He tried to emerge from the dreamlike mists that had enveloped him. "How far is it?" he asked her steadily.
"To the end of Pine-needle Trail," she rocked again, clutched for one of his brown hands, and pressed it between hers.
Then she raised it to her dry lips. Bruce could not keep her from it. And after an instant more he did not attempt to draw it from her embrace. In the darkness of that mountain cabin, in the shadow of the eternal pines, he knew that some great drama of human life and love and hatred was behind the action; and he knew with a knowledge unimpeachable that it would be only insolence for him to try further to resist it. Its meaning went too deep for him to see; but it filled him with a great and wondering awe.
Then he turned away, up the Pine-needle Trail. Clear until the deeper forest closed around him her voice still followed him,—a strange croaking in the afternoon silence. "At last," he heard her crying. "At last, at last."
VIII
In almost a moment, Duncan was out of the thickets and into the big timber, for really the first time. In his journey up the mountain road and on the trail that led to the old woman's cabin, he had been many times in the shade of the tall evergreens, but always there had been some little intrusion of civilization, some hint of the works of man that had kept him from the full sense of the majesty of the wild. At first it had been the gleaming railroad tracks, and then a road that had been built with blasting and shovels. To get the full effect of the forest one must be able to behold wide-stretching vistas, and that had been impossible heretofore because of the brush thickets. But this was the virgin forest. As far as he could see there was nothing but the great pines climbing up the long slope of the ridge. He caught glimpses of them in the vales at either side, and their dark tops made a curious background at the very extremity of his vision. They stood straight and aloof, and they were very old.
He fell into their spirit at once. The half-understood emotions that had flooded him in the cabin below died within him. The great calm that is, after all, the all-pervading quality of the big pines came over him. It is always this way. A man knows solitude, his thoughts come clear, superficialities are left behind in the lands of men. Bruce was rather tremulous and exultant as he crept softly up the trail.
It was the last lap of his journey. At the end of the trail he would find—Linda! And it seemed quite fitting that she would be waiting there, where the trail began, in the wildest heart of the pine woods. He was quite himself once more,—carefree, delighting in all the little manifestations of the wild life that began to stir about him.
No experience of his existence had ever yielded the same pleasure as that long walk up the trail. Every curve about the shoulder of a hill, every still glen into which he dipped, every ridge that he surmounted wakened curious memories within him and stirred him in little secret ways under the skin. His delight grew upon him. It was a dream coming true. Always, it seemed to him, he had carried in his mind a picture of this very land, a sort of dream place that was a reality at last. He had known just how it would be. The wind made the same noise in the tree tops that he expected. Yet it was such a little sound that it could never be heard in a city at all. His senses had already been sharpened by the silence and the calm.