For the first time in his life he was _serving_. Was not his gun resting in his hands? For once in his life he was bearing arms in the oldest war that mankind knows,—the war against the menace of the wild. The blood leaped and sang in his veins. CHAPTER VI In the hour before Pete, the guide, returned with camp supplies to the sheep camp, Hugh had a chance to observe various things about this mountain land of which he had never been aware before. He sensed, for really the first time, the mystery of the forest in the darkness. The domain of man, it seemed to him, extended just to the limits of the little meadow where the sheep were bedded: beyond that lay the Kingdom of the Wild. He saw, with an inner gladness and stir, the long outline of the high range against the pale western sky,—the one part of the firmament the darkness had not yet completely over-spread. The peaks seemed to rise to the upper reaches of the heavens; between them he could see the sweeping concave line, rough-edged, of the pine forests. He learned certain things concerning the way the firelight leaps into the shadow and the darkness comes racing back. He heard the various overtones, known only to a woodsman, in the crackle of the fire. At the end of the hour he beheld an even greater mystery. At first it was just a smear of silver, suddenly catching his eye, in the darkness of the east. It grew, it extended; clouds were ensilvered by it and broken apart; it gleamed with indescribable beauty, and in a moment it evolved into the moon. The orb rose higher, the beams slanted down. But the enchantment of the forest only seemed to deepen beneath it. Only at intervals could the beams penetrate between the trees, and the silver patches that came, now and then, between the trunks only mystified the eyes. And it soon became an indisputable fact that these patches were not motionless and unvarying in outline as Hugh might have expected. Sometimes they blended and moved; and once or twice a swift shadow flicked across them. There was only one explanation. Living creatures—beasts of prey such as always linger about the sheep flocks—hovered at the border of darkness ready to swoop forth. Pete returned soon after and began upon the simple tasks of the night. He went to the edge of the forest, returning with a bundle of fir boughs for Hugh’s bed. He chopped more fuel, and once he mystified the Eastern man by some hurried business in the dead herder’s tent. He seemed to be making a frenzied search for something that he needed very badly. He found it at last, and a moment of drama resulted when he came forth into the firelight. A dark bottle was clutched in each of his hands. Hugh glanced at them, then looked with even greater interest at the deep lines in the guide’s face. “I’ve found ’em,” the Indian told him eagerly. “Knew sure he had ’em somewhere. Fire water.”