It was written, by those special jungle gods that plan entertainment for tenderfeet, that Hugh Gaylord should get some slight taste of the real mountains on his walk to the sheep camp. It was only a mile, but the trail was nothing whatever like the golf course that Hugh had been wont to walk around on Friday afternoons. It was narrow and brown, and hard-packed by the feet of the wild folk that had been passing up and down that way since the mountains were new. They hadn’t been careful to keep the grade under six per cent. There was also an occasional rock and a rather frequent dead log that had to be leaped. Moreover the berry vines scratched the face and caught at his clothes when the trail twined between the heavier thickets. Hugh had been proud of his physical condition. He had been under the tutelage of a high-paid physical director, and he could swing the Indian clubs a startling number of times without fatigue. Before that walk was done, however, the fine edge of his self-assurance had been somewhat dulled. In the first place, the pace was rather fast. Pete the guide was inordinately lazy and a wretched guide, but like most wilderness men who get their exercise in walking game trails rather than in swinging Indian clubs, he knew how to make the long miles slide under his feet. It is not an accomplishment of a day—that bent-kneed, shuffling walk, shoulders sagging and feet falling lightly—and it is far from graceful. But it clicks out four miles in every hour through the long mountain day without fatigue. It carries a man up mountains and into glens, and he feels fresh at the end. To-night Pete was in a particular hurry. The devils that dwell just under the dark skins of all his race were crying for strong drink. Besides, darkness would be upon them very soon. The pace took Gaylord’s wind. It brought queer pains low in his chest and an odd heaviness in his legs. But for all that, a physician could have prescribed no better medicine for him. The sweat leaped from his white skin and felt prickly at his neck and forehead, and the fumes of alcohol departed from his brain. The truth was that in this deepening twilight Gaylord saw more clearly than any time since his arrival at Smoky Land. His senses became more alert, his eyes began to penetrate deeper into the thickets. He began to notice dainty mountain flowers, and he took a singular delight in the tracks of the wild things that had been left in the trail. Here a coyote had skulked, here a wolf had raced along in some chase of death, and here a cougar had crept by in some dreadful business of a few nights before. His hearing was sharper, and once the rustle of leaves above his head called his attention to a family of gray squirrels, disporting on the limbs. He found himself watching, with unexplainable interest, his guide.