Transcriber’s Notes: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end. * * * * * GOD’S COUNTRY _The Trail to Happiness_ _By_ JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD _Author of_ The Valley of Silent Men The River’s End, etc. [Illustration] NEW YORK Cosmopolitan Book Corporation MCMXXI * * * * * Copyright, 1921, by COSMOPOLITAN BOOK CORPORATION _All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian_ _PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA_ The Quinn & Boden Company BOOK MANUFACTURERS RAHWAY NEW JERSEY The Four Trails to Happiness PAGE _The First Trail_ MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 3 _The Second Trail_ I BECOME A KILLER 29 _The Third Trail_ MY BROTHERHOOD 53 _The Fourth Trail_ THE ROAD TO FAITH 83 * * * * * _The First Trail_ MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS * * * * * _The First Trail_ MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS To-night I am in a little cabin in the heart of a great wilderness. Outside it is dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick spruce tops. I hear the laughter of a stream out of which I took my supper of trout. The People of the Night are awake, for a little while ago I heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in an old stub, lives an owl that hoots at the light in my window. I think it’s going to storm. There is a heaviness in the air, and, in the drowse of it, the sweetness of distant rain. I am strangely contented as I start the writing of this strangest of all the things I have written. I had never thought to give voice to the things that I am about to put on paper; yet have I dreamed that every soul in the world might know of them. But the task has seemed too great for me, and I have kept them within myself, expecting them to live and die there. I am contented on this black night, with its promise of storm, for many reasons--though I am in the heart of a peopleless forest fifteen hundred miles from my city home. In the first place, I have built, with my own hands, this cabin that shelters me. My palms are still blistered by the helve of the ax. I am the architect of the fireplace of stone and mud in which a small fire burns for cheer, though it is late spring, with summer in the breath of the forests. I have made the chair in which I sit and the table on which I write, and the builder of a marble palace could take no greater pleasure in his achievement than have I. I am contented because, just now, I have the strange conviction that, in this wild and peopleless place, I am very close to that which many peoples have sought through many ages and have not found.