He dropped his hands from her shoulders and drew her close to him. With his cheek against hers he said softly:
“You didn’t think I was that kind of a fool, did you?”
The sun had risen as they talked, at first slowly peering with a radiant eye over the mountain’s shoulder, then shaking itself free of tree-top and rock-point, and swimming up into the blue. The top of the range stood all glowing and golden, with here and there a white peak, snowily enameled. The rows of pines were overlaid with a rosy brilliance, their long shadows slanting down the slopes as if scurrying away from the flood of heat and light. The clear blues and amethysts that veiled the hollow of the camp were dispersed; the films of mist melted; a quivering silvery sparkle played over the river shallows.
In the clearing beams the life of the hive below seemed to swarm and fill the air with the clamor of its awakening. The man and woman, looking down, saw the toiling world turning to its day’s work—the red dust rising beneath grinding hoof and wheel, the cars sliding swiftly on their narrow tracks, heard the shouts of men, the hum of machinery, and through all and over all, the regular throb of the engines like the heart which animated this isolated world of labor.
Barron looked at his domain for an attentive moment.
“There,” he said, pointing down, “is where I belong. That’s my life,—to work in wild places with men. And yours is with me, my prima donna. We go together, side by side, I working and you singing by the way.”
A LIST of IMPORTANT FICTION
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
DIFFERENT AND DELIGHTFUL
UNDER THE
ROSE