Part 5

Bill, now broadly communicative, minutely detailed his tastes in food, horses, liquors, and saddles in a long monologue which would have been tiresome to any one but an imaginative young Eastern student. Bill had a vast knowledge of the West, but a distressing habit of repetition. He was self-conscious, too, for the reason that he was really talking for the benefit of the girl sitting in critical silence behind him, who, though he frequently turned to her for confirmation of some of the more startling of his statements, refused to be drawn into controversy.

In this informing way some ten miles were traversed, the road climbing ever higher, and the mountains to right and left increasing in grandeur each hour, till of a sudden and in a deep valley on the bank of another swift stream, they came upon a squalid saloon and a minute post-office. This was the town of Moskow.

Bill, lumbering down over the wheel, took a bag of mail from the boot and dragged it into the cabin. The girl rose, stretched herself, and said: "This stagin' is slow business. I'm cramped. I'm going to walk on ahead."

"May I go with you?" asked Norcross.

"Sure thing! Come along."

As they crossed the little pole bridge which spanned the flood, the tourist exclaimed: "What exquisite water! It's like melted opals."

"Comes right down from the snow," she answered, impressed by the poetry of his simile.

He would gladly have lingered, listening to the song of the water, but as she passed on, he followed. The opposite hill was sharp and the road stony, but as they reached the top the young Easterner called out, "See the savins!"

Before them stood a grove of cedars, old, gray, and drear, as weirdly impressive as the cacti in a Mexican desert. Torn by winds, scarred by lightnings, deeply rooted, tenacious as tradition, unlovely as Egyptian mummies, fantastic, dwarfed and blackened, these unaccountable creatures clung to the ledges. The dead mingled horribly with the living, and when the wind arose--the wind that was robustly cheerful on the high hills--these hags cried out with low moans of infinite despair. It was as if they pleaded for water or for deliverance from a life that was a kind of death.

The pale young man shuddered. "What a ghostly place!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "It seems the burial-place of a vanished race."

Something in his face, some note in his voice profoundly moved the girl. For the first time her face showed something other than childish good nature and a sense of humor. "I don't like these trees myself," she answered. "They look too much like poor old squaws."

For a few moments the man and the maid studied the forest of immemorial, gaunt, and withered trees--bright, impermanent youth confronting time-defaced and wind-torn age. Then the girl spoke: "Let's get out of here. I shall cry if we don't."

In a few moments the dolorous voices were left behind, and the cheerful light of the plain reasserted itself. Norcross, looking back down upon the cedars, which at a distance resembled a tufted, bronze-green carpet, musingly asked: "What do you suppose planted those trees there?"

The girl was deeply impressed by the novelty of this query. "I never thought to ask. I reckon they just grew."

"No, there's a reason for all these plantings," he insisted.

"We don't worry ourselves much about such things out here," she replied, with charming humor. "We don't even worry about the weather. We just take things as they come."

They walked on talking with new intimacy. "Where is your home?" he asked.

"A few miles out of Bear Tooth. You're from the East, Bill says--'the far East,' we call it."

"From New Haven. I've just finished at Yale. Have you ever been to New York?"

"Oh, good Lord, no!" she answered, as though he had named the ends of the earth. "My mother came from the South--she was born in Kentucky--that accounts for my name, and my father is a Missourian. Let's see, Yale is in the state of Connecticut, isn't it?"

"Connecticut is no longer a state; it is only a suburb of New York City."

"Is that so? My geography calls it 'The Nutmeg State.'"

"Your geography is behind the times. New York has absorbed all of Connecticut and part of Jersey."

"Well, it's all the same to us out here. Your whole country looks like the small end of a slice of pie to us."

"Have you ever been in a city?"

"Oh yes, I go to Denver once in a while, and I saw St. Louis once; but I was only a yearling, and don't remember much about it. What are you doing out here, if it's a fair question?"

He looked away at the mountains. "I got rather used up last spring, and my doctor said I'd better come out here for a while and build up. I'm going up to Meeker's Mill. Do you know where that is?"

"I know every stove-pipe in this park," she answered. "Joe Meeker is kind o' related to me--uncle by marriage. He lives about fifteen miles over the hill from Bear Tooth."