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Show I TI12 Voice 1 . of the Pack I ; ; ttttv :; '. . v. .. ?: : ; By Edison Marshall v l:! (Copyright, 1D.SJ, Little, Drown Company) O Love story, adventure tory, nature story all three qualities combine in the "Voice of the Pack," a tale of modern man and woman arrayed against the force3 of age-old age-old savagery, n- -r Prologue. 7f one can Just lfe close enough to the kroa.Ht of the wl Idorne.ss, he can't help l,ut he Imbu.d with some of the life that pulses therein. Krom a Frontiersman's Diary. I.nns n-o, when the great city t riitrheapolls was a niur small, middy mi-ddy hamlet In the middle of a phi'n. It used to lie that a pool of waio'r. possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immedinte'y buck of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy in Gitcheap, 1 is In winter; and the pond was nothing more than snow water that the inefii-ciont inefii-ciont drainage system of the city d'd 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 Ihe water, this spring day of long ago. Except for his interest In the pond, it would have been scarcely worth while 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 be was some-tlmes some-tlmes able to convince himself that this was so. But he never took hook and line and played at fishing. lie was too much afraid of the laughter of his hoy 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 Gitcheapolis creek to fish with the other boys for mud cat. He was not very strong, sl g thought, and It was a rough 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 n 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 bole upon n green. Sometimes they don't remember that this instinct is just as much a part of most men. and thus most hoys, as their hands or their lips. It was acquired by just as laborious la-borious a process the lives of up-counted up-counted thousands of ancestors who fished and hunted for a living. Tt was .true Hint little Han didn't look the part. Kon then he shmved s'irns of physical frailty. His eye looked rather large, and his cheeks were not the color of fresh sirloin, as' they should have boon. In fact, one would have bail to look very hard to see any color in them at all. These facts are in'eres'ing from ho 'zh' Ihev throw upon' the next glimpse of Pan, fully twenty years later. . Except for the fact that it was the background for the earliest picture of little Pan, 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. He saw a shadow in he water that he pretended pre-tended he thought might be a fish. lie threw a stone at It. The only thing that happened was i ..plash, and then a slowly widening ripp'e. The circumference of the rip-pie rip-pie grew ever larger, extended and widened, and finally died at the edge of the sfliore. It set little Pan to thinking. He wondered if. had the poo! been larger, the ripple still would have spread ; and if the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple would linve gone on forever. At the time he did net know the laws of cause and effect. Later, when Gitcheapolis was great and prosperous and no longer untidy, he was going to find out that a cause is nothing hut a rock thrown Into a pond of infinity, and the ripple that is its effect keeps growing and growing forever. "M o little '.f.cMont that' is the real beginning 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 Pan " Kniling. since grown up, far out of " me realms or the ordinary. . And that brings all matters down to 1019, in 'tie Isn dnysMif a partlcu- larly sleepy snuaier. rou would liard- , ly know Gitcheapolis now. The business busi-ness district has increased tenfold. And the place where used to be the pool ami the playground of Pan failing fail-ing is now laid off in as green ain pretty a city pari; 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. Bat in the summer sum-mer of 1010. a few small birds and possibly half a dozen pairs of squirrels squir-rels were the extent and limit of the wild cr.-a lures. And at the moment Ibis siory opens, one of these squirrels squir-rels was pen-lied on a wide-spreading limb overarching a gravel path that sianfed through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. lie 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 Failing 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-failed fellow on Ihe tree limb was the 'squirrel of Destiny I , EOOK ONE : i Repatriation. chapter I. Pan Failing stepped nut of the elevator ele-vator and was at once absorbed in the crowd that ever surged up and down Broad street. He was just one of the ordinary drops of water, not an interesting, elaborate, physical and chemical combination to be studied on the slide df a microscope. He wore fairly passable clothes, neither rich nor shabby. He was a tall man, but gave no impression of strength because of the exceeding spareness of bis frame. As long as he remained in the crowd, he wasn't important enough to be studied. " But soon be turned off. through the park, and straightway found, himself alone. The noise and bustle of the crowd never loud or startling, but so continuous contin-uous that the senses are scarcely more aware of them than of the beating beat-ing of one's own heart suddenly and utterly died almost at the very border of the park. The noise from the Wm&m If ?'! "Why, You Little Devil!" Dan Said ' in a Whisper. street seemed wholly unable to penetrate pene-trate the tliii'k branches of the trees, lie could even hoar the leaves whisking whisk-ing and flicjiig together, and when a man can discern this, he can bear the ' cushions ofla mountain lion on a trail at night. Of course Pan Failing had never heard a mountain lion. Except on the railroad tracks between, he bad never really been away from cities in his life. At once his thought went back to the doctor's words. They were still repeating themselves -over and over in his cars, and the doctor's face was still before Ids eyes. It bad been i kind face; Ihe lips had even curled in a little smile of encouragement. Hut the doctor had been perfectly frank, entirely straightforward. There bad been no evasion in his verdict. "I've made every test," lie said. "They're pretty well shot. Of course, you can go to some sanitarium, if you've got the money. If you haven't enjoy yourself all you can for about six months." Pan's voice had been perfectly cool and sure when he replied. He ,hiiI smiled a little, too." He was still rather rath-er proud of that, smile. "Six months? Isn't that rather short?" "Maybe a whole lot shorter. I think that's the limit." There was the situation: Pan Failing Fail-ing had but six months to live. He began to wonder whether his mother had been entirely wise in her effort to keep him from the "rough games" of the boys of bis own age. He realized now that lie had been an underweight all his life- that the frailty that had thrust him to the edge of the grave had begun in his earliesi boyhood. But it wasn't that he was born with physical phy-sical handicaps, lie bail weighed if full ten pounds; and the doctor bad told his father that a sturdier little chap was not to be found in any maternity ma-ternity bod In the whole city. But bis moiUer was convinced that Lhe child was delicate and must be sneltered, Never In all the history of his family, so far as Dan knew, had there been a death from the malady that afflicted him. Yet his sentence was signed and sealed. But he harbored v.o resentment against his mother. It was all in the game. She bad done what she thought was best. And he began to wonder in what way he could get ihe greatest pleasure from his last six months of life. "Good Lord!" he suddenly breathed. "I may not be here to see the snows come!'' Pan had always been partial to the winter season. When the snow lay all over the farm hinds and bowed down the limbs of the trees, it had always wakened a curious Hood of feelings in the wasted man. It seemed to him that he could remember other winters, wherein the snow lay for endless end-less miles over an endless wilderness, and here and there were stratrge, many-toed tracks that could be followed fol-lowed in the icy dawns. But of course it was just a fancy. He wasn't In the least misled about It. He knew that he had never, in his lifetime, seen the wilderness. Of course his grandfather grand-father had been a frontiersman of the first order, and all his ancestors he-fore he-fore him a rangy, hardy breed whose wings would crumple , in civilization but he himself had always lived in cities. Yet the falling snows, soft and gentle but with a kind of" remorseless-ness remorseless-ness he eould sense but could not understand, un-derstand, had always stirred him. He'd often imagined that he -would like to see the forests in winter. In him you could see a reflection of the boy that played beside the pond of snow water, twenty years before. His dark gray eyes were still rather large and perhaps the wasted flesh around them made them seem larger than they were. But it was a little hard to see them, as he wore large glasses. His mother had been sure, years before, that he needed glasses; and she had easily found an oculist that agreed with her. Now that he was ahme on the path, the utter absence of color in his cheeks was startling. That meant the absence of red that warm glow of the blood eager and alive in his veins. Perhaps an observer would have noticed lean hands, with big-knuckled big-knuckled fingers, a rather firm mouth, and closely cropped dark hair. , He was twenty-nine years of nge, but he looked somewhat older. He know, now that he was nver going to be any older. A doctor as sure of himself as-the as-the one he had just consulted couldn't possibly be mistaken. He sat down on a park bench, just beneath the spreading limb of a great tree. He would sit here, he thought, , until he finally decided what he would ' do with his remaining six months. He hadn't been able ,to go to war. The recruiting officer had been very kind but most determined. The boys had brought him great tales of France. It might be nice to go to France and live in some country inn until he died. But he didn't have very long to think upon this vein. For at that instant the squirrel came down to see if he had a nut. It was the squirrel of Destiny. But Dan didn't know it then. Bushy-tail was not particularly afraid of the human- beings that passed up and down the park, because he had learned by experience that they usually attempted no harm to him. But, nevertheless, he had his instincts. He didn't entirely trust them. After several generations, probably the squirrels of this park would climb all over its visitors and sniff in their ears and investigate the back of their necks. But this wasn't the way of Bi'ishy-tnil. He had co'me too recently recent-ly from the wild places. And he wondered, won-dered, most intensely, whether this tall, forked creature had a pocket full of nuts. He swung down on the grass to see. "Why, you little devil !" Dan said in a whisper. His eyes suddenly sparkled with delight. And je' forgot all about the doctor's words and bis own prospects in his bitter regrets that he had not brought a pocketful of mils. And then Dan did a curious thing. Even later, he didn't know why he did if. or what gave him the idea that he could decoy the squirrel up to him by doing it. Th".t was his only purpose-just purpose-just to see how close the squirrel would come to him. He thought he would like to look into the bright eyes at close ralige. All he did was suddenly sud-denly to freeze into one position in an instant rendered as motionless as the rather questionable-looking stone stork that was perched on the fountain. foun-tain. Where Dan Failing decides j to spend his last six months and who he reslly is, are interesting in-teresting features of the next installment of "The Voice of the Pack." (TO BI-: CONTINUED.) |