Carrigan rose, gave Lee a long and solemn look, then went to a trunk in the corner of the room. This he unlocked and opened. From its interior he produced a black bottle.
"I don't take a drink very often," he announced, coming forward and setting the bottle on the table, "but this is one of the times. We'll take one to celebrate your luck."
CHAPTER XXXII[ToC]
About the middle of the next afternoon Lee Bryant was riding southward from camp on the main mesa trail. The road was difficult and his horse Dick made slow time along the snowy path broken by wagons through the drifts, but the rider let the animal choose his own gait, as he had done that hot July day when coming up from the south to buy the Perro Creek ranch. On reaching the ford Lee pulled rein. How different now the creek from on that burning afternoon of his encounter with Ruth Gardner and Imogene Martin! Snow covered its bed; the sands where he had knelt, the little pool, the foot-prints, lay hidden from sight. How much had happened since! And how different was his life! He had suffered much and learned much since that hour of meeting; and he should never henceforth view this spot without a little feeling of melancholy. The youth and two girls who drank there at the rill were no more: they had become other persons.
Presently he dismissed thoughts of this and set Dick wading across the ford. Yonder he now could see the three bare cottonwoods, with the low adobe house near by where he and Dave had lived and laboured at the surveys for the project. The bones of his dog Mike, too, rested there under the ground. This brought to mind the meeting with Louise upon the road—and it was Louise to whom at this moment he was going. He began to urge Dick to greater efforts. Once on a stretch of road, bare and wind-swept, he pushed him into a gallop. It seemed interminable, this snow-bound trail. But at last he crossed Sarita Creek (with but a single glance at the cañon's mouth where the two cabins stood untenanted and abandoned among the naked trees) and then covered the long miles to Diamond Creek, and rode up the lane between the rows of cottonwoods to the house, where Louise, who had perceived his approach from a window, appeared at the door to greet him.
"We were terribly alarmed for your safety the night of the blizzard," she said, "but the mail-man finally made his trip to Bartolo and back, and said you were still there and not blown away. And he also stated that you were working night and day."
"Not any more," said Lee, swinging from the saddle.