"Well, Bill," one of them asked at last, "how's everything with you?" It was not the usual how-d'ye-do of greeting. The words were spoken in actual question, as if they had special significance. The man straightened, turning sober eyes. "Nothing startling yet," he replied. "In after supplies?" "Yes--and my mail." There was a long pause. The conversation was apparently ended. Bill turned to go. A stranger spoke from the other side of the fire. "How's Grizzly River?" he asked. Bill turned to him with a smile. "Getting higher and higher. All the streams are up. You know that bald-faced bay of Fargo's?" Fargo was the Bradleyburg merchant, and the stranger knew the horse,--one of the little band that, after the frontier custom, Fargo kept to rent. "Yes, I remember him." "Well, I've got him this fall. You know he's a yellow cuss." The stranger nodded. In this little community the dumb brutes were almost as well known as the human inhabitants. The meaning was wholly plain to him too, and the term did not apply to the horse's color. Yellow, on the frontier, means just one thing: the most damning and unforgivable thing of all. When one is yellow he gives up easily, he dares not lift his arms to fight, and the wilderness claims him quickly. "There's a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford," Bill went on. "All the horses got through but Baldy, and he could have made it easy if he'd tried. But what did he do but just sit back on his haunches in the mud, like an old man in a chair, his head up and his front legs in his lap, and just give up? Quite a sight--that horse sitting in the mud. I had to snag him out." The others smiled, but none of them with the brilliance of the story-teller himself. The wilderness picture--with the cowardly horse sitting in the mud--was again before his eyes; and none of the hardship of the journey could cost him his joy in it. Bill Bronson was no longer just a dim form on the twilight hilltop. The lamplight showed him plain. In this circle of townspeople he was a man to notice twice. The forests had done well by him. Like the spruce themselves he had grown straight and tall, but his form was sturdy too. There was a lithe strength about him that suggested the larger felines; the hard trails of the forest had left not a spare ounce of flesh on his powerful frame. His mold, except for a vague and indistinct refinement in his long-fingered and strong hands, was simply that of a woodsman,--sturdy, muscular, untiring. His speech was not greatly different from that of others: the woodspeople, spending many of the long winter days in reading, are usually careless in speech but rarely ungrammatical. His clothes were homely and worn. He wore a blue mackinaw over a flannel shirt, dark trousers and rubber boots: garments that were suited to his life.