Produced by Darleen Dove, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE VOICE OF THE PACK By EDISON MARSHALL A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York Published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company _Copyright, 1920_, By Little, Brown, and Company. _All rights reserved_ Published, April, 1920 Reprinted, May, 1920 TO MY FATHER GEORGE EDWARD MARSHALL OF MEDFORD, OREGON HIMSELF A SON OF FRONTIERSMEN CONTENTS PROLOGUE BOOK ONE--REPATRIATION BOOK TWO--THE DEBT BOOK THREE--THE PAYMENT THE VOICE OF THE PACK PROLOGUE If one can just lie close enough to the breast of the wilderness, he can't help but be imbued with some of the life that pulses therein.--_From a Frontiersman's Diary_. Long ago, when the great city of Gitcheapolis was a rather small, untidy hamlet in the middle of a plain, it used to be that a pool of water, possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immediately back of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy in Gitcheapolis in winter; and the pond was nothing more than snow water that the inefficient drainage system of the city did not quite absorb. Now snow water is occasionally the most limpid, melted-crystal thing in the world. There are places just two thousand miles west of Gitcheapolis where you can see it pouring pure and fresh off of the snow fields, scouring out a ravine from the great rock wall of a mountain side, leaping faster than a deer leaps--and when you speak of the speed of a descending deer you speak of something the usual mortal eye can scarcely follow--from cataract to cataract; and the sight is always a pleasing one to behold. Incidentally, these same snow streams are quite often simply swarming with trout,--brook and cutthroat, steelhead and even those speckled fellows that fishermen call Dolly Vardens for some reason that no one has ever quite been able to make out. They are to be found in every ripple, and they bite at a fly as if they were going to crush the steel hook into dust between their teeth, and the cold water gives them spirit to fight until the last breath of strength is gone from their beautiful bodies. How they came there, and what their purpose is in ever climbing up the river that leads nowhere but to a snow bank, no one exactly knows. The snow water back of the courthouse was not like this at all. Besides being the despair of the plumbers and the city engineer, it was a severe strain on the beauty-loving instincts of every inhabitant in the town who had any such instincts. It was muddy and murky and generally distasteful; and lastly, there were no trout in it. Neither were there any mud cat such as were occasionally to be caught in the Gitcheapolis River.