"My boy," he said, softly, pulling off his cap and standing bareheaded in the rain, "I'm alive now, after the experience of looking straight into the eyes of death and giving up every hope. And, I tell you, it seemed hard to die--just now, when the best hopes of my life are coming true. I had time to think. I thought. I know I talked hard just a bit ago. But I wasn't myself then. I was too near the smoke and fire." He stopped and put his hand to watering eyes. "I can see clear now. And I've got over my bitterness, and I guess now I can understand the Golden Rule. That's my word, and there's my hand on it. Now talk for me to those I've hurt." They clasped hands. But it was Barrett who made that overture. "I'll wait for you at Britt's camp--until you come and tell me what I'm to do," said the timber baron. And then he turned and trudged away across the wet ledges. Wade gazed after him until he disappeared in the stunted growth. He gazed sourly into the palm of the hand that the millionaire had squeezed, and reflected that perhaps Barrett's precipitate repentance was off the same piece as his own forgiveness of the bitter matter that lay between them. Being a young man inclined to be honest with himself, Dwight Wade confessed that the fabric of his forgiveness had a selvage that already showed signs of ravelling. He was a little angry at his state of mind. "And yet it sounded like a campaign speech to catch votes," he muttered. He was still angrier at himself then, for, put into words, his doubt seemed an unjust suspicion. "I must have got more of a jolt than I thought when I dropped from ideals to the real," he pondered, gazing out through the slanting lines of rain. "I seem to have about as many grudges against humanity as old Lane himself." When he looked towards the roof of the little fire station he awoke to the consciousness that the rain was wet and the wind searching. To himself, in a sudden flash of introspection, he seemed to be as unkempt within as without. There on the granite of the bare mountain, with the forces of nature conquering the last embers of the mighty conflagration, the narrower things of life and living--the amenities, the trammels that man patiently puts upon himself for the sake of the social fabric--appeared vain and delusive ideals. It was not thus that the strong battled and won. "Considering what sort of a man they're making of me up here, where cast-iron is better than velvet, I think it's likely, John Barrett, that it has been lucky for you that you have a daughter away down there." He set his face in long gaze to the southern hills, bulked dimly behind the mists. "As for Kate Arden--" He shook his head despondently, and walked away across the glistening granite towards "Ladder" Lane's house. CHAPTER XVI IN THE PATH OF THE BIG WIND