The wind lifted Buck’s yellow mane and her own brown hair, while the horse pawed the stony ground impatiently. She let him go on, for she was in truth as eager as he. This was the first day that she had found time to go far from their own house, and she had now a most fascinating goal before her. What girl of sixteen would not feel excited over the prospect of exploring a tract of mountainside woods of which she was sole owner?
Beatrice had never quite understood how her father had come to purchase that stretch of land above Ely; she had not, indeed, thought to ask. She had come into his study one Sunday morning when he was going over his papers and had surprised him with the announcement that she was sixteen that day. Having no other present ready, he had brought out some dusty title-deeds and had made them over to her.
“It will never be of the least use to you, my dear,” he said, “so do not consider it much of a present. Twenty-three acres with timber, cabin, and a waterfall, so the description reads, but you must not think they are worth anything. I have never seen the place myself.”
She had believed that it was on account of this talk about Ely that they thought of the town again when the doctors had prescribed for Aunt Anna “a change of climate—some dry, bracing place in the West.” She was their only aunt, Mr. Deems’s younger sister, and she had cared for his household ever since the death of the two girls’ mother years ago. She was a slim, frail person of indomitable spirit, and had begun to look as though she were far more spirit than body ever since the influenza epidemic had swept through the family. Beatrice had always thought that going to Ely was her own suggestion, though she could not deny that it was Aunt Anna who had carried the plan through in the face of some rather unaccountable opposition from her father. Mr. Deems had finally given in, and had made a flying trip to Ely to be sure that the air and climate were what they wanted, to choose a house, engage a Chinese cook, and make all preparations for a summer’s stay for his sister and the two girls.
“I did not have time to visit your estate on the hill, Beatrice,” he said on his return. “You will have to explore it yourself. Dan O’Leary has charge of it and said he rented it to some engineers who were surveying the mountain, but it is unoccupied now. The place may prove to be a good picnic ground but I fear it has no other possibilities.”
He might say what he chose, Beatrice was thinking, but he could not destroy her eagerness to see the place. The trail ran crookedly upward before her, disappeared in some dense pine woods, then slanted across the spur of the mountain and vanished again. Higher above rose the bare, rocky slopes of the tall peak that dominated the whole valley, Gray Cloud Mountain, on one of whose lower, rugged shoulders lay her land and her cabin. After climbing for a quarter of a mile, she was obliged to hesitate at a fork in the way, uncertain which of the steep paths she was to take.
A little cottage clung to the bare hillside by the road—a shabby place with no paint and a patched roof. The door was swinging open as she passed and a man just going in, a short-set, foreign-looking person, who scowled at her over his shoulder when she asked the way.
“That one,” he said briefly, pointing to the right-hand fork and speaking with a heavy foreign accent. “Up toward John Herrick’s house, only not so far.”
He went in and shut the door abruptly. Beatrice could hear his voice inside calling roughly, “Christina, Christina!”
He had a roll of large papers in his hand, posters that he had evidently been putting up along the way, for she had observed them on trees and fence-posts nearer town. They seemed to announce a meeting of some sort, with English words at the top and odd foreign printing at the bottom in more than one language. She had felt a hot flash of indignant anger at the man’s surly tone, but in a moment she had forgotten him completely, as she and Buck went scrambling up the steep and difficult road.