Poor Kalman!  When on that fateful morning upon his virgin soul there dawned the vision of the maid, the hour of fate struck for him.  That most ancient and most divine of frenzies smote him.  He was deliciously, madly in love, though he knew it not.  It is something to his credit, however, that he allowed the maiden to depart without giving visible token of this divine frenzy raging within his breast, unless it were that in the blue of his eyes there came a deeper blue, and that under the tan of his cheek a pallor crept.  But when on their going the girl suddenly turned in her saddle and, waving her hand, cried, “Good-by, Kalman,” the pallor fled, chased from his cheek by a hot rush of Slavic blood as he turned to answer, “Good-by.”  He held his hat high in a farewell salutation, as he had seen Jack do, and then in another moment she was gone, and with her all the glory of that golden autumn day.

To Kalman it seemed as if months or years must have passed since he first saw her by her Aunt’s tent on that eventful morning.  To take up the ordinary routine was impossible to him.  That very night, rolling up his blankets and grub for three days, and strapping on to his saddle an axe and a shovel, Kalman rode off down the Night Hawk Creek, telling Mackenzie gruffly, as he called his dogs to follow, that he purposed digging out a coyote’s den that he knew lay somewhere between the lake and the Creek mouth.

The afternoon of the second day found him far down the Creek, where it plunged headlong into the black ravine below, not having discovered his wolf den and not much caring whether he should or not; for as he rode through the thick scrub he seemed to see dancing before him in the glancing beams that rained down through the yellow poplar leaves a maiden’s face with saucy brown eyes that laughed at him and lured him and flouted him all at once.

At the edge of the steep descent he held up his broncho.  He had never been down this way before.  The sides of the ravine pitched sharply into a narrow gorge through which the Night Hawk brawled its way to the Saskatchewan two miles farther down.

“We’ll scramble down here, Jacob,” he said to his broncho,—­so named by Brown, for that he had “supplanted” in Kalman’s affection his first pony, the pinto.

He dismounted, drew the reins over the broncho’s head, and began the descent, followed by his horse, slipping, sliding, hanging on now by trees and now by jutting rocks.  By the edge of what had once been a small landslip, he clutched a poplar tree to save himself from going over; but the tree came away with him, and horse and man slid and rolled down the slope, bringing with them a great mass of earth and stone.  Unhappily, Jacob in his descent rolled over upon the boy’s leg.  There was a snap, a twinge of sharp pain, and boy and horse lay half imbedded in the loose earth.  Kalman seized a stick that lay near at hand.

“Get up, Jacob, you brute!” he cried, giving him a sharp blow.