The Way of the Strong. Cullum Ridgwell
was behind him, and Si-wash knew every inch of the trail, whereas he only had a vague knowledge which might fail him at any moment.
Within half an hour the pack on the sled was complete, and the great dogs stood in their harness ready to do the behests of their new master as willingly as those of the old. But the last item of his program still remained to be attended to. Leo searched his pockets and found the stub of a pencil, but no paper rewarded his efforts. For a moment he was at a loss. Then he bethought him of the tent, and passed beneath the flap. In a few moments he returned with a sheet of waterproof paper, such as is used to line biscuit boxes, and he sat down on his pack and began to write. And all the time he was writing the grim twist of his lips remained. He seemed to find some sort of warped humor in what he was doing.
His writing finished he secured the paper on the front of the tent where it must easily be seen. Then he stood off to read it.
"My Dear Tug;
"I find it necessary to commandeer your gold. Mine is at the bottom of a precipice ten miles back, if you care to make the exchange. Si-wash will tell you where. I suggest you either wait here till they come along, or go back to my camp in the woods, beyond the broken hill, and join Si-wash there. Anyway you can travel down with him. They have dogs and camp outfit, and I have left here sufficient food, etc., for your needs. I have found you a better friend than I ever hoped to. So long. Good luck.
"Leo."
Leo read his note over with evident satisfaction. He had no scruples whatever. He saw in one direction only. Straight ahead of him, his eyes turning neither to the right nor to the left of the path of life he had marked out for himself. He believed that the battle must always go to the strong; sentimentality, pity, were feelings he did not acknowledge. He knew of their existence, and deplored them as the undermining germ responsible for the disease of decadence which has wrought the destruction of more than half the great empires in the world's history. And what the world's history had not taught him he had gleaned from the lives of great men, as he saw greatness. Greatness to him meant conquest, and the world's conquerors had been men utterly devoid of all the tenderer feelings of humanity. They had embarked upon their careers thrilling with the lust of the ancient savage, or the ruthless courage of the animal kingdom, qualities which he regarded as the essence of life, as Nature had intended it. So he gave himself up to a similar course. He would rather be a king by savage conquest, than the hereditary monarch of a race whose vitality is slowly being sapped by the vampire of sentimentality.
He picked up Tug's gee-pole, and gave one swift final glance over the camp. Then, stooping, he covered the staring face of the dead man with a blanket and turned to the dogs.
A sharp command and the traces were drawn taut. Another, and the journey had begun. The dogs, fresh from their week of idleness, strained at their breast harness, and the sled moved slowly, heavily over the dry bed of the forest. But it soon gained impetus, and the twilit shadows of the primordial forest quickly swallowed it up.
As the scrunch of the pine-cones under the steel runners died away the calm of ages once more settled upon the woods. The dying fire burned lower and lower, and the deathly stillness was unbroken even by a crackle of sputtering flame. The solitude was profound and full of melancholy.
The minutes crept on. They lengthened into an hour. Then far in the distance, it seemed, came the soft pad as of some prowling forest beast. But the pad quickly changed to the soft scrunch of moccasined feet, and, presently, a man, bearing a great load of wood upon his broad back, came on through the dusky aisles of the forest.
CHAPTER VII
DEAD FIRES
Tug did most things with a smile; but it was never the happy smile of a pleasant nature. Nor was it even a mask. It was an expression of his attitude toward the world, toward all mankind. His eyes conveyed insolent contempt; and his smile was one of the irritating irony and cynicism which permeated all his thoughts and feelings.
But his smile was for those looking on. There were times when another man looked out of the same eyes; a man whose cold heart loomed up ugly and threatening out of those deeper recesses of feeling which the shrewd might guess at, but were rarely admitted to.
Tug was a man whose selfish desire was above and before all things. He was of that temper which saw injustice and wrong in every condition of life obtaining, in every established institution of man, even in the very edicts of Nature. It was impossible for him to see anything but through the jaundiced light of his own utter selfishness. Every condition over which he had no control contained a threat, which, in his view of things, was directed against the fulfillment of his desires. He wanted the world and all its possibilities for comfort, pleasure, profit, for his own, without the effort of making it so; and had he obtained it he would undoubtedly have grumbled that there was no fence set up as a bar to all trespassers upon his property.
He detested the thought that others held possessions which he had not. But it was not his way to air his grievance from a personal point of view. He adopted a subtler course, and a common enough course among men of his class. He cloaked his own selfishness under a passionate plea for those others similarly debarred, railing at the injustice of the distribution of the world's benefits, and storming against class distinctions and all the lesser injustices which went to make up the dividing line between capacity and incapacity. In short he was, though as yet unprofessed, a perfect example of the modern socialist whose utter selfishness prompts methods and teachings which are the profoundest outrage against the doctrines of the Divine Master, who demanded that man should love his neighbor as himself.
Tug had not the moral courage for an open fight, and here he was far inferior to the greater adventurer, Leo. Leo would drive roughshod over everybody and everything; the whole wide world if necessary. He would gain his end by the frank courage of the fighter, which must always command a certain admiration, even if condemnation goes with it. But Tug had no such qualities. It was for him to wriggle and twist, using anybody and anything, by subtle underhand workings, to achieve a similar purpose. But again, even in his purpose he was Leo's inferior. Leo's desire was for victory, victory in the great struggle of modern life, and not for the fleshpots which that victory would entitle him to. Tug desired victory, too, but it was that he might taste the sweetest morsels which those fleshpots contained. Whichever way the struggle went there could be little doubt as to who would claim the applause from the balconies at the fall of the curtain.
When Tug reached his camping ground he found himself in a land of dead fires. The cold, gray ashes were everywhere about him. Life had gone; hope had fled. And the charred embers of the camp-fire in the center of it were the symbol of the ruin.
His quick eyes took in the picture, while his cold heart read something of the meaning of what he beheld. The absence of his dogs first drew his attention, and this was swiftly followed by the realization that his sled was nowhere to be seen. Then his eyes caught the notice which was written on biscuit paper and secured to the front of his tent. He threw down his burden of dead wood, which had still remained upon his back, and stood in front of the message Leo had left him.
For long minutes he stood while the words, the bitter, ironical sentences, sank deep into his selfish heart. Here he was treated to the very attitude he loved to assume himself, and it lashed him to a cold, deadly fury. Again and again he read the message and each time he read it he found fresh fuel with which to build the icy fire of his rage. The theft itself was maddening, but strangely enough the tone of impudent triumph in which Leo addressed him drove him hardest. All that was worst in him was stirred, and the worst of this man was something so malignant and unsavory that the absent Leo might well have shrunk before its pursuing shadow.
No word passed his lips; no expression changed his features, except for the sudden cold pallor which had spread itself over them. Words rarely expressed his deeper feelings; he was not the man to storm in his despair. His whole mind and body were concentrated in a deadly desire to find a means of coming