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 Red Rogue dozed quietly on a dry bed of leaves at the inner end of the deep natural tunnel which was his favorite den. Here, in the heart of the huge rock mass forming Devilhead's summit, the old fox was snug and safe from wind and rain and lightning, while even the mightiest of the thunderclaps came to his ears so softened and subdued that the storm seemed miles away. Cloud King, the falcon, had no such remote retreat. The wind and the rain beat upon the portal of his castle; the glare of the lightning lit its inmost recesses; the crash of the thunder was like the crack of doom. But Cloud King, the peregrine, was a brother of the thunder, a son of the mountain storms. All his life he had dwelt with them and they struck no terror to his heart. While Red Rogue slept peacefully in his rock-ribbed fortress, the big gray duck hawk stood alert and wakeful in his aerie, a small cave in the face of the cliff fifty feet above the entrance of Red Rogue's den, and watched with sullen, undismayed eyes the prodigious drama of the storm.

Dan Alexander, gazing up at the peak from the porch of his father's cabin under Devilhead, guessed that this would be the way of it. A rare man was Dan. He had had some schooling and even a year at college in a city of the lowlands; but his mountains had called to him and presently he had returned to share with his father the little cabin under