Her face crimson she reined the startled Gypsy around with a savage jerk, turned her back squarely upon the Bar L-M, and without a look behind her rode swiftly in the opposite direction. She rode for an hour, not turning once, although many a time her heart fluttered wildly and then grew painfully still at some slight noise which to her yearning ears sounded like the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her.
To-day she crossed the narrow valley toward the cliffs rising like a wall upon the far side of Echo Creek. Stubbornly she shut her mind from its daily wanderings; her camera, that she had not used for a week, was going to work for her to-day. The birds that had come trooping back from wintering in the south—robins and blue birds, blue jays and woodpeckers, larks and yellow hammers—made merry din in the morning air. Shep, running on ahead as usual, disturbed half a dozen grouse from the underbrush in a little cañon, and the muffled roll of their whirring wings threw Shep into brief consternation and prolonged subsequent joy. She saw the bob and flash of a rabbit's tail, noticed again and again the lean, muscular body of a tree squirrel, heard upon a wooded slope the snapping and crashing of brush that told of the leaping flight of a deer. The woods were alive with animal folk, her "friends" called to her from every tree and tiny valley, they peeped out at her from burrows and hollow trees.
"We are going to quit being a little fool," she told Gypsy with tremulous emphasis. "And we are going to get a real picture to-day."
A day or so before she had heard with scant attention and no subsequent interest something which in the old careless, love free days sooner would have sent her riding this way in haste. One of her father's men, Charley or Jim, had found a dead cow under the cliffs and had seen signs of bear. He had returned to the spot later and had killed the animal, a she bear, and had seen one of her cubs making its swift, awkward way into the brush. Recollecting the story, and because to-day she yearned feverishly for something to do, Wanda turned Gypsy toward the cliffs, thinking how she should like, if her fortune were very great, to be able to show Wayne Shandon when he did come to her, the picture of a bear cub playing in the woods.
"I've had so much fun hunting for him!" she would say then. And Wayne would never know how unmaidenly she had been.
Before she had come within a thousand yards of the place where the carcass of the cow was lying she slipped from the saddle and picketed Gypsy. Her lunch she left tied to the saddle strings; camera and field glasses went with her.
Already, in the fast advancing summertime, she had donned her hunting costume. The soft green of blouse and short skirt, of cap and stockings, blended with the many tints of green of the copses and groves and meadows through which she went swiftly and silently. She slipped from tree to tree, making no more sound than the chipmunk scampering almost from under her feet. Her eyes brightened, the colour warmed in her cheek, her heart grew eager. For, sure enough, fortune was good to her; there were two little bear cubs, round and fat and playful, rumpling each other where they rolled in the sunlight in a small grassy open space.
They were a hundred yards away when she saw them, too far for a picture; but as soon as her eyes fell upon them she vowed that she must have a picture. There was little breeze this morning in the quiet woods, but that little blew from where she stood straight toward the spot where the cubs were frollicking. She must circle, come out down yonder behind a pile of rocks, slip behind the great cedar right at the base of the cliffs, and edge on from there on her hands and knees.
But she paused a moment, fascinated, watching them. They were sitting up, their small brown heads shaking from side to side, their sharp eyes watching each other, their little red tongues lolling. They were such baby things, their awkward bodies so like the little bodies of babies just taking the first faltering step, that she wanted to rush at them and pick them up and hug them.
There was the angry snarl of a rifle, sudden and sharp and evil, and one of the little brown bears made an inarticulate whining moan and its playful spirit ran out in red to dye the grass. Its brother fell over backwards in its fright; there came a second shot, the whining of a bullet glancing from a rock, and the cub plunged into the brush. She saw it a moment, lost it, saw it once more running as only the frightened wild things can run as it sped down into a little hollow which hid it from the hunter and thus saved its life, and then she discerned it climbing wildly, clawing its terrified way up the great cedar against the cliffs. When no third shot came she knew that the hunter had not seen it and then, with an angry fire in her eyes, she turned to learn who he might be. Approaching her from the edge of the grove, a complacent smile upon his face, his rifle under his arm, was Sledge Hume.