“Same to you. So long.”
Berea led the way, and Norcross fell in behind the pack-horses, feeling as unimportant as a small boy at the heels of a circus parade. His girl captain was so competent, so self-reliant, and so sure that nothing he could say or do assisted in the slightest degree. Her leadership was a curiously close reproduction of her father’s unhurried and graceful action. Her seat in the saddle was as easy as Landon’s, and her eyes were alert to every rock and stream in the road. She was at home here, where the other girl would have been a bewildered child, and his words of praise lifted the shadow from her face.
The sky was cloudy, and a delicious feeling of autumn was in the air—autumn that might turn to winter with a passing cloud, and the forest was dankly gloomy and grimly silent, save from the roaring stream which ran at times foam-white with speed. The high peaks, gray and streaked with new-fallen snow, shone grandly, bleakly through the firs. The radiant beauty of the road from the Springs, the golden glow of four days before was utterly gone, and yet there was exultation in this ride. A distinct pleasure, a delight of another sort, lay in thus daring the majesty of an unknown wind-swept pass.
Wayland called out: “The air feels like Thanksgiving morning, doesn’t it?”
“It is Thanksgiving for me, and I’m going to get a grouse for dinner,” she replied; and in less than an hour the snap of her rifle made good her promise.
After leaving the upper lake she turned to the right and followed the course of a swift and splendid stream, which came churning through a cheerless, mossy swamp of spruce-trees. Inexperienced as he was, Wayland knew that this was not a well-marked trail; but his confidence in his guide was too great to permit of any worry over the pass, and he amused himself by watching the water-robins as they flitted from stone to stone in the torrent, and in calculating just where he would drop a line for trout if he had time to do so, and in recovered serenity enjoyed his ride. Gradually he put aside his perplexities concerning the future, permitting his mind to prefigure nothing but his duties with Landon at Meeker’s Mill.
He was rather glad of the decision to send him there, for it promised absorbing sport. “I shall see how Landon and Belden work out their problem,” he said. He had no fear of Frank Meeker now. “As a forest guard with official duties to perform I can meet that young savage on other and more nearly equal terms,” he assured himself.
The trail grew slippery and in places ran full of water. “But there’s a bottom, somewhere,” Berrie confidently declared, and pushed ahead with resolute mien. It was noon when they rose above timber and entered upon the wide, smooth slopes of the pass. Snow filled the grass here, and the wind, keen, cutting, unhindered, came out of the desolate west with savage fury; but the sun occasionally shone through the clouds with vivid splendor. “It is December now,” shouted Wayland, as he put on his slicker and cowered low to his saddle. “It will be January soon.”
“We will make it Christmas dinner,” she laughed, and her glowing good humor warmed his heart. She was entirely her cheerful self again.
As they rose, the view became magnificent, wintry, sparkling. The great clouds, drifting like ancient warships heavy with armament, sent down chill showers of hail over the frosted gold of the grassy slopes; but when the shadows passed the sunlight descended in silent cataracts deliriously spring-like. The conies squeaked from the rocky ridges, and a brace of eagles circling about a lone crag, as if exulting in their sovereign mastery of the air, screamed in shrill ecstatic duo. The sheer cliffs, on their shadowed sides, were violently purple. Everywhere the landscape exhibited crashing contrasts of primary pigments which bit into consciousness like the flare of a martial band.