A sort of flash of surprise passed across the reserved, brown, young face. "Yes, ma'am," he said with no expression. "Well, you better leave the rest of your trip until to-morrow."
He slipped from his horse with an effortless ripple, untied a tawny little pony with a thick neck, a round body, and a mild, intelligent face, and led him to Sheila who mounted from her sack. Thatcher carefully adjusted the stirrups, a primitive process that involved the wearisome lacing and unlacing of leather thongs. Sheila bade him a bright and adventurous "Good-bye." thanked the unknown owner of the horse, and started. The pony showed some unwillingness to leave his companions, fretted and tossed his head, and made a few attempts at a right-about face, but Sheila dug in her small spurred heels and spoke beguilingly. At last he settled down to sober climbing. Sheila looked back and waved her hand. The two tall, lean men were gazing after her. They took off their hats and waved. She felt a warmth that was almost loving for their gracefulness and gravity and kindness. Here was another breed of man than that produced by Millings. A few minutes later she came to the top of The Pass and looked down into Hidden Creek.
CHAPTER II
ADVENTURE
Sheila stood and drew breath. The shadow of the high peak, in the lap of which she stood, poured itself eastward across the warm, lush, narrow land. This was different from the hard, dull gold and alkali dust of the Millings country: here were silvery-green miles of range, and purple-green miles of pine forest, and lovely lighter fringes and groves of cottonwood and aspen trees. Here and there were little dots of ranches, visible more by their vivid oat and alfalfa fields than by their small log cabins. Down the valley the river flickered, lifted by its brightness above the hollow that held it, till it seemed just hung there like a string of jewels. Beyond it the land rose slowly in noble sweeps to the opposite ranges, two chains that sloped across each other in a glorious confusion of heads, round and soft as velvet against the blue sky or blunt and broken with a thundery look of extinct craters. To the north Sheila saw a further serenity of mountains, lying low and soft on the horizon, of another and more wistful blue. Over it all was a sort of magical haze, soft and brilliant as though the air were a melted sapphire. There was still blessedness such as Sheila had never felt. She was filled with a longing to ride on and on until her spirit should pass into the wide, tranquil, glowing spirit of the lonely land. It seemed to her that some forgotten medicine man sat cross-legged in a hollow of the hills, blowing, from a great peace pipe, the blue smoke of peace down and along the hollows and the cañons and the level lengths of range. In the mighty breast of the blower there was not even a memory of trouble, only a noble savage serenity too deep for prayer.
She rode for a long while—no sound but her pony's hoofs—her eyes lifted across the valley until a sudden fragrance drew her attention earthwards. She was going through an open glade of aspens and the ground was white with columbine, enormous flowers snowy and crisp as though freshly starched by fairy laundresses. With a cry of delight Sheila jumped off her horse, tied him by his reins to a tree, and began gathering flowers with all the eager concentration of a six-year-old. And, like all the flower-gatherers of fable from Proserpina down, she found herself the victim of disaster. When she came back to the road with a useless, already perishing mass of white, the pony had disappeared. Her knot had been unfaithful. Quietly that mild-nosed, pensive-eyed, round-bodied animal had pulled himself free and tiptoed back to join his friends.
Sheila hurried up the road toward the summit she had so recently crossed, till the altitude forced her to stop with no breath in her body and a pounding redness before her eyes. She stamped her feet with vexation. She longed to cry. She remembered confusedly, but with a certain satisfaction, some of the things Thatcher had said to his team. An entire and sudden lenience toward the gentle art of swearing was born in her. She threw her columbine angrily away. She had come so far on her journey that she could never be able to get back to Thatcher nor even to Duff's shanty before dark. And how far down still the valley lay with that shadow widening and lengthening across it!
Her sudden loneliness descended upon her with an almost audible rush. Dusk at this height—dusk with a keen smell of glaciers and wind-stung pines—dusk with the world nine thousand feet below; and about her this falling-away of mountain-side, where the trees seemed to slant and the very flowers to be outrun by a mysterious sort of flight of rebel earth toward space! The great and heady height was informed with a presence which if not hostile was terrifyingly ignorant of man. There was some one not far away, she felt, just above there behind the rocky ridge, just back there in the confusion of purplish darkness streaked by pine-tree columns, just below in the thicket of the stream—some one to meet whose look meant death.
Her first instinct was to keep to the road. She walked on down toward the valley very rapidly. But going down meant meeting darkness. She began to be unreasonably afraid of the night. She was afflicted by an old, old childish, immemorial dread of bears. In spite of the chill, she was very warm, her tongue dry with rapid breathing of the thin air. She was intolerably thirsty. The sound of water called to her in a lisping, inhuman voice. She resisted till she was ashamed of her cowardice, stepped furtively off the track, scrambled down a slope, parted some branches, and found herself on a rock above a little swirling pool. On the other side a man kneeling over the water lifted a white and startled face.
Through the eerie green twilight up into which the pool threw a shifty leaden brightness, the two stared at each other for a moment. Then the man rose to his feet and smiled. Sheila noticed that he had been bathing a bloody wrist round which he was now wrapping clumsily a handkerchief.