"Wasn't Plutus the giver of wealth?" he returned.
"Yes."
"Well, and wasn't he forced by Zeus to distribute his gifts without regard to the characters of the recipients?"
She laughed merrily. "Plutus or Croesus--I'm glad he chose the Oak Knoll trail."
"And so am I," answered the man, earnestly.
Leisurely, they followed the trail that is hung--narrow thread-like path--high upon the mountain wall, invisible from the floor of the canyon below. At a point where the trail turns to round the inward curve of one of the small side canyons--where the pines grow dark and tall--some thoughtful hand had laid a small pipe from the large conduit tunnel, under the trail, to a barrel fixed on the mountainside below the little path. Here they stopped again and, while they loitered, filled a small canteen with the cold, clear water from the mountain's heart. Farther on, where the pipe-line again rounds the inward curve of the wall between two mountain spurs, they turned aside to follow the Government trail that leads to the fire-break on the summit of the Galenas and then down into the valley on the other side. At the gap where the Galena trail crosses the fire-break, they again turned aside to make their leisure way along the broad, brush-cleared break that lies in many a fold and curve and kink like a great ribbon on the thin top of the ridge. With every step, now, they were climbing. Midday found them standing by a huge rock at the edge of a clump of pines on one of the higher points of the western end of the range. Here they would have their lunch.
As they sat in the lee of the great rock, with the wind that sweeps the mountain tops singing in the pines above their heads, they looked directly down upon the wide Galena Valley and far across to the spurs and slopes of the San Jacintos beyond. Sibyl's keen eyes--mountain-trained from childhood--marked a railway train crawling down the grade from San Gorgonio Pass toward the distant ocean. She tried in vain to point it out to her companion. But the city eyes of the man could not find the tiny speck in the vast landscape that lay within the range of their vision. The artist looked at his watch. The train was the Golden State Limited that had brought him from the far away East, a few months before.
Aaron King remembered how, from the platform of the observation car, he had looked up at the mountains from which he now looked down. He remembered too, the woman into whose eyes he had, for the first time, looked that day. Turning his face to the west, he could distinguish under the haze of the distance the dark squares of the orange groves of Fairlands. Before three days had passed he would be in his studio home again. And the woman of the observation car platform--From distant Fairlands, the man turned his eyes to the winsome face of his girl comrade on the mountain top.
"Please"--she said, meeting his serious gaze with a smile of frank fellowship--"please, what have I done?"
Smiling, he answered gravely, "I don't exactly know--but you have done something."