Suddenly she dipped her paddle and held it. Instantly her light vessel swung about and headed up stream. Slowly, laboriously it nosed in against the stream and glided gently up to the familiar landing place.
Leaping ashore, the Kid stooped and grasped the central struts of her craft. Then she lifted it bodily out of the water, and set it in safety on the broad strand.
The Kid was squatting trail fashion with her back thrust against the smooth-worn, almost polished sides of a great boulder. The chill wind was beating against her rounded cheeks. There were moments when its nipping blast brought tears to her eyes. And her soft, fair hair streamed from under her cap in response to its rough caresses.
Her eyrie was set more than a hundred feet above the rest of the world about her. Her gaze was free to roam the length and breadth of the valley below her. There was nothing whatsoever but the limit of vision to deny her. Here she could feast herself upon the world she had learned to love, with fancy free to riot as it listed.
It was a wonderful panorama for all its harshness. Away to the north lay endless miles of barren, low hills and shallow valleys which lost themselves in the far-off purple of falling daylight. To the south of her it was the same, except that the dying sun of summer lolled heavily on the horizon, gleaming, blinding in its last passion. To the east lay the farm and the corrals that claimed all her working hours, and beyond that was the purple of distance enshrouding lank, sparse, woodland bluffs whose stunted, windswept tops cut sharp drawn lines against the far-off shadows. It was all wide flung, and harsh, and infinitely small viewed from her lofty crow’s-nest. And even the river, immediately below, was no better than a silver ribbon dropped by some careless hand on a carpet that was drab, and worn, and utterly without beauty.
But none of these claimed her now. The girl’s gaze was to the westward. Even the hour was forgotten, and the spread of cold grey cloud which the biting wind was driving down upon the world out of the fierce north-east. Her gaze was on the dark line beyond which flowed the mighty Hekor, where it beat the meeting waters of the two rivers into a cauldron of boiling rapids. It was on the great bluff of woodland which had sheltered her original home, and beyond which lay the deserted Fort, which had been the pulsing heart making life possible for them all. And she was thinking, thinking of a man with “grey eyes, and a strong face that wasn’t too good-looking, and dark hair, and shoulders like a bull caribou.”
He had said he would return, this man who called himself Bill Wilder. He and his red-headed companion and the grey hard-bitten creature he called Chilcoot. They had gone out into the far North. The great, wide-open North with its treacherous smiling summer masking a merciless wintry heart. Would he return? Would he come again down the river? Would he forget, and pass right on down to the city which contained his home? She wondered. And, with each possibility that presented itself, a cold constriction seemed to grip her strong young heart.
How long had he said? She remembered. She had never forgotten. She could never forget. The man’s smiling eyes had haunted her ever since the first moment they had gazed so earnestly, so kindly into hers. Oh, she knew nothing of whence he came or whither he was bound. She knew nothing of the man he might be. These things concerned her not at all. She had judged him in the first moments of her meeting with him nearly two years ago, and from the first words he had spoken in his easy way, and her judgment had been of a splendid manhood that harmonised with the deep woman instinct, which, for good or ill, is the final tribunal of a woman’s life.
He had been the ideal of everything that appealed to her in manhood. She had learned her simple understanding of life amongst the rough men of the northern trail. Here was a man recklessly plunging into the far-off world, ready to face and battle with every chance with which that world was crowded. He was fearless. Yes. He was all she looked for in courage. He was a leader, a strong, determined leader of men no less brave and adventurous than himself. And as for the rest it was all there. She had seen for herself. A great stature, a strong man’s face. And eyes that calmly shone with honesty and kindliness.