It is beyond the ken of man whether or not, in their wild hearts, these forest folk sensed what was taking place,--that their gray monarch, the sovereign grizzly, was at the death-fight with some dreadful invader from the South. They heard the bear's fierce bawls, unimitatable by any other voice as he lashed down blow after blow; and they heard the thud and crunch of the axe against his body. Had this monarch of the trails found his master at last? Gazing out through the aperture of the cave Beatrice beheld the whole picture: the ring of spruce trees, the glade so strange and ensilvered in the moonlight, and these two fighting beasts, magnificent in fury over the embers of the dying fire. And Ben's powers increased, rather than lessened. Ever he swung his terrible axe with greater power. He fought like the wolf that was his blood brother,--lunging, striking down, recoiling out of harm's way, and springing forward to strike again. This man was Wolf Darby, a forester known in many provinces for his woods prowess, but even those who had seen his most spectacular feats, in past days, had not appreciated the real extent of his powers. There was a fury and a might in his blows that was hard to associate with the world of human beings,--such ferociousness and wolf-like savagery, welling strength and prowess of battle that mostly men have forgotten in their centuries of civilization, but which still mark the death-fight between beasts. Ben had always recalled the earlier types of man--his great-thewed ancestors, wild hunters in the forests of ancient Germany--but never so much as to-night. He was in his natural surroundings--at the mouth of his cave in which the Woman watched and exulted in his blows, enclosed by the primeval forest and beside the ashes of his fire. There could be nothing strange or unreal about this scene to Beatrice. It was more true than any soft vista of a far-away city could possibly be. It was life itself,--man battling for his home and his woman against the raw forces of the wild. All superficialities and superfluities were gone, and only the basic stuff of life remained,--the cave, the fire, the man who fought the beast in the light of the ancient moon. At that moment Ben was no more of the twentieth century than he was of the first, or of the first more than of some dark, unnumbered century of the world's young days. He was simply the male of his species, the man-child of all time, forgetting for the moment all the little lessons civilization had taught, and fighting his fight in the basic way for the basic things.