The Duke of Dorset was mistaken when he imagined that a new land would rid him of these fancies. To remove a passion to the desert, a wise man hath written, is but to raise it to its triumph.

He had gone directly to Quebec, and from there traveled swiftly across Canada to the Pacific Coast. In Vancouver he was soon wearied, restless, overcome with ennui. His rifle and its ammunition lay unpacked in an ordinary traveling box. The lure of the mountains, the rivers, the silent barren places, had somehow departed from before him.

In this mood he met the Captain of His Majesty's gunboat, the Cleavewaive. He had known this man in the East; for a fortnight they had stalked tigers in the mountainous country south of the Amur. The man was by nature a hunter. The forest was in his blood. Life by rote and the narrow discipline of the service irked him. His idea of paradise was not unlike that of the Dakota.

Fourteen days in the wilderness bring men of any station to a certain understanding for life. The talk ran on big game killed here and there, in out-of-the-way places of the earth, and memories of that fortnight in Manchuria. Such conversations are not apt to run for long without touching a little on the future. It came out presently that the gunboat was about to make its annual run, south along the coast of the United States, in the general interest of British shipping, and to show the flag.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive, finding the Duke bored and at leisure, asked him to come on this cruise. He wished the Duke to accept for a certain close and personal reason. A larger importance would attach to the cruise from his presence, and this was to be thought of, but to do the man justice, this was not primarily his object. He was one of those men who, prevented by necessity from living the life that he longed for, sought constantly his experiences of it at second hand. Since he must needs thus follow the sea, he craved, with a consuming hunger, the taste of conversation running on the forest, the plain, the trackless mountain. The Duke of Dorset had lived in all of its richness, the very life which this man, had his destiny been open, would have chosen for himself.

For the hope then of talk running on these delectable experiences, he labored to win over the Duke to this voyage. He was not hopeful that he would succeed, and so he was surprised when the Duke finally accepted his invitation.

The Captain of the Cleaveivaive, having got his guest aboard, at first, took nothing from this fortune. The Duke of Dorset was now, strangely, no longer that mighty hunter with whom he had talked at Vancouver. On the gunboat he was a silent, reserved, impenetrable Englishman, hedged about by distances which no inferior could cross, meeting every advance with courtesy and silence. He talked conventionally, he looked over the gunboat at the Captain's invitation, noticed the structure of it, and made a word or two of comment when it seemed to be expected.

On the first evening of the voyage the Captain labored to draw him into conversation, but the manner of the Duke was now polite and formal, and the Captain, seeking a way inward to the man, was always turned deftly aside, until presently he gave over the effort.

The gunboat was delayed by heavy seas. The second day passed like the evening of the first, to the discomfiture of this ship's Captain. The Duke of Dorset was silent, courteous, and interested only in the sea. He sat in his deck chair watching through the afternoon the long polished swells—black, smooth as ebony, and rhythmic—in the hollows of which the sea birds rode. And at night, watching the uncanny mystery of this iron shell wrestling its way through the sea, shouldered from one side to the other, heaved up and pitched forward, assailed with every trick, and artifice, and cunning, with steady lifting and savage desperate rushes; the sea always failing to throw this black invader fairly on his shoulders, but never for one instant, never for one fraction of an instant, ceasing to assail him. And always, as it failed, growling, snarling, sputtering with a rage immeasurable and hideous. Then, when the moon opened like a red door, skyward out of the world, the sea changed as under some enchantment; a golden river welled up on the horizon and ran down toward that one looking seaward from his chair. On the instant he was in a kingdom of the fairy, and illusions, fantastic, unreal, took on under this magic the very flesh and blood of life.

On this second night of the run the Duke of Dorset, sitting alone on the deck, put his hand into his pocket, took out the map that Caroline Childers had sent to him at Oban, tore off the strip at the bottom on which her name was written, pulled that strip deliberately to bits, and tossed the scraps of paper over into the sea. Then he arose, walked across the deck into the cabin of the navigating officer, and put the map down on the table before that officer.

"Lieutenant," he said, "how near is this point, marked here in ink, to the ship's course?"

The officer got out his charts, located the point, and made roughly an estimate of the distance.

"We pass this point, sir."

"On what day?" inquired the Duke.

"On to-morrow morning, sir," replied the officer.

"I thank you," replied the Duke of Dorset. "I wish to be put ashore there." Then he went out.

It is a theory that good fortune travels usually close on the heels of despair. The Captain of the Cleavewaive, as his boat ran south, verified that theory. The Duke of Dorset sat with him for the remainder of this night in his cabin, and in the smoke of it, the talk ran constantly on the wilderness. He was again, as under the sprinkling of some magic water, that primordial man of the wild, whom the Captain so extravagantly envied.

In the cabin, while the moon walked on the water, and the great swells slipped one over the other silently, and that sinister desperate wrestling went endlessly on, the Duke of Dorset charmed and thrilled this sailor with the soul of a Dakota. He led him, panting with fatigue, through the vast, silent forests of Lithuania, day after day, in a path cut down like a ditch by the hoofs of a hundred beasts, one following the other—beasts, that the hunter, now himself a beast, running with the rifle in his hand, his hair caked with dirt, his body streaming with sweat, his heart lusting to kill, could never gain on.

He led him, shriveling with thirst, down the beds of lost rivers, where there was no green thing, no thing with a drop of moisture, only the dull red earth baking eternally under a sun that stood always above it like a disk of copper.

He led him, chattering with cold, across bleak steppes where the wind blew like a curse of God, set there to see that no man passed that way and lived; blew and blew, until it became a thing hideous and maddening, a thing damnable and accursed, coming out of a hell that froze; and the hunter, driven mad, his face raw, his hands bleeding, his bones aching to the marrow, no longer able to go forward, sat on the earth with his head between his knees and howled.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive, set thus living the life he longed for, forgot to be astonished at the strange course which the Duke of Dorset had elected to follow. When the navigating officer had carried to him the Duke's direction, he had been greatly puzzled. There was better hunting in British Columbia than here, some deer and a bear now and then, but nothing to tempt a man over seas with his gun cases. But the mystery of it was a thing inconsequential beside the pleasing fortune which this changed plan carried individually to him, and he easily left it. He was living, through the medium of this man's adventures, vicariously, that big, open, alluring life of the first man running with the wolf in the morning of the world. He was harking back with joy to those elements, primal and savage, by virtue of which all things fight desperately to live. These things were not to be found in books, they were not to be invented, they were known only to those haunting the waste places of the earth.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive was, then, pleased to carry out any plan of his guest. He was quite willing to go into the coast at the point selected by the Duke of Dorset, or at any point within a reasonable run.

At sunrise, the gunboat, turning due east out of her course, anchored off a little bay on the Oregon coast of the United States. The mountains came, at this point, down to the sea; a great chain rising landward and covered with firs, standing a primeval forest. The bay was a perfect miniature harbor protected by a crooked finger of the mountain; the inner border of this finger was a sea wall with steps coming down to the water. A small, gray-stone house, not unlike a gamekeeper's lodge, stood behind this wall on the summit of the finger, flanked by two giant firs, lifting their brown, naked bodies, without a limb, two hundred feet into the sky.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive hesitated to put the Duke ashore in a place so evidently deserted. He pointed out that the bay was merely a private yacht harbor, used doubtless in summer, but now in the autumn abandoned for the winter. There was no boat of any kind to be seen in the bay, and no evidence that the place was inhabited. But the Duke was unmoved in his determination to go ashore at this point; and his boxes were got up from his cabin. While these preparations went forward, the Captain, searching the coast with his glass, saw a man come out from behind the stone house on the summit of the promontory. The man stopped when he observed the gunboat, looked at it a moment under the palm of his hand, and came down with long swinging strides to the point on the sea wall where the stone steps descended into the water.

When the Duke came ashore at this point, the man swinging along the sea wall was already there. He stood back some twenty feet from the landing, waiting until the sailors should bring the Duke's boxes up the stone: stairway, and return to the gunboat. Then he spoke, nodding his head to the Duke: "Good mornin', stranger," he said, in a big deliberate voice that drew out each word as though it were elastic, stretching from his throat over his tongue to his teeth.

The Duke, standing on the sea wall among his boxes, regarded the man with an interest, every moment visibly increasing. He had never until this day, in any country, come upon this type of peasant. The man was past sixty, but indefinitely past it; one could not say how old he was. He might have been five or ten, or only a year or two beyond it. He was big-boned, slouchy, and powerful; his eyes, mild and blue; his face, sinewy and weather-beaten; he wore a shirt without a collar, and fastened at the throat with a big white button; suspenders, hand knitted of blue wool; and trousers tucked into the tops of enormous cowhide boots. His head was covered with a big felt hat, rain-stained, sweat-stained, and mould-stained, until it was a color that no maker ever dreamed of.

The Duke returned the salutation and inquired if he were on the estate of Mr. Cyrus Childers.

"He calls it his'n," replied the native, "but to my notion no man owns the mountains."

The Duke's interest increased. "Are you a servant of Mr. Childers?" he asked.

The man's mouth drew down into a long firm slit.

"Well, no, stranger," he answered, "I don't use that air word 'servant,' except when I pray to God Almighty."

"Ah!" said the Duke, and he remembered that he was in the United States of America.

The native went on with the conversation, "I reckon," he said, "you're on your way over to the big house."

The Duke divined the man's meaning, and explained that he had come ashore from the departing gunboat, under the impression that there was a village here, and some means of transportation to the residence of Mr. Childers. In reply the mountaineer talked deliberately for perhaps five minutes. Much of the idiom was to the Duke unintelligible, but he understood from it that this bay was a private yacht harbor, that the yacht was on the Atlantic Coast, that the keeper's lodge here was closed, and that Mr. Childers's residence was not near to this point, as he expected, but farther inland. The Duke inquired the distance from the coast.

The native screwed up the muscles on one side of his face, "Hit's a right smart step," he said.

The Duke was reassured, "You mean," he ventured, "three or four miles?"

The mountaineer seemed to ponder the thing a moment seriously, then he answered, "Well," he said, "I reckon hit's furder than three or four mile. I reckon hit's purty nigh on to forty-eight mile."

The Duke of Dorset laughed over his own astonishment. He was beginning to like this new type of peasant, who spoke of forty-eight miles as "a right smart step," who thought no man owned the mountains, and who reserved the word "servant" exclusively for his prayers.

The man looked seriously at the smiling face of the Duke and repeated the substance of his first query. "I reckon," he said, "you're a-wantin' to git over to the big house."

"I should like it," replied the Duke, "but the prospect does not seem favorable."

"I might give you a lift," the man replied hesitatingly, a bit timidly, as though he asked rather than offered a favor.

The words attached themselves to no exact meaning in the Duke's mind, but he understood the intent of them.

"Have you a cart here?" he said.

"No," replied the man, shaking his head; "I hain't got no cyart, but I've got a mewel." Then he pointed to the Duke's boxes. "If you leave them air contraptions," he went on, "you kin ride the mewel an' I'll walk; but if them air contraptions has got to go, we'll load'em on the mewel, and both of us walk." Then, he added, jerking his head over his shoulder, "She's back there in the bushes."

The Duke, following the line indicated by this gesture and expecting to see there a donkey, saw such a domestic animal as he had never before this day observed in the service of the human family. It was a mule at least seventeen hands high, big-boned and gaunt like its owner; the hair worn off bare to the skin in great patches on the beast's flanks and withers—marks of the plow. The mule seemed to the Duke to have fallen into the same listless slovenly attitude as that which marked so strikingly the carriage of its master. The resemblance between the two seemed a thing come slowly by intimate association through a lifetime, a thing brought forth by common environment. The beast's trappings were no less distinctive; the bridle was made of rope, smaller than one's little finger, without brow-band or throat-latch, merely a head loop fastened to a bit; the saddle was a skeleton wood frame covered with rawhide; across this saddle hung a gunny sack with something in either end of it.

The Duke looked at the lank beast and then down at his articles of luggage. "Do you think your animal can carry these boxes?" he said.

The mountaineer made a contemptuous gesture. "Jezebel will tote them traps an' not turn a hair," he answered; "hit's the hoofin' hit I'm apesterin' about."

The latter part of this remark the Duke did not wholly follow. While he hesitated to embarrass this good-natured person by inquiring what he meant, the man came over and lifted the various boxes, one after the other, in his big sun-tanned hands. Then he stepped hack, and rested these big hands on his hips. "Yes," he drawled, "if you git wore out, I kin pack 'em an' you kin ride a spell."

The Duke understood now, and he was utterly astonished. This curious person actually thought of carrying these boxes, in order that he might ride the mule. He realized also within the last five minutes, that the usual manner of speech to a servant was conspicuously out of place here. That this man, big and elemental, required a relation direct and likewise elemental. The Duke stepped down at once into that primitive relation. He walked over directly in front of the mountaineer. "Look at me closely," he said, "do I look like a man who would ride while another man walked and carried his luggage?"

The mountaineer ran his mild-blue eyes over the Duke's big sinewy shoulders, then he moved over his woolen braces a trifle with his thumb.

"You mightn't be toughened to it," he said, apologetically.

The Duke doubled his right arm up in its good tweed sleeve, and presented it to the mountaineer's fingers. The muscles under that sleeve sat together, compact and hard as bunches of ivory. Doubt and anxiety departed slowly from the man's face. He made no comment. He removed his hand from the Duke's arm and set off to bring his mule. In a few minutes he returned with that animal and a piece of tarred rope which he had got from some boathouse back of the keeper's lodge.

He lifted the sack from the saddle and set it carefully down. "I'll pack that," he said, by way of explanation, "hit'll jist balance me." And he began to tie pieces of the luggage to the saddle; but the Duke of Dorset instantly took over this part of the preparation for the journey. He had adjusted loads to cavalry horses in India, to donkeys in' the Caucasian Mountains, to hairy vicious ponies in Russia, and he knew how to lay the pack so it would sit snug and firm to the beast. It was fortunate that he stood on this morning an expert in this craft, for the boxes made a difficult pack to manage with the primitive saddle.

When it was done the mountaineer tested it with his big forefinger hooked between the beast's belly and the rope. He arose from the test with an approving nod, glanced at the sun, standing over bay, and spoke his word of comment.

"Hit's a purty job," he said, "an' we better be a-hoofin' it." And this time the Duke of Dorset understood that expressive idiom.

The man lifted his sack tenderly onto his shoulder, slipped the rope bridle over his arm, and set out along the sea wall eastward toward the mountain.