She sat down just outside the doorway of the cave, hat, gauntlets, glasses and camera at her side, her knees clasped in her hands and stared away through the cedar's intricate, rustling needles and across the tops of the forest sweeping away from the cliffs across the verdant miles, and day dreamed. This newly found cave was her own, absolutely her own. No other man or woman in the world knew of it. She would come here again, always careful that no chance eye saw her; she would bring little things to make of it a lady's bower set above the leafy world. There would come, in due season, cushions which she would work secretly in her bedroom at home and which she would fill here with fragrant pine needles and sweet scented herbs; there would be a book or two; little, unused things would disappear from Julia's kitchen, a tea pot, a bit of coffee, knives, forks and spoons; and some day when the full summer had brought the sunshine that would dissipate the shadows of these last days Wayne Shandon would come here, would stand under the cliffs looking up wonderingly; would climb her magic ladder and dine with her.
As she sat, leaning back against the rocks, daydreaming as Youth cannot help doing, her eyes wandered far across her father's ranch. She found the view new to her. Yonder nothing but the fresh green of the tops fir and pine had thrust upward in the spring; beneath them, seen only now and then as it frisked out of shadow and glinted in sunlight, Echo Creek; beyond the creek—
She sat up straight, suddenly picking up her field glasses. Yes, beyond all this she saw the knoll upon which her father's house stood, even the building itself through its clump of cedars. But her glasses, raised higher sweeping back and forth, had found the river, and travelling on picked up the Bar L-M buildings and corrals!— Next time she would bring the larger glasses, and leave them here, hidden in the cave.
For a long time she gazed across the river, her heart beating quickly with the hope that she might see, somewhere in the wide view, the man who was in her heart. Finally, with a sigh, she lowered her glasses, letting them follow Echo Creek speeding down the long slope of her father's valley. And, doing so, it happened that there came into the disc of her vision a man whom she knew she had never seen before. For a few minutes she watched him riding up the valley, idly amused at the awkward manner of his progress. When his horse walked he clung tenaciously to the saddle horn; when the animal trotted he gave her the impression that at any step he was going to fall off. At last, when she had lost sight of him among the trees, and her interest lagged, she made her way down from the cliff, went back to Gypsy and turned her horse's head toward home.
The man whom she had watched clinging to his horse's back so desperately was not only a new-comer to the Sierra and a stranger, but a poor sort of person to be alone where there is a dearth of paved sidewalks and streets with names and numbers. He had lost himself many times since leaving El Toyon the day before, and now, with the main valley road as plain before him as a man could wish a road to be, he forsook it and came on blindly along a second road that the Echo Creek wagons had travelled last week for wood. And Wanda, riding down to the creek, met him when he had reached a state of perspiring despair.
"Say!" he called shrilly when, barely in earshot, he caught his first view of her. "Say, wait a minute, won't you?"
Wanda, smiling a little at the evident distress which gave her her first impression of the man, came on to meet him. She stopped Gypsy with a swift, gentle touch upon the reins, while he yanked his sweating horse about by pulling manfully at both reins held one in each hand.
"Say," was his next word of greeting, "ain't this the doggondest, peskiest wild man's land you ever shot a glimmer of your eye at? Gee, ain't it fierce, lady?"
Wanda's smile brightened in spite of her. He shook his head and pursed his underlip and mopped his reeking face.
"I'm just in a cold sweat all over," he confided ruefully. "What with the rubbing of this saddle on the outside,—an old pirate with eyes like a young sheep and whiskers like Santa Claus robbed me of twenty bucks for it back yonder in that jay town,—and my bones inside trying to poke through the skin, I'm just peeled like a seal whose skin some flash dame is wearing for a coat. Say," with a groan as he shifted a little in the saddle which he blamed for his woes, "you don't live so awful far from here, do you?"