"I take it all back," he said simply. "You take what back?" "What I thought about you--that the Failing line had gone to the dogs. I'll never call you a tenderfoot again." "You are very kind," Dan answered. He looked rather tired, but was wholly unshaken. For an instant Lennox looked at his eyes and his steady hands. "But tell me one thing," Lennox asked. "I saw the way you looked down the barrel. I could see how firm you held the rifle--the way you kept your head. And that is all like your grandfather. But why, when you had a repeating rifle, did you wait so long to shoot?" "I just had one cartridge in my gun. I fired nine times back at the trees and only re-loaded once. I didn't think of it until the coyote charged." Lennox's answer was the last thing in the world to be expected. He opened his straight mouth and uttered a great, boyish yell of joy. His eyes seemed to light. It is a phenomenon that is ever so much oftener imagined than really seen; but the sudden, elated sparkle that came in those gray orbs was past denial. The eyes of the two men met, and Lennox shook him by the shoulder. "You're not Dan Failing's grandson--you're Dan Failing himself!" he shouted. "No one but him would have had the self-control to wait till the game was almost on top of him--no one but him would have kept his head in a time like this. You're Dan Failing himself, I tell you, come back to earth. Grandson nothing! You're a throwback, and now you've got those glasses off, I can see his eyes looking right out of yours. Step on 'em, Dan. You'll never need 'em again. And give up that idea of dying in four months right now; I'm going to make you live. We'll fight that disease to a finish--and win!" And that is the way that Dan Failing came into his heritage in the land of his own people, and in which a new spirit was born in him to fight--and win--and live. BOOK TWO THE DEBT I September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,--that far wilderness of endless, tree-clad ridges where Dan Failing had gone for his last days. September, in this place, was a season all by itself. It wasn't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in length so fast that Whisperfoot the cougar had time for a dozen killings in a single night. Fall only begins when the rains start; and there hadn't been a trickle of rain since April. It was rather a cross between the two seasons,--the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.