movements accompanied by friendly little tittering noises.  Everything about him seemed friendly.  The river rippled and murmured in cooling song just beyond the sandpiper.  On the other side the still cooler forest was a paradise of shade and contentment, astir with subdued and hidden life.  It was nesting season.  He heard the twitter of birds.  A tiny, brown wood warbler fluttered out to the end of a silvery birch limb, and it seemed to David that its throat must surely burst with the burden of its song.  The little fellow’s brown body, scarcely larger than a butternut, was swelling up like a round ball in his effort to vanquish all other song.

“Go to it, old man,” chuckled Carrigan.  “Go to it!”

The little warbler, that he might have crushed between thumb and forefinger, gave him a lot of courage.

Then the tiny chorister stopped for breath.  In that interval Carrigan listened to the wrangling of two vivid-colored Canada jays deeper in the timber.  Chronic scolds they were, never without a grouch.  They were like some people Carrigan had known, born pessimists, always finding something to complain about, even in their love days.

And these were love days.  That was the odd thought that came to Carrigan as he lay half on his face, his fingers slowly and cautiously working a loophole between his shoulder-pack and the rock.  They were love days all up and down the big rivers, where men and women sang for joy, and children played, forgetful of the long, hard days of winter.  And in forest, plain, and swamp was this spirit of love also triumphant over the land.  It was the mating season of all feathered things.  In countless nests were the peeps and twitters of new life; mothers of first-born were teaching their children to swim and fly; from end to end of the forest world the little children of the silent places, furred and feathered, clawed and hoofed, were learning the ways of life.  Nature’s yearly birthday was half-way gone, and the doors of nature’s school wide open.  And the tiny brown songster at the end of his birch twig proclaimed the joy of it again, and challenged all the world to beat him in his adulation.

Carrigan found that he could peer between his pack and the rock to where the other warbler was singing—­and where his enemy lay watching for the opportunity to kill.  It was taking a chance.  If a movement betrayed his loophole, his minutes were numbered.  But he had worked cautiously, an inch at a time, and was confident that the beginning of his effort to fight back was, up to the present moment, undiscovered.  He believed that he knew about where the ambushed man was concealed.  In the edge of a low-hanging mass of balsam was a fallen cedar.  From behind the butt of that cedar he was sure the shots had come.