This was one of Hugh’s madnesses; he would take Sylvie up a mountain and show her his kingdom, show her himself as lord of the wilderness. He had been there before many times, to the top of their one mountain, always under protest from Bella and Pete. It was a bare rock exposed to half the world and all the eyes of Heaven; and for a man in hiding, a man who lived, yet whose name was carved above a grave, it was a very target for untoward accident. Some trader or trapper down in the forest might look up and behold the misshapen figure black and bold, against the sky. Yet there was never so mighty a Hugh as when he stood there defiant and alone. Now he wanted Sylvie to sense that tragic magnificence.
So they went out, Hugh’s arm about her, as strange a pair of lovers as ever tempted the spring—the great, scarred, uncouth, gray cripple and the slim, unseeing girl, groping and clinging, absolutely shut off from any contact with reality as long as this man should interpret creation for her. Sylvie turned back to wave at Pete, whom they had left standing in the doorway.
“I’ll be hunting for you if you stay out late,” he called—to which Hugh shouted back: “You hunting for us! Don’t fancy I can’t take care of this child, myself.”
“Both of them blind!” Pete muttered to himself in answer.
They were moving rather slowly across the rough, sagebrush-covered flat, and presently Hugh led Sylvie into the fragrant silence of the forest trail. To her it was all scent and sound. Hugh whispered to her what this drumming meant and that chattering and that sudden rattle almost under their feet.
They had to go slowly, Sylvie touching the trees here and there, along her side of the trail. He lifted her over logs and fallen trees, and sometimes, before he set her down, he kissed her. Then Sylvie would turn her head shyly, and he would laugh. Thus they made slow, sweet progress.
“I see more in the woods with your eyes than I ever could with my own,” she told him.
“I have eyes for us both,” he answered. “That’s why God gave me the eyes I have, because He knew the use I’d be making of them.”
“Is this the trail Pete follows to the trading-station?” she asked. “I wish you could take me there, Hugh, or—would you let him take me?”
He tightened his arm. “I can’t bear to have you out of my sight,” he answered.