"Jim, you're trying to plague me."
"But you will some day. There's always some girl. And Lorry is a pretty live boy. He isn't going to ride a lone trail forever."
Mrs. Adams affected an indifference that she by no means felt.
"You're a lot better to-day, Jim."
"And that's all your fault, Annie."
She left the room, closing the door slowly. In her own room at the end of the hall, she glanced at herself in the glass. A rosy face and dark-brown eyes smiled back at her.
But there were many things to attend to downstairs. She had been away more than a week. And there was evidence of her absence in every room in the place.
Chapter XXV
The Little Fires
With the coming of winter the Blue Mesa reclaimed its primordial solitude. Mount Baldy's smooth, glittering roundness topped a world that swept down in long waves of dark blue frosted with silver; the serried minarets of spruce and pine bulked close and sprinkled with snow. Blanketed in white, the upland mesas lay like great, tideless lakes, silent and desolate from green-edged shore to shore. The shadowy caverns of the timberlands, touched here and there with a ray of sunlight, thrilled to the creeping fingers of the cold. Tough fibers of the stiff-ranked pines parted with a crackling groan, as though unable to bear silently the reiterant stabbing of the frost needles. The frozen gum of the black spruce glowed like frosted topaz. The naked whips of the quaking asp were brittle traceries against the hard blue of the sky.