"No, but I can climb straight up and not mind the switch back, if you'll wait."
He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the zig-zag by climbing almost straight.
Quizzically, the old man gazed after her; the first hundred feet were easy, a mossed slope with padded foot-hold. Then came steep ground slippery with pine needles; but the mountain laurel and ground juniper gave hand grip; and she swung herself up past the third tier of the switch back where the Ridge arose a rock face and trees with two notches and one blaze marked the lower bounds of the National Forests. Here he saw her run along the bridle trail marked by one notch and one blaze: then, she was swinging over moraine slopes to the fifth bench of the trail. There she disappeared round a jut of rock—he remembered a mountain spring trickled out at this place bridged by spruce poles. Then he noticed that the cumulous clouds which had been flashing sheet lightning all afternoon, were massing and darkening and lowering closer over the Valley, with zig-zag jags of live fire down to the ground and sounds more like the crack of a whip or splinter of wood than thunder. The cliff swallows dipped almost to the grass; and the flowers were hanging their heads in miniature umbrellas. All the trembling poplars and cotton-woods seemed to be furled waiting. Then, the lower side of the slate clouds frayed in the edge of a sweepy garment to sheets and fringes of rain. A little tremor ran through the leaves. The horses laid back their ears.
"We'll get it," said the old man tightening the reins.
She had paused for breath round the buttress of a gray crag when she noticed the churn of yeasty blackness blotting out the Valley and felt the hushed heat of the air. A jack rabbit went whipping past at long bounds. The last rasp of a jay's scold jangled out from the trees. Then, she heard from the hushed Valley, the low flute trill of a blue bird's love song. Ever afterwards, either of those bird notes, the scurl of the jay or the golden melody of the blue warbler, brought her joyous, terrible thoughts, too keen to the very quick of being for either words or tears; for a horseman had turned the crag leading his broncho. It was the Ranger in his sage green Service suit wearing a sprig of everlasting in his Alpine hat.
"Why, I've been trying to get you by telephone all day," he said, "but the wires are cut—"
In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the brooding storm, the impending horror.
"Has Fordie brought the sheep down?"
"Yes, ages ago; he passed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen thousand of 'em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to the bottom. Don't you see how they skinned every branch? That's why the cattlemen hate 'em! Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now. Why; anything wrong?"
She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman's report. She knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the same. She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own being,—