And, as the trooper had said, a little more than a mile farther the trail became a tangle of bushes and swale; the car slowed down and stopped; and a man rose from where he was seated on a mossy log and came forward, his rifle balanced across the hollow of his left arm. The man was Alek Selden. It was long after dark and they were still travelling through pathless woods by the aid of their electric torches. There was little underbrush; the forest of spruce and hemlock was first growth. Cleves shined the trees but could discover no blazing, no trodden path. In explanation, Selden said briefly that he had hunted the territory for years. “But I don’t begin to know it,” he added. “There are vast and ugly regions of bog and swale where a sea of alders stretches to the horizon. There are desolate wastes of cat-briers and witch-hopple under leprous tangles of grey birches, where stealthy little brooks darkle deep under matted débris. Only wild things can travel such country. “Then there are strange, slow-flowing creeks in the perpetual shadows of tamarack woods, where many a man has gone in never to come out.” “Why?” asked Tressa. “Under the tender carpet of green cresses are shining black bogs set with tussock; and under the bog stretches quicksand,—and death.” “Do you know these places?” asked Cleves. “No.” Cleves stepped forward to Tressa’s side. “Keep flashing the ground,” he said harshly. “I don’t want you to step into some hell-hole. I’m sorry I brought you, anyway.” “But I had to come,” she said in a low voice. Like the two men, she wore a grey flannel shirt, knickers, and spiral puttees. They, however, carried rifles as well as packs; and the girl’s pack was lighter. They had halted by a swift, icy rivulet to eat, without building a fire. After that they crossed the Ireland Vlaie and the main creek, where remains of a shanty stood on the bluff above the right bank—the last sign of man. Beyond lay the uncharted land, skimped and shirked entirely in certain regions by map-makers;—an unknown wilderness on the edges of which Selden had often camped when deer shooting. It was along this edge he was leading them, now, to a lean-to which he had erected, and from which he had travelled in to Glenwild to use the superintendent’s telephone to New York. There seemed to be no animal life stirring in this forest; their torches illuminated no fiery orbs of dazed wild things surprised at gaze in the wilderness; no leaping furry form crossed their flashlights’ fan-shaped radiance. There were no nocturnal birds to be seen or heard, either: no bittern squawked from hidden sloughs; no herons howled; not an owl-note, not a whispering cry of a whippoorwill, not the sudden uncanny twitter of those little birds that become abruptly vocal after dark, interrupted the dense stillness of the forest.