“Buck,” she cried aloud, “what have I done!”
The whole mountain seemed to be moving under her feet; she knew dimly that the saddle horn was snatched from her grasp, just before she plunged forward into darkness.
CHAPTER V
CHRISTMAS-TREE HILL
When Beatrice opened her eyes, a soft, insistent nose was passing over her face and hands and breathing warmly against her cheek. She sat up, holding her whirling head, to discover that Buck was standing over her, apparently puzzled and distressed at the mishap to his mistress. It seemed strange, after her last glimpse of that barren mountain-side of sliding shale, to find herself lying half buried in grass and flowers with the warm sunshine laying a level ray across her face. She got to her knees and then to her feet, and found that she was possessed of a dizzy head and an aching shoulder, that she was bruised and lame, but otherwise uninjured. Looking up, she could see where the slope of loose stone, down which she and the horse had slid, ended in a straight wall, a drop of eight or ten feet, over which she had plunged into the soft grass below. Buck, wiser than she, had evidently managed to slide less precipitately, and in the end had saved himself by jumping. His legs were cut by the sharp stones and he was still nervous and quivering, but he was not seriously harmed.
Although she made an effort to climb into the saddle, Beatrice found that her knees were shaking and her head was so dizzy that she was forced to give up the attempt. With her hand upon the horse’s neck, she walked along the crooked path trodden in the tall grass of this high mountain meadow. Bright flowers whose names she did not know brushed her skirts. The whole hillside, sloping to the west, was bathed in the last brightness of the waning sunlight. They passed through a tangle of poplar woods whose dense underbrush showed that it was second growth, springing up after the pine forest had been cut. Then out into the open they came again, to look down into a broad, irrigated valley whose checker-board of fields followed the winding silver ribbon of the river.
And this hillside at her feet—was it a forest or a garden into which she had stumbled? Hundreds of little spruce-trees, as tall as her shoulder and all of the same height, marched in straight rows across the slope of the mountain, clothing the steep ground in a smooth mantle of lusty green. A stream wound downward through the plantation, and on its bank, on a level bench below her, were a clump of willows and a white cottage with a red roof and a wide-open door.
“That must be Dr. Minturn’s house,” Beatrice reflected and a moment later caught sight of Dr. Minturn himself.
He was sitting on a knoll at the edge of the woods, gazing down over his domain and humming a song in a deep, buzzing voice like a bumble-bee. He was a very tall man, with tremendous shoulders and a heavy thatch of gray hair. He did not notice Beatrice and Buck, even when they came close, but sat very still, his big hands lying idle on his knees. He had the air, however, of being intently busy about some project of his own. Beatrice watched him, fascinated, wondering what it could be that absorbed him so.
“What—what are you doing?” she asked at last.
He turned around to her, smiling slowly, seeming neither startled nor surprised.