CHAPTER I
At sunset hour the forest was still, lonely, sweet with tang of fir and
spruce, blazing in gold and red and green; and the man who glided on
under the great trees seemed to blend with the colors and, disappearing,
to have become a part of the wild woodland.
Old Baldy, highest of the White Mountains, stood up round and bare,
rimmed bright gold in the last glow of the setting sun. Then, as the
fire dropped behind the domed peak, a change, a cold and darkening
blight, passed down the black spear-pointed slopes over all that
mountain world.
It was a wild, richly timbered, and abundantly watered region of dark
forests and grassy parks, ten thousand feet above sea-level, isolated
on all sides by the southern Arizona desert--the virgin home of elk and
deer, of bear and lion, of wolf and fox, and the birthplace as well as
the hiding-place of the fierce Apache.
September in that latitude was marked by the sudden cool night breeze
following shortly after sundown. Twilight appeared to come on its wings,
as did faint sounds, not distinguishable before in the stillness.
Milt Dale, man of the forest, halted at the edge of a timbered ridge, to
listen and to watch. Beneath him lay a narrow valley, open and grassy,
from which rose a faint murmur of running water. Its music was pierced
by the wild staccato yelp of a hunting coyote. From overhead in the
giant fir came a twittering and rustling of grouse settling for the
night; and from across the valley drifted the last low calls of wild
turkeys going to roost.
To Dale's keen ear these sounds were all they should have been,
betokening an unchanged serenity of forestland. He was glad, for he had
expected to hear the clipclop of white men's horses--which to hear up
in those fastnesses was hateful to him. He and the Indian were friends.
That fierce foe had no enmity toward the lone hunter. But there hid
somewhere in the forest a gang of bad men, sheep-thieves, whom Dale did
not want to meet.
