* * * * *

In the morning he left for the North and Portlaw’s camp.  Gray drove him to the station; Cecile, in distractingly pretty negligee waved him audacious adieu from her window.

“Shiela seems to be ill,” explained Gray, as the motor car shot out into the haze of early morning.  “She asked me to say good-bye for her....  I say, Hamil, you’re looking rather ill yourself.  This climate is sure to get a white man sooner or later, if he remains too long.  But the North will put you into condition.  You’re going straight to Portlaw’s camp on Luckless Lake?”

“Yes,” said Hamil listlessly.

“Well, we’ll be in New York in a week or two.  You’ll surely look us up when you’re in town, won’t you?  And write me a line about Acton and father—­won’t you?”

“Surely,” nodded Hamil absently.

And they sped on, the vast distorted shadow of the car racing beside them to the station.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LINE OF BATTLE

Portlaw’s camp in the southern foot-hills of the Adirondacks was as much a real camp as the pretentious constructions at Newport are real cottages.  A modesty, akin to smugness, designates them all with Heep-like humbleness under a nomenclature now tolerated through usage; and, from the photographs sent him, Hamil was very much disgusted to find a big, handsome two-story house, solidly constructed of timber and native stone, dominating a clearing in the woods, and distantly flanked by the superintendent’s pretty cottage, the guides’ quarters, stables, kennels, coach-houses, and hothouses with various auxiliary buildings still farther away within the sombre circle of the surrounding pines.

To this aggravation of elaborate structures Portlaw, in a spasm of modesty, had given the name of “Camp Chickadee”; and now he wanted to stultify the remainder of his domain with concrete terraces, bridges, lodges, and Gothic towers in various and pleasing stages of ruin.

So Hamil’s problem presented itself as one of those annoyingly simple ones, entirely dependent upon Portlaw and good taste; and Portlaw had none.

He had, however, some thirty thousand acres of woods and streams and lakes fenced in with a twelve-foot barrier of cattle-proof wire—­partly a noble virgin wilderness unmarred by man-trails; partly composed of lovely second growth scarcely scarred by that, vile spoor which is the price Nature pays for the white-hided invaders who walk erect, when not too drunk, and who foul and smear and stain and desolate water and earth and air around them.

Why Portlaw desired to cut his wilderness into a mincing replica of some emasculated British royal forest nobody seemed able to explain.  While at Palm Beach he had made two sage observations to Hamil concerning the sacredness of trees; one was that there are no trees in a Scotch deer forest, which proved to his satisfaction that trees are unnecessary; the other embodied his memories of seeing a herd of calf-like fallow deer decorating the grass under the handsome oaks and beeches of some British nobleman’s park.