"I would not undertake to say that," he replied, with a smile. "But, such as it is, he takes it. You need help sadly, and perhaps you will both learn more wisdom than I was able to impart when I first interfered."
Durgan went his solitary way down the trail. Godson was still waiting for him. He was as fine a fellow as those remote mountains produce—spare, tall, with a curious look of ideality peculiar to their hardy sons. When he was told he might go up to the summit house, his blue eyes, far under the projecting tow-colored brows, looked almost like the eyes of a saint wrapped in adoration. Durgan was not in a mood to feel that Bertha was his superior.
Durgan built sticks for a fire on the rock-ledge to make his own coffee. He was a better man physically than he had been when he came to Deer Mountain—strong, sinewy, and calm, the processes of age arrested by the vital tide of work. Alone as he was in his eyrie, he could take keen pleasure in the stateliness of his rock palace, in the vision of nights and days that passed before it, in the food and rest that his body earned. To-night he was not expecting satisfaction, and when he struck his match the whole universe was gray and seemed empty; but no sooner had his small beacon blazed than an answering beam leaped out of the furthest distance. It was the evening star.