“You evidently don’t believe there is much danger,” said Burleson, with a smile which seemed to relieve the tension he had labored under.
“Yes, there is danger,” she said.
After a silence she added, “I think I hear your men coming.”
He listened in vain; he heard the wind above filtering through the pines; he heard the breathing of their horses, and his own heart-beats, too. Then very far away a sound broke out.
“What wonderful ears you have!” he said—not thinking of their beauty until his eye fell on their lovely contour. And as he gazed the little, clean-cut ear next to him turned pink, and its owner touched her mare forward—apparently in aimless caprice, for she circled and came straight back, meeting his gaze with her pure, fearless gray eyes.
There must have been something not only perfectly inoffensive, but also well-bred, in Burleson’s lean, bronzed face, for her own face softened into an amiable expression, and she wheeled the mare up beside his mount, confidently exposing the small ear again.
The men were coming; there could be no mistake this time. And there came Murphy, too, and Rolfe, with his great, swinging stride, gun on one shoulder, a bundle of axes on the other.
“This way,” said Burleson, briefly; but the fire-warden cut in ahead, cantering forward up the trail, nonchalantly breaking off a twig of aromatic black birch, as she rode, to place between her red lips.
Murphy, arriving in the lead, scanned the haze which hung along the living moss.
“Sure, it’s a foolish fire, sorr,” he muttered, “burrowing like a mole gone mad. Rest aisy, Misther Burleson; we’ll scotch the divil that done this night’s worruk!—bad cess to the dhirrty scut!”