



Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









                           THE SILENT BATTLE




[Illustration: “The table rang from end to end with joke and laughter.”]




                                  THE
                             SILENT BATTLE


                                  BY
                             GEORGE GIBBS


                               AUTHOR OF
                           THE BOLTED DOOR,
                        THE FORBIDDEN WAY, ETC.


                              ILLUSTRATED


                            [Illustration]


                               NEW YORK
                           GROSSET & DUNLAP
                              PUBLISHERS




                          Copyright, 1913, by
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

        Copyright, 1912, 1913, by the Pictorial Review Company


                Printed in the United States of America




CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                                PAGE
      I. LOST                              1
     II. BABES IN THE WOODS               11
    III. VOICES                           22
     IV. EDEN                             33
      V. WOMAN AND MAN                    46
     VI. THE SHADOW                       60
    VII. ALLEGRO                          73
   VIII. CHICOT, THE JESTER               84
     IX. THE LORINGS                      95
      X. MR. VAN DUYN RIDES FORTH        109
     XI. THE CEDARCROFT SET              122
    XII. NELLIE PENNINGTON CUTS IN       136
   XIII. MRS. PENNINGTON’S BROUGHAM      151
    XIV. THE JUNIOR MEMBER               166
     XV. DISCOVERED                      177
    XVI. BEHIND THE ENEMY’S BACK         190
   XVII. “THE POT AND KETTLE”            200
  XVIII. THE ENEMY AND A FRIEND          212
    XIX. LOVE ON CRUTCHES                225
     XX. THE INTRUDER                    236
    XXI. TEMPTATION                      247
   XXII. SMOKE AND FIRE                  261
  XXIII. THE MOUSE AND THE LION          273
   XXIV. DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND             285
    XXV. DEEP WATER                      297
   XXVI. BIG BUSINESS                    310
  XXVII. MR. LORING REFLECTS             323
 XXVIII. THE LODESTAR                    338
   XXIX. ARCADIA AGAIN                   350




THE SILENT BATTLE




I

LOST


Gallatin wearily lowered the creel from his shoulders and dropped it by
his rod at the foot of a tree. He knew that he was lost--had known it,
in fact, for an hour or more, but with the certainty that there was no
way out until morning, perhaps not even then, came a feeling of relief,
and with the creel, he dropped the mental burden which for the last
hour had been plaguing him, first with fear and then more recently with
a kind of ironical amusement.

What did it matter, after all? He realized that for twenty-eight years
he had made a mess of most of the things he had attempted, and that
if he ever got back to civilization, he would probably go diligently
on in the way he had begun. There was time enough to think about that
to-morrow. At present he was so tired that all he wanted was a place to
throw his weary limbs. He had penetrated miles into the wilderness, he
knew, but in what direction the nearest settlement lay he hadn’t the
vaguest notion--to the southward probably, since his guide had borne
him steadily northward for more than two weeks.

That blessed guide! With the omniscience of the inexperienced, Gallatin
had left Joe Keegón alone at camp after breakfast, with a general and
hazy notion of whipping unfished trout pools. He had disregarded his
mentor’s warning to keep his eye on the sun and bear to his left hand,
and in the joy of the game, had lost all sense of time and direction.
He realized now from his aching legs that he had walked many miles
farther than he had wanted to walk, and that, at the last, the fish in
his creel had grown perceptibly heavier. The six weeks at Mulready’s
had hardened him for the work, but never, even at White Meadows, had
his muscles ached as they did now. He was hungry, too, ravenously
hungry, and a breeze which roamed beneath the pines advised him that it
was time to make a fire.

It was a wonderful hunger that he had, a healthful, beastlike
hunger--not the gnawing fever, for that seemed to have left him, but a
craving for Joe’s biscuits and bacon (at which he had at first turned
up his pampered aristocratic nose), which now almost amounted to an
obsession. Good old Joe! Gallatin remembered how, during the first week
of their pilgrimage, he had lain like the sluggard that he was, against
the bole of a tree