"Why do you do that?" I once whispered. "Because, in hunting deer, you must forget the appearance of the animal in city parks; look for brown or gray spots the size of your hat, or for dead twigs that do not point exactly like tree limbs."

"Are they that hard to see?" I inquired meekly.

"See? why, man, half the time one may be looking right at a deer and not know it, so clever is the animal in taking advantage of

that, the edges of the holes made by the deer do not glisten like the ones we have made. This is because the snow crystals have lost their keenness of edge by evaporation; furthermore, if you stoop down, you will see little specks of fine tree-dust in them. No, the deer crossed this ridge last night soon after the snow ceased falling; and he may be miles away, now."

With the greatest caution, we proceeded, always being careful to go around the head

Further

even the thinnest willows or pines. more, they are the cleverest hiders in the world, and if they are confident you are not aware of their presence, they will let you go by within a few feet. In fact, I once was going down the side of a little timbered gully after a bunch of deer below. All at once the horse that I was leading snorted, and as I looked back, twelve deer jumped across my trail from within a few feet of where I had passed. It was so sudden that they were all gone before I could get ready to shoot."

As we were walking over a ridge Jake stopped abruptly and pointed to the ground ahead.

"A deer's tracks!" I exclaimed, "and so fresh that I can almost get the scent of him."

"There 's where you are mistaken," said Jake. "Do you notice that the snow thrown out ahead of the holes lacks the sparkle of that cast out by our own feet? Not only

of a gully and to inspect every bit of ground before us.. Once we came upon the track of a doe and two fawns, straggling about here and there as if they had browsed tidbits.

"Looks as if a hundred deer had been here," said I, astonished at the many footprints.

"No," said Jake, "just the doe and two fawns. I'll show you presently where they went. Would it surprise you to know that we frightened them away?"

"Oh, surely not!" said I.

"Nevertheless, that is just what happened. You remember that as we stood looking over this ridge you took your hat off for a second? Well, that slight movement caused them to scamper down through that clump of willows and around that cliff."

We went down to prove what he said, and he was right. We examined the tracks, and sure enough! even as we looked, tiny bits of snow fell back into the depressions, the first

effect of evaporation. I was greatly surprised.

"No use to follow them; they know we are present and will not stop for miles," said Jake.

Over hills and across gullies, down ridges and through thick timber, we followed those tracks. Once we came to a place where the wary old buck had deliberately followed in the footsteps of a man,

We walked on, and it seemed to me that we were not going to see any more trails.

Suddenly Jake stopped and knelt down. "By Jove, it's the King of Baldy!" he exclaimed, as he measured the tracks.

"Why, it looks more like the trail of a yearling cow," said I.

"No, it's the king," said Jake, "and we are only half an hour behind him. He's going strong, but we may overtake him. Notice the distance between the steps. My, he 's a beauty!"

as if himself on a hunting-trip, and then, with a single bound of thirty feet or more, he left it. He had not stopped to browse and the distance he covered was remarkable.

Finally, the trail led through a grove of cedars over a ridge. Below stretched a willowed flat, a splendid rendezvous for deer. Jake led the way cautiously, informing me that he could tell by the footprints that we were very, very close. We advanced an inch at a time to the crest of that ridge; and then, just as it seemed that success was ours, I caught sight of the most majestic deer I have ever seen, bounding swiftly toward the flat below. He was about two hundred yards away, and, with a whistle, dashed from one patch of willows to another, snorting and shaking his head, as if angered at the intrusion into his domain. Like a streak of lead he was gone.

Shoot? why I had not half time enough

to do that; and besides, it seemed that I was so struck with admiration for his beauty, size, and grace, that shooting was an afterthought.

"It's the king," said Jake, "and now, as ever, just a few seconds ahead of the calculations of the hunter. Do you see that thin grove of quaking aspens over there? You would not think a deer could hide in it at all, would you? I scanned it carefully as we came up; yet that is where he was.'

We went across the gulch, and the long

bounds from the aspens proved that Jake had surmised correctly. The very first jump was over thirty feet.

"Shall we go on? He will run a long distance now," said Jake.

"Yes, let's go on," I replied.

All the remainder of that day we tracked the king; and it was interesting to note how the clever deer went above rock slides, through thick patches of woods, and over ledges, always picking his way with the greatest accuracy and care.

In fact, so determined had we now become that we camped on the trail, building two big fires and resting between them all night.

In the morning about ten o'clock, we saw where the king had met two does, and, after the three, we followed. Suddenly, as we were approaching a pine grove near a ridge we could hear low bleats, as if a sheep were in distress.

As we approached, a most startling spectacle met our wondering eyes. The king was standing helplessly blatting, with his horns locked with those of a fallen foe. The other buck, covered with blood and snow, was motionless, dead; and the agonized king had for hours, it seemed, been dragging the victim about in an effort to unlock his antlers. The king's head was covered with blood and foam, and his tongue protruded as if his last gasp were near. Every muscle of the magnificent beast shook with exhaustion, and as we came within view, the look of distress, agony, and appeal in his eyes was beyond the power of words to describe. There remained in him no thought of escape, but rather that strange, incomprehensible appeal to man, his greatest enemy. A jackrabbit will run, terrified, right into camp to avoid pursuing coyotes, and then tremble helplessly and appealingly before man.

Well, that is how this wonderful buck appeared as though, when face to face with a lingering death, man could do nothing worse or more terrifying.

The horns were locked beyond our power to pull apart. The fallen buck must have died from the wrenches and twists his superior had given him in the desperate efforts to be free, for the snow many yards each way told the story of the struggle.

The king never resented in the least our efforts; in truth, he seemed about to fall.

"I never saw anything like it before," said Jake. "It would be murder to shoot an animal so helpless. I once found the locked horns of two white-tailed deer, but never the mule-deer."

"Let's cut the horns apart," I suggested taking out my hunting-knife.

As I held the king's head, Jake cut into the dead buck's antlers. There was one tip that seemed to be the key lock, and to our great delight, when finally this was severed, we wrenched the heads apart.

The king never attempted to move, and he was too weak to resist.

Neither of us had the heart to harm the beautiful animal. Jake insisted that no one would ever give credence to our story unless we left some mark to prove it by.

Taking the knife, he made a neat notch on one of the delicate hoofs.

"There," he said, when it was done, "the one who eventually takes the King of Baldy in a fair chase will know that we once set him free."

It was over half an hour before the king regained sufficient strength to walk; and then, as we patted his back, he looked at us with an expression of thankfulness that I shall never forget. Slowly he plodded away into the pines.

I know I've got a lot of things— A cart, a ball and bat,

A pair of skates, a search-light, A cow-boy suit and hat.

But I want what the others have!
I'd give up all my toys
If I could have a nickname,
Like all the other boys!

CHAPTER VII CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL

WHEN Beatrice opened her eyes, a soft, insistent nose was passing over her face and hands and breathing warmly against her cheek. She sat up, holding her whirling head, to discover that Buck was standing over her, apparently puzzled and distressed at the mishap to his mistress. It seemed strange, after her last glimpse of that barren mountain-side of sliding shale, to find herself lying half buried in grass and flowers, with the warm sunshine laying a last level ray across her face. She got to her knees, then to her feet, and found that she was possessed of a dizzy head and an aching shoulder, that she was bruised and lame, but otherwise uninjured. Looking up, she could see where the slope of loose stone, down which she and the horse had slid, ended in a straight wall, a drop of eight or ten feet, over which she had plunged into the soft grass below. Buck, wiser than she, had evidently managed to slide less precipitately, and in the end had saved himself by jumping. His legs were cut by the sharp stones and he was still nervous and quivering, but he was not seriously hurt.

Although she made an effort to climb into the saddle, Beatrice found that her knees were shaking and her head so unsteady that she was forced to give up the attempt. With her hand upon the horse's neck, she walked along the crooked path trodden in the tall grass of this high mountain meadow. Bright flowers, whose names she did not know, brushed her skirts. The whole hillside, sloping to the west, was bathed in the last brightness of the waning sunlight. They passed through a tangle of poplar woods,

whose dense underbrush showed that it was second growth springing up after the pine forest had been cut. Then out into the open they came again, to look down into a broad, irrigated valley whose checker-board of fields followed the winding silver ribbon of the river.

And this hillside at her feet- -was it a forest or a garden into which she had stumbled? Hundreds of little spruce-trees, as tall as her shoulder and all of the same height, marched in straight rows across the slope of the mountain, clothing the steep ground in a smooth mantle of lusty green. A stream wound downward through the plantation, with-on a level bench below her—a clump of willows on its bank and a white cottage with a red roof and a wide-open door.

"That must be Dr. Minturn's house," Beatrice reflected, and, a moment later, caught sight of Dr. Minturn himself.

He was sitting on a knoll at the edge of the woods, gazing down over his domain and humming a song to himself in a deep, buzzing voice, like a bumble-bee. He was a very tall man, with tremendous shoulders and a heavy thatch of gray hair. He did not notice Beatrice and Buck, even when they came close, but sat very still, his big hands lying idle on his knees. He had the air, however, of being intently busy about some special project of his own. Beatrice watched him, fascinated, wondering what it could be that so absorbed him.

"What-what are you doing?" she asked at last.

He turned around to her, smiling slowly, seeming neither startled nor surprised. "I'm getting rich," he said.

She looked so bewildered by his reply that he jumped up at once.

"That is one of my stupid jokes, and I 've startled you with it!" he exclaimed in a tone of self-reproach. "And you have come over that trail all alone-why, you 've had an accident! Come down to the house at once and let Miriam and me see what we can do for you."

He helped her into the saddle, took Buck's bridle, and conducted them down through the rows of spicy-smelling little trees to the door of the cottage. On the way, Beatrice managed to explain why she had come and at whose suggestion. The doctor nodded his head in immediate agreement.

"To be sure I'll go!" he said. "I would do anything for John Herrick or a friend of his. So that 's all settled. Here's Miriam

coming to the gate to meet you."

The cottage was square and neat and white and had a garden before it, surrounded by a white paling fence, the first garden Beatrice had seen since she came to Broken Bow Valley. It gave her a pang of homesickness to look at the tangled hedge of pink wild roses, the clumps of yellow lilies and forget-me-nots, and the bright borders of pansies. Miriam, at the gate, was a plump, quiet-voiced person, with smooth gray hair and a placid smile.

"Miriam would have a garden," Dr. Minturn said when the greetings were over and Beatrice had admired the flowers. "Almost everything in it is just what runs wild over the mountains, but she prefers them behind a fence. I think she dreams at night of how to make those big, wild forget-me-nots look like the little cultivated

"The doctor likes to make fun of my garden," Mrs. Minturn said in her pleasant, soft voice, "but it is not very different from what he has done with the whole mountainside. It was as bare as your hand when we came here, and he has planted every one of the little pines himself and has nursed each tree as though it were a baby. We call it Christmas-tree Hill. But come in, my dear you must rest and wash that cut on your cheek."

She led Beatrice to the house and, taking it quite for granted that her guest was to spend the night, conducted her to what the girl thought was the smallest and cleanest bedroom she had ever seen. Here Mrs. Minturn insisted that she must lie down and be tucked up under the patchwork quilt and go to sleep for an hour if she could. Beatrice did not sleep, but lay very peacefully, star

ing at the rough plastered walls of the tiny room, or through the window at the myriad little trees stepping in their straight, decorous rows across the side of the hill. Long before the hour was over, she was beginning to feel quite rested and herself again; and when her hostess came to announce that supper was ready, she was sitting at the window, gazing out at the sunset light on the white peaks of the range of mountains opposite.

After they had eaten, Dr. Minturn insisted that she make a tour of the place.

"Oh no, my dear, I don't need any help with the dishes," Mrs. Minturn had said when her guest wished to stay and assist her. "It is n't often that the doctor has a chance to show things off to a new person, so don't deny him the pleasure."

Beatrice, accordingly, saw everything-the horses, the contented cows, even the cheerful pig grunting happily to himself in his spotless sty. The chickens occupied a substantial residence, on account of the owls, coyotes, martens, and other wild animals that lent difficulty and excitement to poultry-raising in the Rocky Mountains. in the Rocky Mountains. Then the doctor led Beatrice beyond the garden and the clump of willows to where she could see the whole sweep of the mountain and the shadows flooding the valley as darkness crept up the hill.

"It was a plan of my own, this replanting where the pine forest has been cut," he explained, as he sat down by Beatrice on the grassy slope, evidently delighted to have some one to listen to his enthusiasm. "The Government does a good deal of this reforestation where tracts have been cut over or burned, but they can't give the trees the care that I do-nobody could, except a man who loves them. As they grow big, I keep taking out some for Christmas trees or for small timber, but the bulk of them shall never be cut until they have got to be giants a hundred feet high. I love to sit here and watch them each year a little bigger, each year more valuable. It will be a wonderful piece of timber-land fifty, sixty, seventy years from now."

"But-but-"began Beatrice, and stopped. She had almost blurted out that a man who was gray-haired at the planting of these trees could not hope to see them grow to that mighty forest of which he dreamed.

"Oh, I know I will be gone long before then," he replied serenely; "but what does it matter? We live here in the mountains to keep Miriam well-she does n't get on