And without waiting to hear either assent or dissent to her intention, she touched Betty with the whip, and Mowitza and her master were left behind, much to Mowitza's dissatisfaction. She gave one plunge ahead as if to follow, but Genesee's hand on the bridle had a quick, cruel grip for a moment, and in slow silence they made their way down the timbered slope to the lower levels. The girl, free from companionship save her own thoughts, galloped through the odorous, shadowy table-lands, catching here and there a glimpse of glistening water in a river ahead, as it trailed its length far below the plateaus, and shone like linked diamonds away toward the east.
She remembered the river; it was a branch of the Kootenai. To be near it meant but a short journey home; two days more, perhaps, and then—well, their outing would be over. She would go back East, and say good-bye to Betty; and then she began to think of that man who belonged to these hills and who never need leave them—never need go a mile without his horse, if he did not choose; and she envied him as she could not have thought it possible to do six months before—to envy a man such a primitive existence, such simple possessions! But most human wants are so much a matter of association, and Rachel Hardy, though all unconscious of it, was most impressionable to surroundings. Back of her coolness and carelessness was a sensitive temperament in which the pulses were never stilled. It thrilled her with quick sympathies for which she was vexed with herself, and which she hid as well as she could. She had more than likely never tried to analyze her emotions; they were seldom satisfactory enough for her to grant them so much patience; but had she done so, she would have found her desires molded as much by association and sentiment as most other human nature of her age.
Once or twice she looked back as she left the timber, but could see nothing of the others, and Betty seemed to scent the trail home, and long for the ranch and the white-coated flocks of the pastures, for she struck out over the table-lands, where her hoofs fell so softly in the grass that the wild things of the ground-homes and the birds that rest on the warm earth scampered and flew from under the enemy's feet that were shod with iron. A small herd of elk with uncouth heads and monstrous antlers were startled from the shelter of a knoll around which she cantered; for a moment the natives and the stranger gazed at each other with equal interest, and then a great buck plunged away over the rolling land to the south, and the others followed as if they had been given a word of command.
The girl watched them out of sight, finding them, like the most of Montana natives, strange and interesting—not only the natives, but the very atmosphere of existence, with its tinges of wildness and coloring of the earth; even the rising and setting of the sun had a distinct character of its own, in the rarefied air of this land that seemed so far off from all else in the world. For in the valley of the Kootenai, where the light breaks over the mountains of the east and vanishes again over the mountains of the west, it is hard at times to realize that its glory is for any land but the mellow, sun-kissed "park" whose only gates open to the south.
The late afternoon was coming on; only an hour or so of sun, and then the long flush twilight.
Remembering the camping-spot they were making for, she gave Betty rein, thinking to reach it and have a fire built on their arrival, and her hard ride gave her a longing for the sight of the pack-mules with the eatables.
Another of those ugly, jolting bits of scrub-timber had to be crossed before the haven of rest was reached. Betty had almost picked her way through it, when a huge black something came scrambling down through the brush almost in front of them. The little mare shied in terror, and the girl tried to make a circuit of the animal, which she could see was an enormous black bear. It did not seem to notice her, but was rolling and pitching downward as if on a trail—no doubt that of honey in a tree. Managing Betty was not an easy matter, and it took all of the girl's strength to do so until the black stranger passed, and then, on loosening the bridle, the terrified beast gave a leap forward. There was a crash, a growl from under her feet, and an answering one from the huge beast that had just gone by them; she had been followed by two cubs that had escaped Rachel's notice in the thick brush, as all her attention had been given to the mother; but Betty's feet coming down on one of the cubs had brought forth a call that the girl knew might mean a war of extermination. With a sharp cut of the whip, Betty, wild from the clawing thing at her feet, sprang forward over it with a snort of terror, just as the mother with fierce growls broke through the brush.
