Jack went with her as far as he dared, and stood under a wind-tortured balsam fir and watched her out of sight. On the last ledge before the trail dipped down over the hump that would hide her for good, she turned and looked up at him. She stood there poised—so it seemed—between mountain-crest and the sky. The lake lay quiet and shadowed, deep below her, as though God had dropped a tear and the mountain was holding it reverently cupped, sheltering it from the keen winds of the heights. Beyond, painted with the delicate shadings of distance and yellow sunlight, Indian Valley lay quietly across the lap of the world, its farms and roads and fences sketched in lightly, as with the swift pencil strokes of an artist; its meandering, willowfringed streams making contrast with the yellowed fields of early harvest time.
She stood there poised like a bird on the rim of the world. Her slimness, her sure grace, her yellow hair shining under the beach hat she wore tilted back from her face, struck him like a blow in the face from that pleasurable past wherein woman beauty had been so abundant. She was of the town; moreover, he felt that she was of the town from which he had fled in guilt and terror. She stood for a long minute, taking in the full sweep of the rugged peak. She was not looking at him especially, until she turned to go on. Then she waved her hand carelessly—slightingly, he felt in his misery—and went down the steep slope.
Until he could no longer see the crown of her hat he looked after her. Then, the sickness of his terrible loneliness upon him again, he turned and slowly climbed back to his glass-walled prison.
CHAPTER NINE
LIKE THE BOY HE WAS
Down the balsam and manzanita slope toward the little valley where she lived, Jack stared hungrily during many an empty, dragging hour. Until the darkness had twice drawn down the black curtain that shut him away from the world, he had hoped she would come. She had been so friendly, so understandingly sympathetic—she must know how long the days were up there.
On the third day Hank came riding up the trail that sought the easiest slopes. He brought coal-oil and bacon and coffee and smoking tobacco and the week's accumulation of newspapers, and three magazines; but he did not bring any word from Marion Rose, nor the magazines she had promised. When Hank had unsaddled the horses to rest their backs, and had eaten his lunch and had smoked a cigarette in the shade of a rock, his slow thoughts turned to the gossip of his little world.
He told of the latest encounter with the crabbed fireman on Claremont, grinning appreciatively because the fireman's ill temper had been directed at a tourist who had gone up with Hank. He related a small scandal that was stirring the social pond of Quincy, and at last he swung nearer to the four who had taken mining claims along Toll Gate Creek.
"Too bad you can't go down to Toll-house an' git acquainted with your neighbors," he drawled half maliciously. "There's a girl in the bunch that's sure easy to look at. Other one is an old maid—looks too much like a schoolma'm to suit me. But say—I'm liable to make a trip up here twice a week, from now on! I'm liable to eat my dinner 'fore I git here, too. Some class to that girl, now, believe me! Only trouble is, I'm kinda afraid one of the men has got a string on her. There's two of 'em in the outfit. One is one of them he schoolma'ms that goes around in a boiled shirt and a hard-boiled hat, buzzin' like a mosquito. He's sweet on the old maid. It's the other one I'm leery of. He's the brother of the old maid, and he's the kind that don't say much but does a lot uh thinkin'. Big, too.