He had been there with his father for a week, and now must go. He was chopping wood that morning, with his father looking on. Steele had cast a measuring glance at the pile of wood cut, then wiped the fine dew of perspiration from his brow, buried the ax blade in the chopping-log and seated himself upon a sawn block. A smile shaped itself upon his lips. Though he never chopped wood now except on these rare visits to his recluse father's cabin here on the forested mountain side, his tall lean figure was as tough and wiry as ever, his arm as tireless, his eye as true to cut the exact line. There was yet no softening of his fibers or fat on his ribs, and there would be neither if he had anything to say about it. From the little Idaho town in the valley below, which he viewed through the clearing before the cabin, his gaze came around to his father seated on the doorstep. Taciturn and brooding the latter had always been, but the pity and sorrow struck at the son's heart as he perceived what a mere shell of a man now sat there, gray-haired, bent, fleshless, consumed body and soul by the destroying acid of some dark secret. Even when a lad Steele Weir had sensed the mystery clouding his father's life. Like an evil spell it had condemned them to solitude here in the mountains, until Steele's youth at last rebelled and he had departed, hungry for schooling, for human society and for a wider field of action. What that secret might be he had for years not allowed himself to speculate. Unbidden at times the memory of certain revealing looks or acts of his father's floated into his mind:--a dread if not terror that on occasion dilated the elder man's eyes, and a steadfast driving of himself at work as if to obliterate painful and despairing thoughts, and an uneasy, furtive vigilance when forced to visit town. Once when a stranger, a short heavy-set bearded man, had unexpectedly appeared at the door, his father had leaped for the revolver hanging in its holster on the wall. On catching a second view of the chance visitor he had exclaimed, "Not Burkhardt after all!" With which he burst into a wild laugh, the shrill mirthless laugh of a man suddenly freed of a terrible fear. However, as he returned the gun-belt to its place, his hand shook so that he pawed all around the nail on which it was accustomed to hang.