"It's nothing. I hoped that it would escape your ruthless managerial eye. I tried to heat water and I'm not used to a kitchen range. In fact, I don't know what I can do that's vitally useful. When—when I go back to civilization I shall take a course in nursing, then I won't be so absolutely useless at a time like this." Her voice was pitched in a key of nervous excitement, and she shivered as she spoke.
"Come here!" Courtlandt's face was as white as the girl's as he picked her up in his arms and put her into the car. He drew her wrap closer about her shoulders and tucked a light robe about her knees. She sat there tense, unresponsive, but as he started the car she suddenly relaxed with a stifled sob and covered her face with her hands. Steve stopped the car. With quiet determination he put his arm about her.
"Cry it out, child," he encouraged tenderly. When the storm broke he wondered if he had been wise in the recommendation. He was frightened at the tempest of sobs which shook the slender body. He tightened his arm. Then after a few moments, "Was it as bad as that, girl?"
She sat up with a start and drew as far away from him as the limited space would permit. He laid his arm across the back of the seat. She pushed the hair from her forehead and looked up at him through drenched eyes.
"Bad!" she controlled a shudder. "Bad only because I was so powerless to help. An angel from heaven wouldn't have looked as good to me as Doc Rand." There was an hysterical note of laughter in her voice as she continued, "He must have thought I had gone suddenly mad for when he opened the door I flew at him and kissed him." She made furtive dabs at her eyes. "Don't think that I'm constitutionally a cry-baby," she laughed up at Courtlandt shamefacedly. He turned away from her quickly, removed his arm from the back of the seat and started the car.
"Now that you've got your grip again we'll go on. I'm famished," he announced prosaically.
"Now that I think of it, so am I," she agreed with gay camaraderie, but her breath came in a little sob as a child's might after crying, "and—and so are they! Look, Steve! Over on that hillside—look!"
She gripped his arm with one hand as she pointed with the other. On the top of a low hill, outlined like shadow pictures against the morning sky, so near that their hanging tongues were plainly visible, were three dark, sinister shapes.
"Coyotes?" the girl whispered as though even at that distance they might hear.
"Timber wolves. See those sheep grazing in the coulée below? They are after them."