“Oh, but it’s good to be alive!” she said as she turned into the narrow, well-shoveled trail leading to the cabin. Just then a breeze, on mischief bent, perhaps, tossed a heavily-laden pine bough above her head and a small avalanche of snow crashed down upon her. Laughingly, she shook herself as best she could.
The snow had knocked her cherry-colored tam awry, and had loosened her hair, which curled at the ends and clustered about her ears and on her neck. With cheeks flushed and eyes brimming with mirth, the girl-teacher tapped upon the door of the cabin. No one answered, and she pushed it open and found herself facing a strange young man who, wrapped well in blankets, sat in the big easy-chair close to the stove. How Frederick Edrington had longed to climb to the shelter of the loft when he had seen the unwelcome guest passing the window, but there had not been time.
For one terrorized moment he had feared that, when the door opened, he would behold either his aunt or the dreaded Marlita Arden. It was with an audible sigh of relief that he beheld the vision of his dreams.
Miss Bayley was the more startled of the two. “Oh!” she exclaimed, as she backed toward the door again. “I—I didn’t know that the Martin children had company. I am so sorry—if—if I—” she hesitated.
The young man was the first to recover his presence of mind. “You haven’t, Miss Bayley,” he said with the smile that won friends for him among rich or poor, young or old. “I assure you that you have done the very nicest thing that you possibly could have done. I’m mighty glad to see you again. I—”
“Again?” The girl-teacher was indeed surprised, and at once began to search her memory for the time of their former meeting. Surely she could not have forgotten the good-looking young man, who bronzed face, with its clear-cut features, plainly told that his life-work kept him out-of-doors.
“Pardon me for not rising, Miss Bayley, and please do slip off your cloak and stay a while,” he begged. “Dixie and the others have gone to the Valley Ranch on an errand, but they will soon return.”
Then, as he saw the puzzled expression in her eyes, the young man answered her unspoken query. “Miss Bayley, you have never met me before, but I have heard my little friends speak of you so often that I feel well acquainted with you.”
Relieved, Josephine slipped off her fur-lined cloak and seated herself. For a moment she sat looking thoughtfully out of the window toward a snow-covered range that formed the other side of the wide cañon.
“May I hear about it?” the young engineer asked.