Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/22

14 Colonel had amassed a fortune by his own resistless effort. In the second, he had known the great school of the forest. He was a sportsman whose metal had been tried and proven on the game trails of two continents.

His eyes leaped over Hugh's face, and he wondered if he had undertaken a vain task. He knew that a steel-worker cannot make tempered blades out of inferior metal. He wondered if he could hope for any real response from the treatment he was about to suggest. Hugh looked soft, and soft men are not usually made hard by a few weeks in the mountains. To follow the high trails, to seek the hidden people, to scale the cliffs and wade the marsh require a certain hardihood of spirit to start with,—and Hugh Gaylord seemed lacking in that trait. It was not that he had a weakling's body. Because it was the thing to do in his own circle he had kept himself fit on the gym-floor of his athletic club. His hands were hard and brown, his figure lithe, his face and neck were tanned in tennis court and golf links.

Yet that hard-eyed old woodsman looked at him straight and knew the truth. Hugh would not be able at once to enter into the spirit of the land where the Colonel was about to advise him to go. The lean foresters, natives of the land, would not accept him either; nor would they stay to eat at his camp. They wouldn't linger to tell him secrets of the wild. If they talked to