His voice and air were unembarrassed, though he was breathless, and Evelyn fancied that in this and the incident of the jacket he had at last revealed the forceful, natural manners of the West. It was the first glimpse she had had of them, and she was not displeased. The man had merely done what was most advisable, with practical sense.
A little farther on, a shoot of falling water swept out of the mist above and came splashing down a crag, spread out in frothing threads. It flowed across their path, reunited in a deep gully, and then fell tumultuously into the beck, which was now ten or twelve feet below them. They clung to the rock as they traced it downward, stepping cautiously from ledge to ledge and from slippery stone to stone. At times a stone plunged into the mist beneath them, and Vane grasped the girl's arm and held out a steadying hand, but he was never fussy nor needlessly concerned. When she wanted help, it was offered at the right moment; but that was all. Had she been alarmed, her companion's manner would have been more comforting than persistent solicitude. He was, she decided, one who could be relied upon in an emergency.
"You are sure-footed," she remarked, when they stopped a minute or two for breath.
Vane laughed as he glanced into the vapor-rilled depths beneath. They stood on a ledge, two or three yards in width, with a tall crag behind them and the beck, which had rapidly grown larger, leaping half seen from rock to rock in the rift in front.
"I was born among these fells; and I have helped to pack various kinds of mining truck over much rougher mountains."
"Have you ever gone up as steep a place as this with a load?"
"If I remember rightly, the top of the Hause drops about three hundred feet, and we'll probably spend half an hour in reaching the valley. There was one western divide that it took us several days to cross, dragging a tent, camp gear and provisions in relays. Its foot was wrapped in tangled brush that tore most of our clothes to rags, and the last pitch was two thousand feet of rock where the snow lay waist-deep in the hollows."
"Two thousand feet! That dwarfs our little drop to the Hause. What were you doing so far up in the ranges?"
"Looking for a copper mine."
"And you found one?"