"I say, you don't never want to let Cooney git you started up that trail you was speakin' about. First place, it's steeper'n the side of a house. Next place, ever let him git you to the top, he'd land you slambang over to Ewing's, spite of all you could do."
"Thank you! I'll be sure to remember that. Good night!"
She left him, still with the far-centered, puzzled look on her face—the shadow of some resemblance, indefinite, nameless, but insistent.
CHAPTER II
A LADY LOSES HERSELF
ONLY a few miles separate Bar-7 from the Ewing place; but they are interesting miles and at least one of them will be found exciting by the town-bred novice. There is a stretch where the trail leaves the valley road and zigzags up the face of the east bench to a height from which one may survey the whole sleeping valley of the Wimmenuche as through a reducing glass. The way seems no broader than one's hand, and to Mrs. Laithe, who approached it from across the flat and studied it for the first time as a practicable thoroughfare, it looked to be impossibly perpendicular; a climb that no horse in its right mind would attempt, an angle of elevation that no rider could sustain.
Brought to incredulity by this survey, she pulled Cooney to a walk as she neared the parting of the ways. Then, indecisively, she let the bridle rein fall on his neck. The little horse loitered on, splashing through the creek with a few leisurely sips of its icy water (taken merely in the spirit of a connoisseur), and a moment later halted where the bench trail turned out. At the beginning of his intimacy with his present rider he had adopted rushing tactics at this point, leaping at the trail in a fine pretense that no other way could have been thought of, and showing a hurt bewilderment when the sudden pull brought him about and into the valley road. For that was a road that led nowhere, since it led away from his home. Day after day he had played this game, seemingly with an untouched faith that some time he would win. Day after day had he exercised all his powers of astonished protest when the frustrating tug was felt. But these tugs had become sharper, to betoken the rider's growing impatience, and it may be surmised that on this day Cooney had lost his faith. If it were inevitable that one should be whirled back into the broad, foolish way, one might save effort by omitting that first futile rush; one might stop and let evil come. Cooney stopped now, drooping in languid cynicism.
His rider waited, wishing that he had not stopped; wishing he had rushed the trail as always before. She felt the need of every excuse for daring the hazards of that climb. Cooney waited—and waited—morosely anticipating the corrective jerk of a rider who refused to guide him properly by pressing a rein across his neck. The shock was delayed. Cooney thrilled, aspiring joyously. He waited still another uncertain moment, bracing his slim legs. At last, with a quick indrawing of breath, he sprang up the only desirable trail in all the world, with an energy of scurrying hoofs that confined his rider's attention wholly to keeping her seat. She hardly dared look down even when the little horse stopped on a narrow ledge to breathe. Nor did Cooney tarry. Still fearful, perhaps, of that deadly backward jerk, he stopped but once again before the summit was reached. Doubtless he suspected that the most should be made of this probably fleeting mood of compliance in one who had hitherto shown herself inveterately hostile to his most cherished design.
Looking back over the ascent while the stanch little animal panted under her, Mrs. Laithe discovered that the thing had been worth while. The excitement had been pleasurable and the view was a thing to climb for. On the north the valley narrowed to a cañon, its granite sides muffled in clouds of soft green spruce. To the south it widened away until, beyond a broad plain, quickened with flying cloud shadows, a long, low-lying range of blue hills showed hazily, far over the New Mexico border. Straight before her, across the valley, were mountains whose rough summits leaped gray and barren above their ragged hemming of timber—mountains not to be seen from the ranch because of the intervening mesa.
But the picture was not long to be enjoyed—no longer a time than Cooney needed to recover his wind. He was presently off through a sparse grove of aspen, breaking by his own will into a lope as they crossed a wide, grassy meadow, level between the wooded hills that sloped to its edge on either side. And this was the horse who, when he bore her lazily up and down the valley, constantly cropped the good green stuff to right and left, a horse always before willing to loiter, or to stand motionless for an hour with his bridle rein on the ground, while she adventured beyond him on foot. The rider caught his new spirit and laughed as she felt herself hurried to the consummation of this mild adventure; hurried up the long ridge, over a cross system of sudden gullies, through another wide meadow of the mountains where strange cattle paused to regard her rather disconcertingly; on through the gloom of other woods, the trail worrying itself up another ascent, and then out upon an open summit that looked down upon a tiny lake set in a cup of the hills. On one side the water, its shining surface pierced only by the heaps of hungry trout, flashed the green of chrysoprase up to the spruce trees that crept to its edge; on the other it mirrored a scarred wall of rock that rose sheer from the water to some far, incalculable height, its summit carved into semblances of buttressed castles with gray and splendid battlements.