The Call of Youth

Isolation was nothing new to these men. The remotenesses of the back world had been their life for years. They understood its every mood, and met them with nerves in perfect tune. The mountains filled their whole outlook. They desired nothing better, nothing more.

Yet it seemed strange that this should be. For the Padre had not always lived beyond the fringes of civilization. He was a man of education, a man of thought and even culture. These things must have been obvious to the most casual observer. In Buck's case it was easier to understand. He had known no other life than this. And yet he, too, might well have been expected to look askance at a future lost to all those things which he knew to lay beyond. Was he not at the threshold of life? Were not his veins thrilling with the rich, red tide of youth? Were not all those instincts which go to make up the sum of young human life as much a part of him as of those others who haunted the banks of Yellow Creek? The whole scheme was surely unusual. The Padre's instinct was to roam deeper and deeper into the wild, and Buck, offered his release from its wondrous thrall, had refused it.

Thus they embraced this new home. The vast and often decaying timbers, hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house, whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued, and the sentence of life and death had been handed out with scant regard for justice. Then there were the ruined walls of the common-room, where the fighting men had caroused and slept. The scenes of frightful orgies held in this place were easy to conjure. All these things counted in a manner which perhaps remained unacknowledged by either. But nevertheless they were as surely a part of the lure as the chase itself, with all its elemental attraction.