“I have brought Snort back to you,” she said, just as she had planned to say. Her hair was twisted into a knot but there were still leaves and bits of vines clinging to it, and the bramble scratch was red on her brown cheek. “I was coming to help you, when I found him. The doctor wouldn’t let me come, but I came. I was hours catching Snort, but I was coming to you all the time. I’ve been coming to you all night—all year!” She rode close to him and slipped into his arms, and they clung to each other wordlessly. It was their peak in Darien, and they were silent upon it. Silence flowed over them, clarifying, healing, and when it passed it took away with it forever their stubborn pride, the bitterness and the bleak misunderstanding.
“I did try to find you,” said Ginger, lifting her face and looking gravely into his eyes. “In the east, I mean. I went to Boston to find you and tell you—and ask you—I sent a note to you at your house, and I waited in a little hotel. I waited twenty-seven minutes; I know how long it was because I was watching the clock. Then the messenger came back and told me your home was closed and all your family gone to Florida.”
“You came to find me! You did come!” He bent his head again; it was beyond language; there was nothing he could say about it in words. “But I wasn’t in Florida. I was at the School of Forestry, trying to make myself—fit for you. And I was coming to Dos Pozos before I went back. I was coming to you. You believe that, don’t you? You knew it.”
“Yes, I knew it,” said Ginger, contentedly. “I tried to pretend that I didn’t, but I knew it, all the time.” She dropped her head to his shoulder and stood leaning against him so closely that she seemed to be part of him, to belong to him. Never in the bright days of last summer, in the days of the house built upon the golden sands, had she given herself to him like this.
The morning which she had brought with her grew warm about them and it was very still. He wondered a little at the perfect stillness of the young day: then he realized that it was because the lone lion had stopped calling.
Then Ginger remembered, and looked about her, startled. “Where is your Scout? Oh—I see! He is asleep.” She could see the quiet figure on the bed of great ferns with the shabby little dog charging rigidly beside it.
“Yes,” he said, unsteadily, grief and remembrance rushing over him again. “He is—asleep. My good Scout is—asleep.” Then he told her, not in careful phrasing, like a Wolcott, but brokenly, raggedly, his red-rimmed eyes stinging, his smoke-grimed face working, and they walked across the crisp grass and over the bending brakes and stood beside him, looking down.
Ginger was a little above Dean on the hillside; she looked at him pitifully and then down at Elmer Bunty and back again at her lover. Then she put her arms about him. “I wish you could cry,” she said. She pulled his head with its fine fair hair down upon her breast. “I wish you could cry—here.”
Mateo Golinda shouted to them presently and rode over the crest. He had come up at daybreak, as he had promised, and he had seen, understandingly, all that had happened with the latest fire, and he had grave words of praise for the Ranger. Then he rode swiftly on ahead of them; he would ask his wife to have ready a stirrup cup as they passed, and he would go on to the doctor’s camp, and tell them there. He would find Pedro on the trail and take him home.