The Voice of the Pack

e question without coughing once, but in spite of it she felt that he ought to be asking for California or Arizona maps, rather than Oregon. People did not usually go t

nshine in the south, with all the grades between. There are certain sections where in midwinter all hunters who do not particularly care to sink over their heads in the level snow walk exclusively on snowshoes. There are others, not one hundred miles distant, where any kind of snowstorm is as rare a phe

sage hens as thick as poultry in a hen-yard and jack rabbits of a particularly long-legged and hardy breed, but also America's one species of antelope. Had Dan known that this was true, had he only been aware that these antelope are without exception the fastest-runnin

hat the town, halfway between the sage plains and the mountains, had prospered and changed its name. He remembered that it was located on one of those great fresh-water lakes of Southern Oregon; so, giving up that search, he began to look for lakes. He found them in plenty,-vast, unmea

map said so very plainly. Then Dan knew he was getting home. His grandfather had lived and trapped and died in these same woode

ht sporting equipment. Knowing the usual ratio between the respective pleasures of anticipation

stence. There were men who were fitted for living in cities, but perhaps he was not one of them. He saw the station lights grow dim as the train pulled out. Soon he cou

. It is true that he had not experienced many adventures. He had lived most of them in imagination alone; or else, with t

ed to know the name of some mountain rancher where possibly he might find board and room for the remainder of the summer and the fall. He wanted shooting, and he particularly cared to be near a river where trout might be found. They never came up Gitcheapol

vivid memories of Dan's grandfather. But it might be that a legend of the gray, straight frontiersman who w

finding country homes for orchardists in the pleasant river valleys. But it happened that the recipient of the wire was one of the oldest residents, a frontiersman himself, and it was one of the traditions of the Old West th

Dan Failing of th

thing, Dan Failing would have probably stepped off the train at his destination wholly unheralded and unmet. The one thing that changed his destiny was that at a meeting of a certain widely known fraternal order the next night, the Chamber of Commerce crossed trails with the Frontier in the person of another old resident who had his home in the farthest reaches of the Um

mmerce had replied. "But Lennox-that remi

interested face. "Remember him!" he exclaimed. "I should say I do." The middle-aged man half-closed his piercing, gray eyes. Those piercing eyes are a characteristic peculiar to the

-tail bounding up a long slope. It was just a spike-buck, and Dan Failing said he could take the left-hand spike off with one shot from his old Sharpe's. Three o

g for, then. You're not going o

N

dson of Dan Failing. His name is Dan Failing too, and he wants

e spoke, too. "Good Lord," he said. "I used to foller Dan around-like old Shag,

led. "He won't come, then," he explained. "Anyway, have that out with him at the end of his stay. He wants fishing, and you've got that in the North fork. He wants shooting,

andfather was before him-that all the Failings have been since the first days of t

s own knowledge. "He won't be; don't count on it," he said humbly. "The Failings have done much for this region, and I'm glad enough to do a little to pay it bac

'd been like the other Failings, he'd never have been that. Why, Steele, you couldn't have given that old man a cold if you'd tied him in th

not af

. Snowbird weighs one hundred and twenty pounds and is hard as stee

s he drove down to the lower levels in the winter and, twisting its horns, would make it lay over on

nitely fresh into the windows of the sleeping car, and it brought, as camels bring myrrh from the East, strange, pungent odors of balsam and mountain flower and warm earth, cooling after a day of blasting sun. And these smells all c