From the first mile these two riders were the best of companions.  They talked gaily, their voices carrying to each other with entire ease through the still glades.  He found her spirited, warm-hearted, responding with an eager gladness to every fresh manifestation of the wild; and in spite of his gay laughter she read something of the dark moodiness and intensity that were his dominant traits.  But he was kind, too.  His attitude toward the Little People met with on the trail—­the little, scurrying folk—­was particularly appealing:  like that of a strong man toward children.  She saw that he was sympathetic, instinctively chivalrous; and she got past his barrier of reserve as few living beings had ever done before.

She saw at once that he was an expert horseman.  Riding a half-broken mustang over the winding, brush-grown moose trails of the North is not like cantering a thoroughbred along a park avenue, and a certain amount of difficulty is the rule rather than the exception; but he controlled his animal as no man of her acquaintance had ever done.  He rode a bay mare that was not, by a long way, the most reliable piece of horseflesh McClurg owned, yet she gave him the best she had in her, scrambling with a burst of energy on the pitches, leaping the logs, battling the mires, and obeying his every wish.  The joy of the Northern trails depends largely upon the service rendered by the horse between one’s knees, and Ben knew it to the full.

Before the first two hours were past Beatrice found herself thrilling with admiration at Ben’s woodcraft.  Not only by experience but by instinct and character he was wholly fitted for life in the waste places.  Just as some artists are born with the soul of music, he had come to the earth with the Red Gods at his beck and call; the spirit of the wild things seemed to move in his being.  She didn’t wholly understand.  She only knew that this man, newly come from “The States,” riding so straight and talking so gaily behind her, had qualities native to the forest that were lacking not only in her, but in such men as her father and Ray Brent.  Seemingly he had inherited straight from the youngest days of the earth those traits by which aboriginal man conquered the wild.

The first real manifestation of this truth occurred soon after they reached the bank of Poor Man’s creek.  All at once he had shouted at her and told her to stop her horse.  She drew up and turned in her saddle, questioning.

“There’s something stirring in the thicket beside you.  Don’t you hear him?”

Beatrice had sharp ears, but she strained in vain for the sound that, forty feet farther distant, Ben heard easily.  She shook her head, firmly believing his imagination had led him astray.  But an instant later a coyote—­one of those gray skulkers whose waging cries at twilight every woodfarer knows—­sprang out of his covert and darted away.

Beatrice was amazed.  The significance of the incident went further than the fact of mere good hearing.  The coyote, except when he chooses to wail out his wrongs at the fall of night, is one of the forest shadows for silence—­yet Ben had heard him.  It meant nothing less than that strange quickening of the senses found in but few—­master woodsmen—­that is the especial trait and property of the beasts themselves.