The night, the moon-glow, the tense attitude of his waiting added to the weirdness of the picture which the old wanderer of the mountains made as Aldous faced him.  MacDonald was tall; some trick of the night made him appear almost unhumanly tall as he stood in the centre of that tiny moonlit amphitheatre.  His head was bowed a little, and his shoulders drooped a little, for he was old.  A thick, shaggy beard fell in a silvery sheen over his breast.  His hair, gray as the underwing of the owl whose note he forged, straggled in uncut disarray from under the drooping rim of a battered and weatherworn hat.  His coat was of buckskin, and it was short at the sleeves—­four inches too short; and the legs of his trousers were cut off between the knees and the ankles, giving him a still greater appearance of height.

In the crook of his arm MacDonald held a rifle, a strange-looking, long-barrelled rifle of a type a quarter of a century old.  And Donald MacDonald, in the picture he made, was like his gun, old and gray and ghostly, as if he had risen out of some graveyard of the past to warm himself in the yellow splendour of the moon.  But in the grayness and gauntness of him there was something that was mightier than the strength of youth.  He was alert.  In the crook of his arm there was caution.  His eyes were as keen as the eyes of an animal.  His shoulders spoke of a strength but little impaired by the years.  Ghostly gray beard, ghostly gray hair, haunting eyes that gleamed, all added to the strange and weird impressiveness of the man as he stood before Aldous.  And when he spoke, his voice had in it the deep, low, cavernous note of a partridge’s drumming.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Aldous,” he said.  “I’ve been waiting ever since the train come in.  I was afraid you’d go to the cabin!”

Aldous stepped forth and gripped the old mountaineer’s outstretched hand.  There was intense relief in Donald’s eyes.

“I got a little camp back here in the bush,” he went on, nodding riverward.  “It’s safer ’n the shack these days.  Yo’re sure—­there ain’t no one following?”

“Quite certain,” assured Aldous.  “Look here, MacDonald—­what in thunder has happened?  Don’t continue my suspense!  Who shot you?  Why did you warn me?”

Deep in his beard the old hunter laughed.

“Same fellow as would have shot you, I guess,” he answered.  “They made a bad job of it, Johnny, an awful bad job, an’ mebby there’d been a better man layin’ for you!”

He was pulling Aldous in the bush as he spoke.  For ten minutes he dived on ahead through a jungle in which there was no trail.  Suddenly he turned, led the way around the edge of a huge mass of rock, and paused a moment later before a small smouldering fire.  Against the face of a gigantic boulder was a balsam shelter.  A few cooking utensils were scattered about.  It was evident that MacDonald had been living here for several days.

“Looks as though I’d run away, don’t it, Johnny?” he asked, laughing in his curious, chuckling way again.  “An’ so I did, boy.  From the mountain up there I’ve been watching things through my telescope—­been keepin’ quiet since Doc pulled the bullet out.  I’ve been layin’ for the Breed.  I wanted him to think I’d vamoosed.  I’m goin’ to kill him!”