Part 26

"About thirty miles."

"Oh!" She expressed in this little sound her disappointment, and as it trembled over the wire he spoke quickly: "Please tell me! Do you want me to come down? Never mind the distance--I can ride it in a few hours."

She was tempted, but bravely said: "No; I'd like to see you, of course, but the doctor said mother was in no danger. You must not come on our account."

He felt the wonder of the moment's intercourse over the wilderness steeps, and said so. "You can't imagine how strangely sweet and civilized your voice sounds to me here in this savage place. It makes me hope that some day you and Mrs. Redfield will come up and visit me in person."

"I should like to come."

"Perhaps it would do your mother good to camp for a while. Can't you persuade her to do so?"

"I'm trying to do that--I mean, to stop work; but she says, 'What can we do to earn a living?'"

"If nothing happens I hope to spend an hour or two at the Forks next Sunday. I hope to find your mother better."

Their words were of this unemotional sort, but in their voices something subtler than the electrical current vibrated. He called to her in wordless fashion and she answered in the same mysterious code, and when she said "Good-bye" and hung up the receiver her world went suddenly gray and commonplace, as if a ray of special sunlight had been withdrawn.

The attendant asked, with village bluntness: "It was Ross, wasn't it?"

Lee Virginia resented this almost as much as if it were the question of an eavesdropper; but she answered: "Yes; he wanted to know how my mother was."

She turned as she reached the street and looked up toward the glorious purpling deeps from which the ranger's voice had come, and the thought that he was the sole guardian of those dark forests and shining streams--that his way led among those towering peaks and lone canons--made of him something altogether admirable.

That night her loneliness, her sense of weakness, carried her to bed with tears of despair in her eyes. Lize had insisted on going back to her work looking like one stricken with death, yet so rebellious that her daughter could do nothing with her; and in the nature of fate the day's business had been greater than ever, so that they had all been forced to work like slaves to feed the flood of custom. And Lize herself still kept her vigil in her chair above her gold.

Closing her mind to the town and all it meant to her, the girl tried to follow, in imagination, the ranger treading his far, high trails. She recalled his voice, so cultivated, so rich of inflection, with dangerous tenderness. It had come down to her from those lofty parapets like that of a friend, laden with something sweeter than sympathy, more alluring than song.

The thought of some time going up to the high country where he dwelt came to her most insistently, and she permitted herself to dream of long days of companionship with him, of riding through sunlit aisles of forest with him, of cooking for him at the cabin--what time her mother grew strong once more--and these dreams bred in her heart a wistful ache, a hungry need which made her pillow a place of mingled ecstasy and pain.

VII

THE POACHERS

One morning, as he topped the rise between the sawmill and his own station, Cavanagh heard two rifle-shots in quick succession snapping across the high peak on his left. Bringing his horse to a stand, he unslung his field-glasses, and slowly and minutely swept the tawny slopes of Sheep Mountain from which the forbidden sounds seemed to come.

"A herder shooting coyotes," was his first thought; then remembering that there were no camps in that direction, and that a flock of mountain-sheep (which he had been guarding carefully) habitually fed round that grassy peak, his mind changed. "I wonder if those fellows are after those sheep?" he mused, as he angled down the slope. "I reckon it's up to me to see."

He was tired and hungry, a huge moraine lay between, and the trail was long and rough. "To catch them in the act is impossible. However," he reflected, "they have but two trails along which to descend. One of these passes my door, and the other, a very difficult trail, leads down the South Fork. I'll have time to get breakfast and change horses. They'll probably wait till night before attempting to go out, anyway."

In less than three hours he was over on the trail in the canon, quite certain that the hunters were still above him. He rode quietly up the valley, pausing often to listen and to scrutinize the landscape; but no sign of camp-fire and no further rifle-shots came, and at last he went into camp upon the trail, resolved to wait till the poachers appeared, a ward which his experience as a soldier helped him to maintain without nodding.

In these long hours his thought played about the remembrance of his last visit to the Fork and his hour with Lee. He wondered what she was doing at the moment. How charming she had looked there at Redfields'--so girlish in form, so serious and womanly of face!

He felt as never before the ineludible loneliness of the ranger's life. Here he sat in the midst of a mighty forest with many hostile minds all about him, and it must be confessed he began to wonder whether his services to the nation were worth so much hardship, such complete isolation. The stream sang of the eternities, and his own short span of life (half gone already without any permanent accomplishment) seemed pitifully ephemeral. The guardians of these high places must forever be solitary. No ranger could rightfully be husband and father, for to bring women and children into these solitudes would be cruel.

He put all this aside--for the time--by remembering that he was a soldier under orders, and that marriage was a long way off, and so smoked his pipe and waited for the dawn, persistent as a Sioux, and as silent as a fox.

At daylight, there being still no sign of his quarry, he saddled his horse, and was about to ride up the trail when he caught the sound of voices and the sharp click of iron hoofs on the rocks above him. With his horse's bridle on his arm he awaited the approaching horseman, resolute and ready to act.

As the marauders rounded the elbow in the trail, he was surprised to recognize in the leader young Gregg. The other man was a stranger, an older man, with a grizzled beard, and tall and stooping figure.

"Hello Joe," called the ranger, "you're astir early!"

The youth's fat face remained imperturbable, but his eyes betrayed uneasiness. "Yes, it's a long pull into town."