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 mingling overhead cast a shade too dense for undergrowth to subsist. Down the long shadowy vistas amid the column-like tree-trunks Almayne's gray eyes roamed restlessly, viewing many things.

Everywhere he saw deer. In this paradise of the foothills the whitetails still swarmed in incalculable numbers—in numbers which seemed not to have diminished at all since the first white hunters had pushed inland from the coast. Once, far away, at the farther end of a sun-dappled forest aisle, he saw a troop of nine buffalo traveling northward in single file behind a shaggy old bull; and once, when the forest opened to enclose one of those beautiful green meadows or forest-prairies which were scattered here and there through the primeval woods, he saw a much larger herd, fifty or sixty animals at least, standing shoulder-deep in lush maiden canes and wild pea vines. Ahead of him a lumbering black bear crossed the trail. A half-mile farther along, a lynx which had been lying along a beech limb almost overhanging the road, leaped lightly to the ground and bounded away into the forest.

Most of these Almayne viewed with languid interest. They were the common things of life, the everyday sights of the wilderness. The buffalo held his attention while they were within view, for they were less abundant here to the eastward of the Appalachians than in the almost unknown coun-