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Show S The Voice I 1 of the Pack 1 i mm i g J $ 3 j; By Edison Marshall t; J 8 . ' ' ly know GItcheapolIs now. The business busi-ness district has Increased tenfold. And the place whero used to be the pool and the playground of Dan Failing Fail-ing Is now laid off in as green and pretty a city park as one could wish to see. Some day, when the city becomes more prosperous, a pair of swans and a herd of deer are going to be introduced, intro-duced, to restore some of the natural wild life of the park. But In the summer sum-mer of 1919. a few small birds and possibly half a dozen pairs of squirrels squir-rels were the extent and limit of the wild creatures. And at the moment this story opens, one of these squirrels squir-rels was perched on a wide-spreading limb overarching a gravel path that slanted through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. He wished that some one would come along with a nut. There was a bench beneath the tree. If there had not been, the life of Dan Palling would have been entirely different. dif-ferent. If the squirrel had been on any other tree, if he hadn't been hungry, if any one of a dozen other things hadn't been as they were, Dan Failing would have never gone back to. the land of his people. The little bushy-tailed fellow on the tree limb was the squirrel of Destiny 1 . (Copyright, 1920, Little, Brown fc Company) p - o Love story, adventure story, nature story all three qualities combine in the "Voice of the Pack," a tale of modern man and woman arrayed against the forces of age-old age-old savagery. Q Q Prologue. it one can Just lie close enough to the Ivreaat of the wilderness, he can't help IfUt be Imbued with some of the life that pulses therein. From a Frontiersman's Diary. Long ago, vhen the great city of Gitcheapolls was a richer small, untidy un-tidy hamlet in the middle of a plain, It used to be that a pool of water, possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immediately back of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy In Gitdieaplis In winter ; and the- pond was nothing more than snow water that the inefficient ineffi-cient drainage system of the city did not quite absorb. Besides being the despair of the plumbers and the city engineer, it was a severe strain on the beauty-loving instincts of every Inhabitant in the town who had any such Instincts. It was muddy and murky and generally distasteful. A little boy played at the edge of the water, this spring day of long ago. Except for his interest In the pond, it would have been scarcely worth wtiNe to go to the trouble of explaining that it contained no fish. He, however, bitterly regretted the fact. In truth, he sometimes liked to believe that it did contain fish, very sleepy fish that never made a ripple, and as he had an uncommon Imagination he was sometimes some-times able to convince himself that this was so. But he never took hook and line and played at fishing. He was too much afraid of the laughter of his boy friends. His mother probably prob-ably wouldn't object if he fished here, he thought, particularly if he were careful not to get his shoes covered with mud. But she wouldn't let him go down to Gltcheapolis creek to fish with the other boys for mud cat. lie was not very strong, she thought, and It was n rousrh sport anyway, and besides be-sides she didn't think he wanted to go very badly. As mothers are usually usual-ly particularly understanding, this was a curious thing. The truth was that little Dan. Failing Fail-ing wanted to fish almost as much as he wanted to live. He would dream about it of nights. His blood would glow with the thought of it In the springtime. Women the world over will have a hard time believing what an intense, heart-devouring passion the love of the chase can be, whether It Is for fishing or hunting or merely knocking golf balls into a little hole upon a green. Sometimes they don't remember that this instinct is just as much a part of most men, and thus most boys, as their hands or their lips. It was acquired by just as laborious la-borious a process the lives of uncounted un-counted thousands of ancestors who fished and hunted for a living. It was true that little Dan didn't look the part. Eon then he showed signs of physical frailty. His eyes looked ratherlarge, and his cheeks were not the color of fresh sirloin, as they should have been. In fact, one would have had to look very hard to see any color in them at all. These facts are interesting from the light they throw upon the next glimpse of Dun, fully twenty years later. Except for the fact that it was the background for the earliest picture of little Dan, the pool back of the courthouse court-house has very little Importance in his story. It did, however, afford an Illustration to him of one of the really real-ly astonishing truths of life. lie saw A shadow in the wnter that he pretended pre-tended he thought might be a fish. He threw a stone t It. The only thing that happened was a splash, nnd then n slowly widening ripple. The circumference of the ripple rip-ple grew ever larger, extended and widened, and Anally died at the edge of the shore. It set little Dan to thinking. He wondered 1f, had the pool been larger, the ripple still would have spread ; and If the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple would have gone on forever. At the time he did net know the laws of cause and effect. Later, when Gltcheapolis was great and prosperous and no longer untidy, he was going to find out that a cause Is nothing but a rock thrown Into a pond of Infinity, and the ripple that Is its effect keeps growing and growing forever. The little '.ncldent that Is the real neglnnlng of. this story was of no more Importance than a pebble thrown Into the snow-water pond; but its effect ef-fect was to remove the life of Dan Falling, since grown up, far out of the realms or the ordinary. And thpt brings ;ill matters down to 1019, hi ne l-t days of a particularly particu-larly sleepy srtumer. You would hard- |