She bit her lip and turned away from him. He watched her a moment, then called,
"Are you riding back to the house? My horse is right back there and I'll ride with you."
"No," she answered quietly. "I'm not going back just yet."
She walked on to where the dead cub lay—stood looking down on it a moment and then moved on. Hume watched her while he filled his pipe and lighted it, and went in turn to look at his game. He turned the little beast over with his foot, noted with satisfaction the hole which the bullet had torn through the soft body, and then strolled toward his horse. Wanda saw him ride away in the direction of her home, smoking his pipe.
"All men like to hunt, to kill things," she mused. "Are they as cruel about it as he is? Would Wayne have watched the little things playing for ten minutes and then, when he tired of it, shot them in the midst of their play?"
Not until Sledge Hume had topped a gentle rise and dropped down and out of sight upon the farther side, did the girl turn quickly to the great cedar up which she had seen the escaping cub scramble. She was certain that he had not come down. When at first she did not see him she circled the tree slowly, expecting from each new angle to catch a glimpse of the roly-poly brown body. And when, after fifteen minutes peering upward through the widely flung, horizontal branches, she saw him, a swift inspiration came to her; her quarry had not escaped her yet.
The tree, one of the giants of her father's ranch that she knew very well, thrust its crest upward so close to the cliffs that many of the branches had been bent this way and that, flattening against the granite. The lowest limb, twenty feet above the girl's head, was as thick as many a tall tree hereabouts, and was like a giant's arm, bent at the elbow, thrusting the rocks back. She could make her way up this far, working along a ragged fissure in the cliff; thence she could edge out upon the broad limb until she came to the trunk itself. And once there, to Wanda in her hunting costume and with her knowledge of tree climbing, the rest of the way, from limb to limb, might be difficult but would certainly not be impossible or fraught with unaccustomed danger.
The cub had climbed until coming to a limb which like the lowest one scraped against the rock not half a dozen feet from the tapering trunk, he had crept out on it and was lying upon a ledge of rock. Wanda hoped that here was the opportunity of a lifetime. She would climb as high as that limb, and find the cub's flight shut off by the sheer wall rising perpendicularly behind him. Then she would make him pose for her, whether he liked it or not.
Flushed and panting the girl made her way upward until finally she caught with both hands the big lower limb. Field glasses and camera in their cases strapped to her belt in no way interfered with the free play of her muscles. She tested the branch a moment, smiled at herself for hesitating to trust her light weight to a thing which would have carried tons, gripped a firmer hold and swung free of the rocks. Here would have been a picture for her mother had she come with her this morning; the lithe graceful body swinging twenty feet high in air, only hard slab and broken boulder beneath her. Then she drew herself up as a boy does "chinning himself," threw a heel over the limb, and in a flash lay breathing deeply and triumphantly, the most difficult step of her climb achieved.
Slowly, steadily she made her way upward. In the main it was simple enough for Wanda for it was the sort of thing she did over and over week in and week out. Once, already fifty feet from the ground, she did something that would have been simple enough under other circumstances and yet which put a quick flutter in her heart. It was something which would have made the heart grow still in the breast of Wayne Shandon had he seen, which would have brought a paralysing fear for her to a man who loved life for the gamble in it and who took his chances recklessly.