Down from the far-away music room floated the quavering, passionate violin wail of the boy who had dared to temporize with Fate. Up from the close-nudging street crashed the confusing slap of hoofs and the mad whir of wheels racing not so much for the Joy of the Destination as for the Thrill of the Journey. She gave a little gasping sob, and Brian Baird stooped forward incredulously, as though from the yellow glare of his camp fire he had only just that instant sensed the faltering footfall of a wayfarer in acute distress, and could scarcely distinguish even yet through the darkness the detailed features of the apparition.
For a second, startled eyes defied startled eyes, and then suddenly, out of his own meager ration of faith or fortune or immediate goodness, the man straightened up, and smiled—the simple, honest, unquestioning camp-fire smile—the smile of food and blanket, the smile of welcome, the smile of shelter, the signal of the gladly-shared crust—and the Woodland Girl gave a low, wild cry of joy, and ran across the room to him, and wheeled back against him, close, tight, with her tousled hair grazing his haggard cheek and her brown hands clutching hard at the sweep of his arms along the mantel.
"Adele Reitzen is right," she cried out triumphantly. "This is my—man!"
THE PINK SASH
O man could have asked the question more simply. The whole gaunt, gigantic Rocky Mountain landscape seemed indeed most peculiarly conducive to simple emotions.
Yet Donas Guthrie's original remark had been purely whimsical and distinctly apropos of nothing at all. The careless knocking of his pipe against the piazza's primitive railing had certainly not prepared the way for any particularly vital statement.
"Up—to—the—time—he's—thirty," drawled the pleasant, deep, distinctly masculine voice, "up—to—the—time—he's—thirty, no man has done the things that he's really wanted to do—but only the things that happened to come his way. He's forced into business to please his father, and cajoled into the Episcopal Church to gratify his mother, and bullied into red neckties to pacify his sister Isabel. But once having reached the grown-up, level-headed, utterly independent age of thirty, a man's a fool, I tell you, who doesn't sit down deliberately, and roll up his sleeves, and square his jaw, and list out, one by one, the things that he wants in the presumable measure of lifetime that's left him—and go ahead and get them!"