"What have you done! You're doing something that I never saw a tenderfoot do in my life, before. I've known men to hunt for years--literally years--and not know how to do it. And that is--to place your feet." "Place my feet? I'm afraid I don't understand." "I mean--to walk silently. To stalk, damn it, Dan! This brush is dry. It's dry as tinder. A cougar can get over it like so much smoke, and a man who's lived all his life in the hills can usually climb a ridge and not make any more noise than a young avalanche. Just now I had a feeling that I wasn't hearing you walk, and I thought my ears must be going back on me. I stopped to see. You were doing it, Dan. You were stalking--putting down your feet like a cat. It's the hardest thing to learn there is, and you're doing it the first half-hour." Dan laughed, delighted more than he cared to show. "Well, what of it?" he asked. "What of it? That's it--what of it. And what caused it, and all about it. Go on and let me think." The result of all this thought was at least to hover in the near vicinity of a certain conclusion. That conclusion was that at least a few of the characteristics of his grandfather had been passed down to Dan. It meant that possibly, if time remained, he would not turn out such a weakling, after all. Of course his courage, his nerve, had yet to be tested; but the fact remained that long generations of frontiersmen ancestors had left this influence upon him. The wild was calling to him, wakening instincts long smothered in cities, but sure and true as ever. It was the beginning of regeneration. Voices of the long past were speaking to him, and the Failings once more had begun to run true to form. Inherited tendencies were in a moment changing this weak, diseased youth into a frontiersman and wilderness inhabitant such as his ancestors had been before him. But before ever Lennox had a chance to think all around the subject, to actually convince himself that Dan really was a throwback and recurrence of type, there ensued on that gaunt ridge a curious adventure. The test of nerve and courage was nearer than either of them had guessed. They were slipping along over the pine needles, their eyes intent on the trail ahead. And then Lennox saw a curious thing. He beheld Dan suddenly stop in the trail and turn his eyes towards a heavy thicket that lay perhaps one hundred yards to their right. For an instant he looked almost like a wild creature himself. His head was lowered, as if he were listening. His muscles were set and ready. Lennox had prided himself that he had retained all the powers of his five senses, and that few men in the mountains had keener ears than he. Yet it was truth that at first he only knew the silence, and the stir and pulse of his own blood. He assumed then that Dan was watching something that from his position, twenty feet behind, he could not see. He tried to probe the thickets with his eyes.