"Is it very far?" the lad sighed pitifully.
"A mile or two. Come on."
The big timber insensibly gave place to pines scattering up the slope of ever-lessening girth and stature, sharp, slender cones, black like funeral torches. It seemed ten weary miles to the top of this upper foothill. The summit was a desolate moor, streaked with snow in its hollows, stony, with patches of grassy swamp and scattered torches twisted in uncouth torture, very small, yet looming monstrous against the waning light. Ahead was a stony ridge speckled with juniper bushes, and on its brow two spots like jutting rocks.
"Look," said the Blackguard, pointing to a tiny glimmer under one of these spots; "they're lighting their lamp at the Throne."
CHAPTER VI
THE Burrows girl was sitting on a soap box outside the Throne cabin. Supper was over, the dishes were just washed up, her uncle sat within reading a book of mathematics, so the Burrows girl could enjoy the cool solitude of the hills watching the afterglow. She knew she was ruddy, sunburned, and freckled; she also knew that the effect was rather becoming, that week by week her dainty beauty was budding steadily with considerable prospect of real loveliness,—all of which gave very good cause for contentment. As yet man had not appeared in her paradise, because so far a month's observation had convinced her that none of the neighbouring prospectors were sufficiently young to count. At school she had been three times in love with men seen distantly in church or street, but these had all gone blindly by, and were probably fools. Now, according to all her text-books, which were mostly novels, to every maid there comes in time a man. This man takes himself seriously as a lord of creation, but is really not at all so formidable as he looks, being a vulnerable creature, prone to make an ass of himself on the smallest provocation from a woman. The greater the lord of creation, the more abject his enslavement, the more complete the conquest. There was one story about a young lad, called Una, leading a growling lion around with a string.
"I want my lion to be very growly indeed," said the Burrows girl to the stars; whereat the stars, seeing two young men toiling painfully up the trail, began to wink.
"Why," said the Burrows girl, "there's something moving yonder. Two men, I declare, on horseback, coming up to the cabin. Uncle!" she called,—"Uncle!"
"Well, my dear?" An elderly man in a velveteen jacket came lounging to the door and stood against the lamplight.