slid up into

the heart of the sky with cold, white winter upon them, but here below it

was spring indubitably. There was hardly enough fresh grass to temper the

winter brown into shining bronze, but a busy, awakening insect life

thronged through the roots. Surer sign than this, the flowers were coming.

A slope of buttercups flashed suddenly when the wind struck it and wild

morning glory spotted a stretch of daisies with purple and dainty lavender.

To be sure, the blossoms never grew thickly enough to make strong dashes of

color, but they tinted and stained the hillsides. He began to cross noisy

little watercourses, empty most of the year, but now the melting snow fed

them. From eddies and quiet pools the bright watercress streamed out into

the currents, and now and then in moist ground under a sheltering bank he

found rich patches of violets.



His eyes went happily among these tokens of the glad time of the year, but

while he noted them and the bursting buds of the aspen, reddish-brown, his

mind was open to all that middle register of calls which the human ear may

notice in wild places. Far above his scale were shrilling murmurs of birds

and insects, and beneath it ran those ground noises that the rabbit, for

instance, understands so well; but between these overtones and undertones

he heard the scream of the hawk, spiraling down in huge circles, and the

rapid call of a grouse, far off, and the drone of insects about his feet,

or darting suddenly upon his brain and away again. He heard these things by

the grace of the wind, which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and

again shut off all except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often

whisked away every murmur and left Gregg, in the center of a wide hush with

only the creak of the pack-saddle and the click of the burro's accurate

feet among the rocks.



At such times he gave his full attention to the trail, and he read it as

one might turn the pages of a book. He saw how a rabbit had scurried,

running hard, for the prints of the hind feet planted far ahead of those on

the forepaws. There was reason in her haste, for here the pads of a racing

coyote had dug deeply into a bit of soft ground. The sign of both rabbit

and coyote veered suddenly, and again the trail told the reason clearly--

the big print of a lobo's paw, that gray ghost which haunts the ranges with

the wisest brain and the swiftest feet in the West. Vic Gregg grinned with

excitement; fifty dollars' bounty if that scalp were his! But the story of

the trail called him back with the sign of some small animal which must

have traveled very slowly, for in spite of the tiny size of the prints,

each was distinct. The man sniffed with instinctive aversion and distrust

for this was the trail of the skunk, and if the last of the seven sleepers

was out, it was spring indeed. He raised his cudgel and thwacked the burro

joyously.



"Get on, Marne," he cried. "We're overdue in Alder."



Marne switched her tail impatiently and canted back a long ear to listen,

but she did not increase her pace; for Marne had only one gait, and if Vic

occasionally thumped her, it was rather by way of conversation than in any

hope of hurrying their journey.