"The affair of the girl is not mine at all," he said. "Simply because she seemed superior to the tribe she was with, I hoped Mr. Barrett would do as he partly promised--use a few dollars of his money to help her from the muck. Such cases appeal to me, because I'm not accustomed to seeing them, perhaps." "If my girl is interested in that poor little wildcat, you needn't think twice about her bein' taken good care of," cried the admiring father. And gazing into the wholesome eyes and candid face of the little man, Wade reflected that perhaps Fate had handled a problem better for John Barrett's abandoned daughter than he himself, in his resentful zeal, had planned. He shook Ide's hand hard, and, with the picture of John Barrett's other daughter in his dimming eyes and the love of John Barrett's other daughter burning in his lonely heart, he turned back towards the woods, whose fronded arms, tossing in the October wind, beckoned him to his duty. CHAPTER XX THE HA'NT OF THE UMCOLCUS "For even in these days P. I.'s shake At word of the phantom of Brassua Lake; And all of us know of the witherlick That prowls by the shores of the Cup-sup-tic; Of the side-hill ranger whose eyeballs gleam In the light of the moon at Abol stream." --The Ha'nts. A few days after the men of Enchanted were housed, those who gazed southeast from the mountain shoulder saw a smear of white on the horizon. It was the first snow on lofty Katahdin. Tommy Eye greeted that sight most enthusiastically. Like a good teamster, he was anxious for "slippin'." "Bless the saints, old Winter has pitched camp down there, and is mixin' up a batch of our kind of weather," he said to Wade. "Injun Summer had better grab up what's left of her flounces and get out from under." But Winter proceeded about his business with majestic deliberateness. He patted down the duff under the big trees with beating, sleety rains; and when the ground was ready for the sowing of the mighty crop, he piled his banks of clouds up from the south, and, though he gave the coast folk rain, he brought the men of the north woods what they were longing for--snow a-plenty; snow that heaped the arms of the spruces, filled all the air with smothering clouds, and blanketed the ground. Wade, blinking the big flakes out of his eyes as he breasted the swirling storm, came across to the main camp from the wangan, his pipe and tobacco-pouch in hand. He rejoiced in his heart to see the snow driving so thickly that the camp window was only a blur of yellow light smudging the whiteness. This first real storm of the winter promised two feet on a level, and guaranteed the slipping on ram-downs and twitch-roads.