“But you are not ill?” she cried out, with a note of apprehension in her voice.
He smiled in response to her question. “No, I feel nothing but weariness and a little depression. I can’t help feeling somehow as if I were burning up a part of myself in that fire—the saddle I have ridden for years, my guns, ropes, spurs, everything relating to the forest, are gone, and with them my youth. I have been something of a careless freebooter myself, I fear; but that is all over with now.” He looked her in the face with a sad and resolute glance. “The Forest Service made a man of me, taught me to regard the future. I never accepted responsibility till I became a ranger, and in thinking it all over I have decided to stay with it, as the boys say, ‘till the spring rains.’”
“I am very glad of that,” she said.
“Yes; Dalton thinks I can qualify for the position of Supervisor, and Redfield may offer me the supervision of this forest. If he does, I will accept it—if you will go with me and share the small home which the Supervisor’s pay provides. Will you go?”
In the light of his burning cabin, and in the shadow of the great peaks, Lee Virginia could not fail of a certain largeness and dignity of mood. She neither blushed nor stammered, as she responded: “I will go anywhere in the world with you.”
He could not touch so much as the hem of her garment, but his eyes embraced her, as he said: “God bless you for the faith you seem to have in me!”
Redfield’s voice interrupted with hearty clamor. “And now, Miss Virginia, you go back and rustle some breakfast for us all. Swenson, bring the horses in and harness my team; I’m going to take these women down the canon. And, Ross, you’d better saddle up as soon as you feel rested and ride across the divide, and go into camp in that little old cabin by the dam above my house. You’ll have to be sequestered for a few days, I reckon, till we see how you’re coming out. I’ll telephone over to the Fork and have the place made ready for you, and I’ll have the doctor go up there to meet you and put you straight. If you’re going to be sick we’ll want you where we can look after you. Isn’t that so, Lee Virginia?”
“Indeed it is,” replied the girl, earnestly.
“But I’m not going to be sick,” retorted Cavanagh. “I refuse to be sick.”