The late afternoon sunlight, shot and dappled by the shadows of the leaves, fell over the bull elk’s body; and the animal sensed the approach of night. It was the drinking hour. A spring flowed at the foot of the glen, Spread Horn knew, and he turned toward it, stealing softly. And all at once he seemed to freeze in his tracks. The wind had brought him a message, unmistakably as wireless telephones bring messages of approaching foes across a battle field. His nervous reaction was instantaneous: danger, go slow! Yet it was not a familiar smell, and scientists would have a hard time explaining why the stag had at once recognized its menace. For the creature from whom it came was almost a stranger to these mountains, and it was wholly possible that Spread Horn had never perceived the breed before. He stood still, gazing, and he looked a long time through the shrubbery branches down to a little green glade beside the spring. He raised one foot and lifted his long muzzle. Then he gave the warning cry,—the sound with which, in the fall, he would warn his herd of danger. There was no more distinctive cry in the whole wilderness world than this,—a strange, whistling snort, beginning high on the scale and descending to a deep bawl. It traveled far through the stillness. He waited a breathless instant while the echo came back to him. Then he sprang and darted at full speed away into the heavier thickets. Far below, at the spring, an unfamiliar figure in these wilds leaped to his feet with a guttural cry. It was also a distinctive sound: and no wonder the little chipmunk paused in his scurried occupations to listen to it. Even to the addled brain of the squirrel it suggested annoyance and anger,—a quality possessed by the snarl of the puma when it had missed its stroke. No wonder Spread Horn had fled. The figure was none other than that tall harbinger of death and peril, man. “It was an elk,” the man cried. “You’ve missed your chance.” Some one stretched on the grass at his feet answered with a half-snarl. “To hell with the elk,” he replied. “You’ve tipped over the last quart.” CHAPTER II It is a far cry from the fastnesses of Idaho back to the lounging room of the Greenwood Club in a great and fashionable city on the Atlantic seaboard; but that distance must be traveled in order to explain at all, to the satisfaction of the old camp-robber bird that perched and squawked upon a limb beside his camp, the presence of Hugh Gaylord in Smoky Land. It all went back to a June evening, immediately preceding the dinner hour, in which he had a short and somewhat important talk with that gray, wise, venerable head of the board of governors whom all men knew fondly as the “Old Colonel.”