“I thought we’d ride to Ely’s to-day, sleep there to-night, and make Mount Avalanche to-morrow evening.”
“Then we must hurry,” said Claire. “Come, Marion.”
“How long––shall we be gone?” asked Marion, struggling to appear enthusiastic.
“Four or five days, I suppose.”
Her heart sank. She could have cried with vexation. But she managed to conceal her real feelings in 123 the bustle of preparation. There were provisions to be packed: cans and jars and bottles; bacon and ham and flour against the possible event of bad luck with the guns and rods; warm clothes and bedding; medicines and bandages. So fully occupied were her hands and brain with these details, and later with her first real experience with the mountain trails, that her heart must perforce keep its peace until some hour of solitude.
Toward five o’clock of the second day they reached their destination,––a grassy shelf a little below timber line on Mount Avalanche. There, in some past age, an avalanche of titanic proportions had carried away part of the mountain itself; and they camped now on the top of the débris, long since concealed by a dense forest growth, as if nature had employed her utmost arts to hide the wound. Marion could not but yield a little to emotions of delight and wonder. On that high platform she stood above a marvelous mountain world, below another mountain world as marvelous. Behind her Avalanche reared sheer and sharp and white against the sky. On either side were snow-clad peaks. At her feet were forests in solid masses of green, now darkening in the twilight. And beyond, far, far beyond, the Park they had left lay bright under the sun’s after-glow, with a background of range on range of mountains in their violet haze. On the shelf was forage for the horses; near at hand were moss and balsam for their beds; and at a little distance a rivulet, ice-cold, had shady pools where small trout awaited capture. And the air was like dry wine on the lips, with a tang of resin in the nostrils; and the woods sang a song that even Marion could not resist.
Here they pitched two tents just large enough to cover the beds of balsam boughs and moss and blankets. In the three days they passed in camp Marion learned many things that were to be of incalculable value to her one day, though she never could have guessed that all this too, like the encounter in the Forbidden Pasture, had been ordered in the Beginning, details in the Scheme of Things. She learned surprising secrets of makeshift cookery; she learned the Indian’s lesson of a very little fire; she learned the mountaineer’s economy of matches and like precious articles. She fished in the small pools that lay hidden away in dark recesses of the forest, practised shooting with her rifle, and on the third day, in the timber below the camp, with Seth at her side, brought down her first deer.
“I told you!” cried Huntington, delighted at the progress of his pupil.
But her heart was not in all this; it was clamoring now to be heard, and would by no means be stilled. Each evening Marion walked apart from the others, to stand at the edge of the lofty platform, and watch her green and violet Elysium swallowed up in night. Each morning she searched for it through her field glasses to assure herself that it had not vanished in the dark. And when the last day of their outing came, the last evening, the last night, she could scarce contain her impatience. To-morrow they would start; and the day after––