Later they sat on the ground and ate fried bacon and boiled potatoes as the cold black mountain night gathered round them. Away to the east the twinkling lights of Ragtown threw serpentine swords across the lake like the blade in the hand of the angel who stood before Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Here and there on the sagebrush slope between them and the water other campfires gleamed. Down there the little dabchicks clucked as they fed on tender water growths, and the mudhens scolded one another for greediness.
Then Joshua lighted his pipe, and Shanty Madge asked him about the young man with the resplendent green vest, who had leaned against the saloon in Ragtown and never removed his eyes from them throughout the altercation with Lee Sweet. So Joshua told her of his meeting with Slim Wolfgang and The Whimperer, and put it up to her to solve the strange riddle of the connection between the pair.
“But, Joshua,” the girl exclaimed, “you never were actually that tramp’s road-kid, were you?”
“Well,” he replied, “not in the strict sense of the term, perhaps. He tried to boss me at first, but I was physically a little too much for him. Still, it took a long time to shake him, and it has always been a mystery to me just why I couldn’t. He seemed to have an uncanny luck in trailing me up. I guess he would have been with me to-day if my telescope hadn’t tempted him. I’ll bet he had a glorious jag after he’d peddled it!”
“It’s the strangest thing on earth,” Madge mused, “that you should encounter these two here in Ragtown. And the fact that The Whimperer ran through this Wolfgang’s tent proves to me that there is some bond between them. But I can’t fathom the mystery.”
They gave it up finally and began planning their future activities on their homesteads. They decided that next day Madge and her mother would make themselves comfortable in a semi-permanent camp, and Joshua would start out of the mountains for lumber. He would take one team and drive to Spur. A single team would be sufficient to haul the load to the foot of the mountains, and there Shanty Madge would meet him with the other team, and they would drive four-up to the summit.
Madge was doing most of the planning. Her mother sat on a camp stool lost in thought. Joshua, stretched on the ground, looked across the campfire at Madge and watched the play of the firelight on the girl’s bronze hair.
She too lay prone on the ground, her supple body relaxed, her hands locked behind her head, her eyes gazing up at the stars and the black sky.
Cole of Spyglass Mountain was dreaming dreams. From boyhood he had been an individualist, a loather of the commonplace in life. Here, then, was a situation that made distinct appeal to him, and here was a girl that appealed. All about was the mountain stillness, for, somehow, the lover of the outdoors does not estimate the sounds of nature in terms of noise. The breath of the sage was sweet. There came from the blackness that welled about the little circle the sound of the crunching molars of the mules as they ate their hay. Here indeed was the beginning of an adventure far from the commonplace, and a girl far from commonplace was the nucleus of it. What a girl was Shanty Madge, dethroned gypo queen—a girl who knew more about horses and mules and wagons, and the ways of rough, hard men than he did. Yet what a picture of feminine beauty she made as she lazed beside the campfire, all woman, all rounded curves of loveliness! And he—Joshua Cole—had sought for her and found her out in the West of his boyhood dreams—and she was here with him, with only a flickering blaze between them—and, in a measure, her happiness was in his hands.
And so with her picture in his heart he arose, said good-night softly, and trailed away through the blackness toward his own little tent.