Jackson Gregory

“ Big were the forests, limitless, seeming as vast as infinity itself, resting heavy and still upon a man’s soul. The feeling of last night, the loneliness, the sort of unnamed dread came back upon John Sheldon. ”

“ Why should there be two white piles of unburied human bones here in a day’s travel? Why should there be a fresh track in the wet soil made by a little naked foot in the night? Why should every bit of metallic substance disappear from the presence of those dead men? Why should his visitor of last night peer down at him and then slip away, with no word? ”

“ If it had been the big track of a big man, Sheldon’s heart would not have hammered so. But it was the track that might have marked the passing here of a boy of ten or twelve—or of a girl!
“A child or a woman came last night and looked at me as I slept,” muttered the man wonderingly. “Here, God knows how many miles from anywhere! Bare-footed, prowling around in the middle of the night! Good God! The cursed thing is uncanny!” ”

“ Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block of granite, carry it a hundred yards up-hill, and place it upon a rock of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.
One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred yards farther on, the fourth!
He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and they ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far below him. ”

“ Three hours had slipped away since noon. But he told himself that he was not “burning daylight.” He had found a way over the mountain, a way he believed his horse could go with him. And if luck was good, he’d camp to-night in the valley down into which he had looked from the peak.
And somewhere, far ahead of him, perhaps not a thousand feet away, watching him from behind some tree or rock, was his “wild man!” He was beginning to be certain that it was a man, a little fellow, dwarfed in body and mind and soul, and yet—
And yet the track might have been that of a boy of ten, or of a woman. ”

“ And yet he thought that last night’s visitor was ahead of him. True, a half-demented, supercunning wild man might have hidden behind any of those big tree-trunks, might even now be watching him with feverishly bright eyes. Sheldon must chance that; he could not seek behind every tree in this forest of countless thousands. ”

“ One could conceive of a man who had never got his full growth physically, who was stunted mentally as well, a half-crazed, half-wild being, who fled here, who subsisted in a state little short of savagery, who crept through the moonlit forests subtly stirred by the weird moon-madness, who hunted like the other wild things. ”