She followed him trustfully, and as she stepped from the squalor of the hotel into the splendor of the morning her head lifted. She drank the clear, crisp wind as one takes water in the desert.
“The air is clean, anyway,” she said.
Cavanagh, to divert her, pointed away to the mountains. “There is my dominion. Up there I am sole ruler. No one can litter the earth with corruption or poison the streams.”
She did not speak, but as she studied the ranger her face cleared. “It is beautiful up there.”
He went on. “I hate all this scrap-heap quite as heartily as you do, but up there is sweetness and sanity. The streams are germless, and the forest cannot be devastated. That is why I am a ranger. I could not endure life in a town like this.”
He turned up the street toward the high hill to the south, and she kept step with him. As she did not speak, he asked: “What did you expect to do out here?”
“I hoped to teach,” she replied, her voice still choked with her emotion. “I expected to find the country much improved.”
“And so it is; but it is still a long way from an Eastern State. Perhaps you will find the people less savage than they appear at first glance.”
“It isn’t the town or the people, it is my mother!” she burst forth again. “Tell me! A woman in the car yesterday accused my mother of selling whiskey unlawfully. Is this so? Tell me!”
She faced him resolutely, and perceiving that she could not be evaded, he made slow answer. “I don’t know that she does, but I’ve heard it charged against her.”