instead of trumpet-call and battle-cry only a long, low singing on the beach. No; one thing beside—a faint whining from within a deserted hovel. Again, from without, the beast before the desolate threshold woke the hill-born echoes with his howling. Surely a stray dog had got in there and been unable to get out. She would open the door barely wide enough to throw him some of the pilot bread she’d brought in her pocket for luncheon. She lifted a hand to the rude latch, but, instead of opening the door outright, sheer habit, with nothing in it of reflection, made her first of all knock. “Come in,” said a voice. She started back, and held her breath. Again that low: “Come in.” It seemed to her that she must run, and at the same time even more that she must obey the voice. Oh, why had she come? Taking uncertain hold of her courage she pushed the door ajar. Red flung it wide by bounding in before her. She had time only to see that a man, half-sitting up on a camp bed, with a gray army blanket over his knees, was whittling away at a long, narrow bit of flat wood. She hardly noticed at the moment, though she remembered later, that when he saw a stranger at his door, he dropped his knife and made an automatic action to lay protecting hands on a dingy bundle, half out, half under the low bed. Hildegarde’s attention was of necessity centered in the dogs; his, shaky and half-blind, conducting defense from the foot of the bed. The girl laid hold on Red’s collar and dragged him back, although it was plain now she had done so, that he considered the decrepit animal, half-muffled in the blanket, as vanquished already and quite unworthy of more consideration than could be conveyed in a final volley of scornful howls. After which relief to his feelings, Hildegarde’s fellow-intruder pointedly turned his back and went sniffing about the forlorn little room. “I am sorry we disturbed you,” the girl said to the hollow-eyed, unkempt being on the bed. There were curious scars on the wasted face set in its frame of wild, tawny hair and wilder, tawnier beard. No scattering of silver here and there, but just at the temples the hair was white as wool. As she saw plainer now, being used to the dimness, the face, striking as it was, impressed her chiefly through that quality of special ghastliness produced by a pallor that shows clay-like under tan. “I thought,” she said, winding up her apology—“I thought the dog was shut up here alone—forgotten.” “It might come to be like that,” he said, and paused an instant, as if for breath. When he spoke again it was less to his visitor than as if to soothe the ruffled feelings of the miserable beast at his feet. “It won’t be my fault, though,” he said. “I’ll forget most things before I forget you, shan’t I, Ky?” “That is how his master feels about this dog, too, though _he’s_ nothing but a mongrel,” Hildegarde said. She was thinking, “The man is very ill.” “His master—some one prospecting hereabouts?”