slopes lost their white blankets, surrendered to the conquering brown.  Migratory life, long absent, returned to its own.  Prairie kites soared far overhead on motionless wings.  Meadow larks, cheeriest of heralds, practised their five-toned lay.  Here and there, to the north of prairie boulders, appeared tufts of green; tufts that, like the preceding brown, grew and grew and grew until they dominated the whole landscape.  Then at last, the climax, the finale of the play, came life, animal and vegetable, with a rush.  Again at daylight and at dusk swarms of black dots on whistling wings floated here and there, descended to earth; and, following, indefinite as to location, weird, lonely, boomed forth in their mating songs.  Transient, shallow, miniature lakes swarmed with their new-come denizens.  Last of all, final assurance of a new season’s advent, by day and by night, swelling, diminishing, unfailingly musical as distant chiming bells, came the sound of all most typical of prairie and of spring.  From high overhead in the blue it came, often so high that the eye could not distinguish its makers; yet alway distinctive, alway hauntingly mysterious.  “Honk! honk! honk!” sounded and echoed and re-echoed that heraldry over the awakened land.  “Honk! honk! honk!” it repeated; and listening humans smiled and commented unnecessarily each to the other:  “Spring is not coming.  It is here.”

CHAPTER XV

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

A shaggy grey wolf, a baby no longer but practically full grown, swung slowly along the beaten trail connecting the house and the barn as the stranger appeared.  He did not run, he did not glance behind, he made no sound.  With almost human dignity he vacated the premises to the newcomer.  Not until he reached his destination, the ill-lighted stable, did curiosity get the better of prudence; then, safe within the doorway, he wheeled about, and with forelegs wide apart stood staring out, his long, sensitive nose taking minutest testimony.

The newcomer, a well-proportioned, smooth-faced man in approved riding togs, halted likewise and returned the look; equally minutely, equally suspiciously.  The horse he rode was one of a kind seldom seen on the ranges:  a thoroughbred with slender legs and sensitive ears.  The rider sat his saddle well; remarkably well for one obviously from another life.  Both the horse and man were immaculately groomed.  At a distance they made a pleasant picture, one fulfilling adequately the adjective “smart.”  Not until an observer was near, very near, could the looseness of the skin beneath the man’s eyelids, incongruous with his general youth, and the abnormal nervous twitching of a muscle here and there, have been noted.  For perhaps a minute he sat so, taking in every detail of the commonplace surroundings.  Then, apparently satisfied, he dismounted and, tying the animal to the wheel of an old surrey drawn up in the yard, he approached the single entrance of the house and rapped.