He loved the long days of wandering, the nights of vigil, the cool camps in the forest shadow, the little daily adventures that were all part of the eternal war that the powers of the wilderness waged upon the dominance and works of man. Sometimes these took the form of a wolf, striking like a gray shadow from a clump of underbrush and making his kill before Hugh could raise his weapon, sometimes the measured stalk of a cougar on the fold. The fight was never done. Never the night descended but that the age-old battle cry of the wild—the howl of a wolf or a scream of a cougar in the gloom—would come soaring, eerie and wild past all telling, to his ears. And more than once the leaping flame of his camp was the center of a circle of fire—twin disks, here and there, wherever the eyes might fall.
The inanimate wild itself menaced the flock. It wasn’t easy to find watering places in these days of drought. There were deep glens—box canyons the mountaineers call them—into which stray bands from the flock would wander and be unable to find the way out. Sometimes arms of the brush thickets cut them off from their fellows, and these were the times when Running Feet and his savage companions were in their glory. Hugh found an ever-increasing delight in testing his own strength and skill against the sinister forces of the wild. It was his joy to give the flock the best possible care: keeping down its casualties, choosing the best feeding grounds, and protecting them from panic or excitement. And as the result of his vigilance, few of his sheep died of sickness, and the lambs grew like weeds.
“You know, Hugh,” the girl told him one day, “you are a wonderful herder. We owe you more than we can ever pay.”
No praise had ever meant so much. “I have to be a good one,” the man replied, glowing. “I have to make up for the years I’ve wasted. Besides—it seems to come naturally to me.”
He had never spoken a truer word. It seemed to him that this was his ordained place—behind the flocks as they fed through the forest.
He liked the long still nights in which he knew the solace of the fire, and the whispering and the mystery that crept to him from the forest. He felt that he had lost all love of pretentious things. His standards were true at last, and the little, simple joys that came to him now meant more than all the luxury of his former life. His pipe—no longer tasting of varnish but cool and sweet—his simple meals, the little triumphs of his day’s work, his refreshing rest after the day’s fatigue gave him unmeasured joy. He had the lasting satisfaction of work well done, of time profitably spent. Already, he reflected, he had some hundred dollars to show his friends in the Greenwood Club! But that famous organization seemed infinitely distant now. It was as if it had never been real: that all his days he had roamed behind the sheep.
Strangely, he no longer even missed the old days. The love of strong drink was gone from his body. He didn’t look a great deal like the man that the Old Colonel had sent forth from the Greenwood Club. His hands and face had been brown before, now they were almost as dark as those of Pete, his late guide. A fast walk over the ridges did not fatigue him now. He was lean and hard as hickory, the muscles rippled under his toughened skin, the sweet, mountain air rushed deep in his lungs. It was almost recreation: never in his old life had he known the buoyancy, the tireless strength, the simple joy of living vibrant and alive in every nerve. There was a curious change in his eyes, too. The little blood-splotches had quite gone from the whites, and they were a firm, pale blue. The corneas looked slightly more hard and bright, and the lines that dissipation had enscribed were almost gone.
“Go for two weeks,” the Old Colonel had said. “And Lord knows—it might make a man of you.”
Two weeks! Three months had already passed, and whether Alice knew it or not, that remote possibility that the Old Colonel had hoped for had already come true. Hugh had done a man’s work: the degree had been won. For the law that was true in the earth’s young days is true today; it endures when scorn has spent itself and false pride is humbled: that by toil and conflict alone shall men find their place, their honor, and their happiness. Hugh knew now, as he watched his sheep, that this was the world of the warrior, not the weakling; of those who gave, not those who took; of those who stood firm and endured, not those who broke and fled from the crash of armor.
He did not doubt but that he had already been forgotten by the members of the Greenwood Club. Three months had he been gone: another played his hand at poker, another occupied his favorite seat in the club dining room. But of course they would forget him! There was no comradeship of arms, no mutual memories of trial and strife and conquest to hold them close to him. He had supposed that he had known them intimately, their natures and their souls, but now he realized that they had been but strangers,
