Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/114

96 leaves, and even the whisper of the north wind. The pines seemed darker, and now and then gray clouds gathered, promised rain, but passed without dropping their burdens on the parched hillsides. Of course all the tones and voices of the wilderness sound clearest at night—for that is the time that the forest really comes to life—and Dan Failing, sitting in front of Lennox's house, watching the late September moon rise over Bald Mountain, could hear them very plainly.

It was true that in the two months he had spent in the mountains he had learned to be very receptive to the voices of the wilderness. Lennox had not been mistaken in thinking him a natural woodsman. He had imagination and insight and sympathy; but most of all he had a heritage of wood lore from his frontiersmen ancestors. Two months before he had been a resident of cities. Now the wilderness had claimed him, body and soul.

These had been rare days. At first he had to limit his expeditions to a few miles each day, and even then he would come in at night staggering from weariness. He climbed hills that seemed to tear his diseased lungs to shreds. Lennox would n't have been afraid, in a crisis, to trust his marksmanship now. He had the natural cold nerve of a marksman, and one