They turned their horses toward the Morgan ranch and galloped off.
“Thank you so much, Fred, for this happy day. Good night,” she said, as she passed through the gate he had opened for her.
“Good night,” he said, watching her gallop away. Then closing the gate, he leaped on Brownie, took another trail, and rode slowly homeward, with a strange new feeling in his heart.
Chapter XII
AMONG THE TEPEES
THE scene is a horseshoe cove, or basin, half a mile or more in average width, situated high up the mountain slopes. A rim of ragged rock hides and walls it away from the banks of hills and the peaks about it. A score of laughing streams, born of snow-fed springs, running generally toward the lower northwest end, combine there to make a strong stream which plunges into a craggy gorge and foams through it into the wider canyon below.
This gorge, the only break in the wall of the basin, is at the same time the only gateway into it. A risky way it offers to those who would enter the mighty mountain horseshoe. Yet a trail there is leading into this hole in the wall, fit only for the mountain sheep; and along this risky way Old Copperhead had led his band, and within this cliff-barricaded dell they had pitched their smoky-topped tepees.
For it was a dell, a glorious one too, with its patches of dark pines climbing the hillside slopes and scaling the painted cliffs, its groves of bright quaking aspens, its meadows of mountain grass, knee-deep, out of whose tasseled green, fringed daisies, pink geraniums, bluebells, waxy columbines, and a hundred other kinds of wild flowers shone in starry profusion.
An artist’s heart would have leaped to see the picture that night when the sun, slowly wheeling down the west, flooded the dell with light, tinting with gold and pink and purple the cliffs and sleepy clouds that lingered and smiled brightly out of the clear blue above.
The tawny-topped wigwams pitched carelessly about among the open groves, the dusky savages variously grouped about the fires, the contented vari-colored ponies feasting on the fragrant meadows—all together made such a picture as might thrill the soul of a master.
But it was not the charms of the scene that had drawn Old Copperhead into this delightful cove. The place just now offered another more vital attraction for him and his band—safety from pursuit. It gave them a surer base of operations in the new business that they, under the lead of Bud Nixon, had begun. It was a perfect robber’s roost for the cattle-thieving outlaws. From this vantage place, by climbing to a certain point they could command a full view of the valley below. Should they be pursued, the gorge offered a fine chance to ambush the enemy and beat him back.