THE CINNAMON CREEK FOREST RANGER
“No, Vivian,” assured Virginia for at least the tenth time, “there aren’t any cattle on those hills. You just turn up the Bear Canyon road where we went after the bear, and go till you reach the creek. It’s only a mile from here. Then if you feel a bit nervous about riding Siwash up the mountain, why tie him to a tree and walk. Perhaps ’twill be easier anyway, for you’ll find the kinnikinnick just after you leave the creek. It will be redder in the open places, so hunt for those. You’ll love it for Christmas boxes. If it weren’t for Cæsar, I’d go with you, but I want to finish the third book before Mary goes. Is it at the creek Carver’s going to meet you?”
“There or at the crossroads,” explained Vivian, as she mounted Siwash. “He went to town this morning with Donald, but he said he’d be back in 238 plenty of time. I tried to ’phone, but I guess there must be something wrong. I couldn’t get any one, and it didn’t buzz at all. But I know he’ll be there, and I’m not a bit afraid of Siwash. Good-by.”
Virginia stood on the porch and watched Vivian ride down the lane before returning to Cæsar. She was wondering if anything could be the matter, if, perhaps, something had happened at the barn-warming the evening before to displease Vivian. She had seemed so unlike herself all the morning.
But, she concluded wisely, few days were cloudless, and even an almost perfect house-party had its ups and downs. She and Donald had both discovered that. So many different personalities were bound to collide occasionally, and one couldn’t be happy always. An afternoon on the mountain was sure to make Vivian’s world bright again.
Meanwhile Vivian neared the crossroads. Carver was not there. A scanning of the prairie showed him nowhere in sight. She would ride up the canyon to the ford and wait there, she said to herself. When she rode, her thoughts were less 239 troublesome, and it was far easier to stick to her resolve.
Last evening, just as Mr. Benjamin Jarvis’ guests were dispersing, she had made a hasty engagement with Carver to meet her the following afternoon and go for kinnikinnick up Cinnamon Creek. The search for kinnikinnick was not, however, her real reason for wishing to see Carver. If her courage did not fail her, and if her sudden resolve did not wane in the light of day, as resolves so often do, she was going to ask Carver to ride with her up Cinnamon Creek to the ranger’s cabin, and there help her to apologize for their rudeness. To admit her regret to Carver would be even more difficult than to apologize to the ranger, and she was not at all sure that she should wish to do so in severely practical daylight.
Yet daylight had come—it was early afternoon of the next day—and she was still ready if Carver would only come. She allowed Siwash to sink his warm nose in the amber waters of the ford while she waited. It was very still up there. In fact, only Virginia’s repeated assurances that there 240 were no cattle on the hills and her own knowledge that a homesteader’s cabin was just out of sight beyond the quaking-asps on her left, made Vivian endure that stillness, broken only by the hurrying creek waters and the lazy humming of tiny, hidden insects.
To her right rose the mountain wall, dark with pine and spruce, though here and there a flaming service-berry or a hawthorn broke through the evergreens like sudden fire. The tangle of trees and shrubs seemed impenetrable, and yet Virginia had told of a trail which led from the creek not three rods from the ford—led up, up, up for five miles until it reached the Cinnamon Creek Station.
Why did not Carver come? She wished she could be as patient as Siwash who stood knee deep in the ford, hung his shaggy, homely head, and stole a nap gratefully. For the twentieth time Vivian rehearsed her speeches, the one to Carver and the other to the insulted ranger. That is, he had every cause to be insulted, though her memory of the smile with which he had received her thrust would seem to dispute his justifiable indignation. Perhaps 241 here in the mountains people were not so easily insulted. They, the mountains, were so big and generous that they made one ashamed of littleness.
Being sure of the speeches, she grew more and more impatient. Carver, waiting in Elk Creek for a stock train to load up with its living freight, was even more uneasy than she. He could not leave Donald and there was no way of letting Vivian know that he could not meet her at the ford. At last, having convinced himself that he could not help matters, he sat down on the station platform, disturbed in spirit and conscience, and hoped that Vivian had already turned back home.
But Vivian did not turn back. It grew hot by the ford, and she decided to tie Siwash in the shadow of some quaking-asps across the creek, and go up the trail herself to a shady place. Carver would see Siwash and call to her if she did not hear him come.
It was cool and shady beneath the trees that bordered the rocky trail. She would willingly have rested had not her eyes spied the red berries of 242 some kinnikinnick growing on either side of the path. Farther away in an open space she saw more and larger. They were far prettier than holly for Christmas boxes, and would be so different to her friends back East. She loved the tiny leaves and graceful trailing of the vines, which seemed hardly sturdy enough to hold the big, round, jolly-looking berries.
Virginia was right. They did grow more luxuriantly in the infrequent open places, and she climbed farther and farther up the mountain side, seeking like Hansel and Gretel for bigger berries than she had found. Sometimes she stood still and listened. The silence made a queer catch in her throat. Had it not been for her eagerness to find more and better kinnikinnick, and her knowledge that the homesteader’s cabin was very near, she would have been frightened. But Carver must be there very soon, and though she often left the trail, the sound of the creek was proof against her being lost. Her own woodsman instinct was not strong, but Virginia had told her always to trust the creek, which would ever lead one down whence she had come. 243
Once her heart almost stopped beating. Away in the top of a great spruce she heard a hammering sound. It echoed through the silent woods like great blows of an ax, and some long moments passed before Vivian could assure her frightened heart that it was only a flicker searching for his dinner.
Her box was filled with kinnikinnick and she would go back. If Carver were not at the ford, they must make the trip up the trail the next day in spite of Virginia’s plan for a ride to Lone Mountain. If necessary, she would be brave enough to explain matters, and then they would understand.
She turned to go down the mountain, when suddenly from above her came a sound of breaking underbrush as though some creature were bursting from its covert. Vivian stood motionless, too terrified to move or to scream. It was not Carver—that was certain. He would never be upon the mountain. It was far more likely to be a bear. Why not one here as well as farther up the canyon where they had caught that monster from the sight of which she had not yet recovered? Thoughts passed like flashes through her brain while that 244 awful sound of breaking twigs continued. Hundreds and hundreds of them came, crowding one another for space—thoughts of St. Helen’s, snatches of poems she had learned, memories of things which had frightened her as a child. And last of all, perhaps because without knowing it she had reached a great tree and sunk in a little heap at its foot, came the picture of a sallow youth in eye-glasses and a linen duster, who had once, ages ago, crashed through some underbrush somewhere else!
The crashing ceased. Some one stepped into the trail above her. The thought of a bear had somehow given place to her old knight-errant of the soda-fountain. And yet when she looked up, expecting to see his pale, sickly countenance, she saw instead the khaki-clad form and the surprised blue eyes of the Cinnamon Creek forest ranger!
He was the very person she had wished to see. She could make her speech now, and be spared her long ride, and yet she found herself studying the line between his eyes and wondering why other people did not have a line there, too. It was the Cinnamon Creek forest ranger who spoke first. 245
“If that were an oak tree,” he said, “I’d think you were consulting an oracle; but since it isn’t, maybe you’re just a Dryad who’s fallen out of the branches. What are you doing away up here anyway? I guess you startled me almost as much as I seem to have startled you. I’m mighty sorry I scared you though!”
His apology made Vivian remember her own, and though she quite forgot her speech and just stammered out how sorry she was, the ranger liked it quite as well and assured her he should never think of it again.
“And now,” he said, “since you’ve come away off up here, I’m not going to let you go home until you’ve seen my garden.”
“Your garden?” queried Vivian. “Why, your cabin isn’t here! It’s——”
“I know,” he interrupted, “but my garden is. Follow me. I’ll show you. I promise there aren’t any bears.”
She followed him for half a mile up the trail. They wound around great bowlders and along the edges of steep, forbidding places. Then the ranger 246 paused before a thicket of yellow quaking-asps.
“This is the entrance,” he explained. “Now prepare, for you’re going to see something more wonderful than the hanging gardens of Nineveh.”
Pushing aside the quaking-asps, he made a path for Vivian, who followed, mystified. A few moments more and they had passed the portals, and stood in the ranger’s garden.
Vivian caught her breath. Never in her life had she seen such grandeur of color. They stood in an open place—a tiny valley surrounded by brown foot-hills. Beyond, the higher pine-clad mountains shut off the valley from the eyes of all who did not seek it. Some great, gray, over-hanging rocks guarded the farther entrance. Within the inclosure, carpeting the valley and clothing the foot-hills, great masses of color glowed in the gold of the sunlight. The ranger’s garden was a flaming pageant of yellow and bronze and orange, crimson and scarlet and purple between a cloudless, turquoise sky.
“Oh!” cried Vivian. “It’s just like a secret, isn’t 247 it, hidden away up here? I never saw such color in all my life, except in Thaïs, you know, where the women in Alexandria wore such beautiful gowns.” Somehow she knew that the Cinnamon Creek forest ranger did know.
“Yes,” he said understandingly, “I remember, only this is better than grand opera, because it’s real. You see, I spotted this place last spring. I saw all the different shrubs—quaking-asp and buck-brush and Oregon grape and service-berry and hawthorn and wild currant—and I thought to myself that this would be some garden in September. It’s cold nights up here in these hills, the frosts are early, and the sun strikes this valley all day. It’s going to be even more gorgeous in two weeks more. It isn’t exactly on my beat, but it’s near enough so I can make it. Come on. I’ll show you all the different things.”
So he led her from golden quaking-asp to crimson hawthorn, and taught her the names of everything that grew in his wonderful garden. Before they had made the circle, Vivian mustered courage, and, seeing the jeweled pin upon the pocket of his 248 rough shirt, which his coat had covered the evening before, asked him about himself, and if Wyoming were his home.
No, he said, glad to tell her. He was from Maine, and the pin he wore was his fraternity pin. He had studied forestry in the university there, and then, becoming ill, had been sent West to get rid of a nasty cough which didn’t want to go away. But the mountains had proven the best doctors in the world, and he was only staying on a year in the cabin at Cinnamon Creek to learn the mountain trees, and to add a few more pounds before going back home again.
Vivian grew more and more confused as she listened. Here he was a New Englander like herself, and she had been so rude. What would Carver say when he knew?
“It just shows,” she said, “that we never can tell about persons on first acquaintance. I’m doubly sorry I was rude last night. I thought you didn’t talk like a Westerner, but I didn’t dream you were from New England!”
“I’ve learned since I’ve been out here,” he said, “that it doesn’t make any difference where we’re from. Wyoming hearts are just like New England ones, and the only safe way is never to be rude or unkind at all.”
Vivian agreed with him. She never would be again, she said to herself, as they left the garden and went back down the trail to Siwash and the ford. Carver was not there, and the ranger insisted upon walking home with her. He would not have stayed for supper had not Virginia and Aunt Nan, meeting them at the mail-box, persuaded him.
So it was a very merry party that ate supper beneath the cottonwoods—a party saddened only by the early good-night of the Cinnamon Creek ranger, who wanted to make his mountain cabin before darkness quite obliterated the trail. As he swung into the main road after some cordial handshakes which warmed his heart, he met Carver Standish III.
It was too nearly dark for Carver to see the fraternity pin, and no one had yet told him that 250 the ranger was from New England. Nevertheless, he straightened his shoulders, and held out his hand.
“I’ve wanted to see you, sir,” he said, “to tell you that I was an awful cad last night, and that I’m dead ashamed of it!”