The hushed, dark, primal forest had a different appeal for him now.  He loved it still, with the reverence and adoration of the forester he was, but no longer with that love a servant bears his master.  He had distinctly escaped from its dominance.  The passion and mounting fire that it wakened at the fall of darkness could no longer take possession of him, as strong drink possesses the brain, bending his will, making of him simply a tool and a pawn to gratify its cruel desires and to achieve its mysterious ends.  He had been, in spirit, a brother of the wolf, before:  a runner in the packs.  Such had been the outgrowth of innate traits; part of his strange destiny.  Now, after these weeks in the cave, he was a man.  It was hard for him to explain even to himself.  It was as if in the escape from his own black passions, he had also escaped the curious tyranny of the wild; not further subject to its cruel moods and whims, but rather one of a Dominant Breed, a being who could lift his head in defiance to the storm, obey his own will, go his own way.  This was no little change.  Perhaps, when all is said and done, it marks the difference between man and the lesser mammals, the thing that has evolved a certain species of the primates—­simply woods creatures that trembled at the storm and cowered in the night—­into the rulers and monarchs of the earth.

Ben had come out from the darkened forest trails where he made his lairs and had gone into a cave to live!  He had found a permanent abode—­a lasting, shelter from the cold and the storm.  It suggested a curious allegory to him.  Some time in the long-forgotten past, probably when the later glaciers brought their promise of cold, all his race left their leafy bowers and found cave homes in the cliffs.  Before that time they were merely woods children, blind puppets of nature, sleeping where exhaustion found them; wandering without aim in the tree aisles; mating when they met the female of their species on the trails and venturing on again; knowing the ghastly, haunting fear of the night and the blind terror of the storm and elements:  merely higher beasts in a world of beasts.  But they came to the caves.  They established permanent abodes.  They began to be men.

All that now stands as civilization, all the conquest of the earth and sea and air began from that moment.  It was the Great Epoch,—­and Ben had illustrated it in his own life.  The change had been infinitely slow, but certain as the movement of the planets in their spheres.  Behind the sheltering walls they got away from fear,—­that cruel bondage in which Nature holds all her wild creatures, the burden that makes them her slaves.  Never to shudder with horror when the darkness fell in silence and mystery; never to have the heart freeze with terror when the thunder roared in the sky and the wind raged in the trees.  The cave dwellers began to come into their own.  Sheltered behind stone walls they could defy the elements that had enslaved them so