The detectives knew him, but the region’s population did not know. He went by the name of Skyline Pete, because he was seen so often silhouetted against the horizon along the crests of the bare Alpine heights above the timber stand.

The rumor went around that Roland Danvers had in his peeled log cabin unusual luxuries and supplies of the most tasty kinds. This was near the truth, for the doctors had prescribed for him a great many luxuries to assuage his physical condition. He had a fortune from which he could scarcely spend the income.

His cabin was finely furnished, but he would have been glad to exchange all that he had for the robust health and easy habits of mind of most of those who dwelt far away and in humbler surroundings than his mountain retreat, where at times despair could not fail to mingle its voice with his most determined resolutions. Never before had his courage been so sorely tried.

Drawn into an unnatural shape by his illness, he daily worked against the strains, exercising, reading in the great literature that inspires heroes and records the transition of human despair into supreme confidence, generally he was content. Though winter was upon him, he refused to obey the portents of the migration of the wild life from the high ranges down into the lower belts.

“No,” he shook his head, “leave me here alone. I’ve enough to eat, more than three pounds a day for the length of the winter season, and a ton of grain and a cord of dried meats to hang out for my wild neighbors. There’s plenty of fuel in the woodshed, and lots of oil for my lamps. No! If man can’t help me it may be I’ll find here in these mountains the faith of mind that ’ll overcome my physical ailments.”

“We prob’ly cain’t git to come up more’n once or twicet this winter, if the snow’s loose!” the club superintendent warned him.

“Don’t worry about me, boys,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter what happens. If I go back down now, I’m retreating. I want to stay here and fight it out.”

With forebodings they left him, and well they might dislike to leave a man alone like that in such a remote fastness. Danvers was a good fellow. When he had been a stalwart, like his camp mates, he had been one of the kindliest men in the world. Now he was even finer and gentler.

They left him firearms and ammunition. They made sure of every detail, from fire extinguishers to matches, and from venison jerky to long rows of canned fruit. His own solicitude was that he should have plenty of grain and dried meats, great sticks of beef and mutton kidney fats to be hung out for his bird friends, who like himself would rather enjoy the great mountains, despite the cold, than go down to milder climes.

When two of the guides fought their way into the cabin to spend Christmas with the self-exiled man, they found him about the same. He was putting records through his phonograph when they came up to the cabin in the evening. The timber above the cabin was splitting with the terrific frost, the ground shaking as the solid granite shrank to the shriveling touch. But within, a red fire blazed cheerily in the sitting room, a heating stove insuring the cabin the ample warmth of comfort. At their hail from without the man threw wide the door.

“Why, boys, you’ve come?” he exclaimed.

“Sure thing—Merry Christmas!” they laughed, and unloaded bundles of mail, magazines and remembrances which had been sent to him by his friends.

“Thank you, boys!” he said, brokenly, stirred by the affection which was willing to undertake that tremendous trip through the hard going when every step of the snowshoes on the loose fluff let them down nearly two feet in it.

The visitors remained four days. Danvers visibly cheered up under their presence. He was not sorry to have them leave, but from every word that had come to him he knew that his friends were pulling for him. They wanted him to swing up instead of slide down. They couldn’t afford to lose him. At the same time they knew he was the captain of his own destiny, and that he must find himself there alone or not at all.

New Year’s, January and February were magnificent phenomena in that land. Storms swept the mountains and added snow on the deeps already inundated. There were days so cold that the birds could not face it, and the watcher saw a raven, flying along, suddenly collapse and fall into the snow, frozen to death on the wing.

Wiser birds buried themselves in the loose snow, waiting for the freeze to moderate, and when they came out at last they swarmed in flocks around the great chunks of suet and lean meat which hung in Danvers’s trees and scratched and ate the grain till their crops stuck out like pouters. All of them, when stuffed, came with shining eyes to cock their heads to right or left, staring at the muffled human who attended them in their wants.

He even set out dishes of warm water at which they drank dramatically. Now and then a foolish young one plunged in to take a bath, requiring thawing operations quickly.

* * * * *

Skyline Pete, improvident and a thief, came prowling into the winter hermit’s valley. He had failed to lay in enough food to see him through the winter, and, hungry as a bear, emerging from its hibernating, Skyline Pete took advantage of hard snow and bare streaks to sneak out of his own fastnesses into the domain of Roland Danvers.

He arrived near the cabin after dusk. He circled around it, peering through the windows into the fire-lit comfort of the sitting room, where the recluse sat listening to the music of his records, of which he had brought so many that perhaps some had never yet been played. The skulker went, cat-like, to the porch to look in. Ravenous, he broke off a chunk of jerky, careless whether it was beef or horse, gnawing it, jealous and envious of the birds, who there had all they needed.

Skyline Pete knew well enough that just one word of his own hungry predicament would give him a back load of supplies, and another lot when he should return. Sportsmen were like that, prodigal in their liberality. He knew that Danvers was one of the best fellows in the world. He hated him for the contrast with his own surly and brutal instincts.

There was loot of firearms, of money, probably, and of innumerable trinkets and valuables. He even saw sparkling on the man’s hand the beautiful stone which marked Danvers’s allegiance to his wife and sweetheart, now gone.

The visitor turned raider. He slipped to the door and softly tried it. Of course, no one locked a camp in that remote place! Skyline Pete quietly opened the hewn plank barrier and walked in on his toes, feline in his invasion. The cool draft rolling through the room gave the man who had spent the winter there his first warning of the intrusion.

Roland Danvers straightened from the rack of records to look. He saw the whiskery, long-haired scoundrel, who was patched about with furs and hides, the accumulated results of repugnance to cold water, visible to his looks. Skyline Pete had picked up a club of firewood as he came along the porch from looking at the window. Under his grizzly brows his eyes glowed green in their sunken pits. Perhaps he was demented or a reversion to the cave man era of intelligence and habits. In any event murder was his intention, unmistakably.

Roland Danvers straightened up, his brows lifting with surprise. His soul had been tried by his long vigil alone in that high back land. There had been times when he had bent weakly in dejection before the fireplace on gloomy nights, but courage had never failed him. Weak or strong, he was no quitter. He took a step toward the scamp with such a serene and blue-eyed contempt that Skyline Pete flinched, hesitated and took a slight step backward.

The intruder was a much heavier man than his intended victim. He was armed with a club, revolvers, and a knife in his belt. He had every advantage, it seemed, over the slender gentleman who stood with such a feeling of expectant exultation as he had not felt in twenty years, as though youth itself had returned to bless him with its stalwart joy in the beginning of some great feat.

Angered that he had betrayed his own cowardice, the raider surged forward with a savage, incoherent growl, shrill and high in its timbre, raising his club to beat down the smaller man with famine-inspired blows. Side-stepping, Danvers slipped from under, and the knot struck a dent in the flooring.

Danvers leaped in, driving home a fist blow. Its strength surprised him. He had not known he was that nearly fit.

His physique cleared with his mind. He was largely himself again. He had scant chance against that antagonist, but he took it cheerfully, as though any possibility, however slight, was all he asked.

Much quicker than Skyline Pete, he must, if he would win, keep clear of the club, duck out of the fellow’s bear-like arms, and stay on his feet. If caught and seized, he did not forget the guns and knife whose butts jutted out of the bearskin hair at the fellow’s waist. Cool against increasing and baffled rage, Danvers had some advantage of which he took the full measure.