And that night, by candlelight in his cabin, Dr. Mayfield wrote to Ginger’s favorite aunt, and he said, in closing—“And so, my dear Miss Fanny, it is quite clear that the nice lad is still head over heels in love with Ginger, and if your diagnosis of her condition is correct, we shall be able to arrange matters very satisfactorily.”
He folded the sheet and slipped it into its envelope and sat smiling to himself in the soft, uneven light. It was going to be a very pleasant undertaking, he thought, to bring these two fine young things together—to be the instrument, in a world where so much went stupidly or viciously wrong, of setting something right.
CHAPTER IX
BEFORE he went back to San José Dr. Mayfield took keen satisfaction in introducing Dean Wolcott to the precipitous trails and the secret fastnesses of the wild land he loved, and in presenting him to the people on widely separated ranches. Always he said, with possessive pride, “I want you to shake hands with a mighty good friend of mine, your new Forest Ranger!”
The regular Ranger stayed a fortnight with his deputy before he went on his leave and left the easterner in full possession of the job. The young man told himself that never in all his life—a singularly serene one, save for the months in France and the episode of Dos Pozos—had he been so solidly happy.
He headquartered in a snug cottage near Post’s and his housekeeping was an amused delight to him. He had three cabins at various points on his trails and gypsy, picnicking sojourns in them were novel and fascinating. He rejoiced in a daily, almost hourly, sense of increased vigor; he had a red-blooded feeling of boundless endurance. Always he had lived—and the entire Wolcott connection, as his cousin in Boston would have expressed it—had lived—in their mentalities; they had been—and rather prided themselves on being—absent from the body and present with the brain; they had stayed upstairs in their minds. Now he was to know the hearty comfort of coming down and living lustily in his flesh; to revel frankly and sensuously in the sound young body which had come back to him. It was good to be too hot (for the sun scorched sometimes on the bare hillsides) and to go into the deep shade; to be chilled on a long ride home along the coast and to build up a roaring fire and bask in it; to be ravenously hungry, when he came late to his cabins, and to make himself an enormous meal and eat enormously of it; to be healthily, heartily tired and to tumble into bed and sleep nine dark and dreamless hours.
It was best of all, he thought, to be part of the large silence of the mountains and the sea. The Wolcotts were talkers and all their friends were talkers. They talked entertainingly and well but they talked most of the time, and they had insisted that the Happy Warrior should converse unsparingly of all he had seen and done, of all that had been done to him, of his actions and reactions in the red welter of conflict. Therefore, devoted as he was to the doctor and much as he appreciated the time and pains the Ranger had spent upon him, he was glad to be alone with Snort, with the extra horse whom the Ranger had left as a sort of spare tire, and the Ranger’s dog, a small, shabby Airedale of reserved manner. Making his daily rides according to schedule he formed the habit of passing by the infrequent ranch houses without a hail: later he would be more clubby with the cordially kind people within them, but for the present he desired to be like the stout (and, he recalled, incorrectly named) gentleman of the well-known sonnet—silent upon a peak in Darien.
There were a great many peaks for him to be silent upon and he rode tirelessly from one to the other. Ordinarily, his various “beats,” as the Ranger had jocularly called them, were so arranged that he might serve himself with human society at least every forty-eight hours, but he determined upon a week’s fast from the sight and sound of his fellows. By arriving late at his headquarters—the cabin at Post’s—and leaving early, by passing Slate’s Springs with its lure of a hot and comforting meal, making his own slender supper, and lodging in his sleeping bag on the ground, he was able to manage his seven days hermiting, and he told himself that—with every muscle in play—it was still the most perfect rest he had ever known.
He believed that he now understood Snort perfectly, and that Snort was on the way to understanding him. Rusty, the Ranger’s dog, had a faintly scornful air of understanding him only too well; he sat disdainfully aloof and watched the Bostonian at his saddling, his fire building, his camp making, with an air of weary tolerance, and he was even guilty of yawning in the young man’s face.
“All right, old top,” Dean Wolcott would say to him, “I dare say I’m a pale imitation of your master, and that I shall never quite reach the picturesqueness and dash of the ‘Virginian,’ but you might give me credit for coming on, you know.”