Through the pit of gloom Alan made his way.  He was not lost.  Three years ago he had walked a score of times to the cabin of old Olaf Ericksen, half a mile up the shore, and he knew Ericksen would still be there, where he had squatted for twenty years, and where he had sworn to stay until the sea itself was ready to claim him.  So he felt his way instinctively, while a crash of thunder broke over his head.  The forces of the night were unleashing.  He could hear a gathering tumult in the mountains hidden beyond the wall of blackness, and there came a sudden glare of lightning that illumined his way.  It helped him.  He saw a white reach of sand ahead and quickened his steps.  And out of the sea he heard more distinctly an increasing sound.  It was as if he walked between two great armies that were setting earth and sea atremble as they advanced to deadly combat.

The lightning came again, and after it followed a discharge of thunder that gave to the ground under his feet a shuddering tremor.  It rolled away, echo upon echo, through the mountains, like the booming of signal-guns, each more distant than the other.  A cold breath of air struck Alan in the face, and something inside him rose up to meet the thrill of storm.

He had always loved the rolling echoes of thunder in the mountains and the fire of lightning among their peaks.  On such a night, with the crash of the elements about his father’s cabin and the roaring voices of the ranges filling the darkness with tumult, his mother had brought him into the world.  Love of it was in his blood, a part of his soul, and there were times when he yearned for this “talk of the mountains” as others yearn for the coming of spring.  He welcomed it now as his eyes sought through the darkness for a glimmer of the light that always burned from dusk until dawn in Olaf Ericksen’s cabin.

He saw it at last, a yellow eye peering at him through a slit in an inky wall.  A moment later the darker shadow of the cabin rose up in his face, and a flash of lightning showed him the door.  In a moment of silence he could hear the patter of huge raindrops on the roof as he dropped his bags and began hammering with his fist to arouse the Swede.  Then he flung open the unlocked door and entered, tossing his dunnage to the floor, and shouted the old greeting that Ericksen would not have forgotten, though nearly a quarter of a century had passed since he and Alan’s father had tramped the mountains together.

He had turned up the wick of the oil lamp on the table when into the frame of an inner door came Ericksen himself, with his huge, bent shoulders, his massive head, his fierce eyes, and a great gray beard streaming over his naked chest.  He stared for a moment, and Alan flung off his hat, and as the storm broke, beating upon the cabin in a mighty shock of thunder and wind and rain, a bellow of recognition came from Ericksen.  They gripped hands.

The Swede’s voice rose above wind and rain and the rattle of loose windows, and he was saying something about three years ago and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, when the strange look in Alan’s face made him pause to hear other words than his own.