Corduroy
Date: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young women -- Fiction; California -- Fiction; Ranch life -- Fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Corduroy

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Title: Corduroy

Author: Ruth Comfort Mitchell

Release date: March 15, 2023 [eBook #70289]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1923

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Library of Congress)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CORDUROY ***

CORDUROY

RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

Books by
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

CORDUROY
NARRATIVES IN VERSE
JANE JOURNEYS ON
PLAY THE GAME

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
New York London

THE NEXT MORNING SHE WAS EARLY ON HER HORSE AND SHE WORE HER WORN AND MELLOW CORDUROYS

[Page 31]

CORDUROY

BY
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
AUTHOR OF “PLAY THE GAME,”
“JANE JOURNEYS ON,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK : : LONDON : : 1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1922, by The Crowell Publishing Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

W. S. Y.

WHO HAS PUT ON CORDUROY
AND WEARS IT WELL

CORDUROY

CHAPTER I

FOR the first time in her life—she had been alive twenty-two vivid and zestful years—Virginia Valdés McVeagh, nicknamed, descriptively, “Ginger,” felt something like reverence for a male creature of her own species.

Her father, that stolid Scot, had died while she was a hearty and unimaginative child; Aleck, her only brother, killed on the last day of fighting in the Great War, had been her pal and play-fellow, as were, in lesser and varying degrees, the young ranchers of the miles-wide neighborhood, while the vaqueros and old Estrada, mayordomo of her cattle ranch, were her henchmen, loyal, admiring, unquestioning. Always she had been able to divide the men of her world unhesitatingly into two classes—her equals, her inferiors.

Dean Wolcott was different. He was framed in mystery and hallowed by grief, coming to her—almost like a visitant from another world—in the dawn of a Christmas Day she had vowed not to keep, bringing her the word of her dead brother for which she had thirsted, and a stained and crumpled letter in Aleck’s own hand. It was the first shred of information she had had since the official communication, nearly four months after the armistice. That had come on a delicate day of early California spring; the rains had been late and the hills were only faintly brushed with green, but the wild flowers were out, brilliant, arresting, and the oaks were vocal with linnets and orioles; meadow larks sank liltingly on the low ground; the narrow little creek was lively and vehement, and the air was honey and wine. Everything was awake and alive except Aleck, and Aleck was dead. The grave official statement regretted to inform her that Lieutenant Alexander McVeagh was dead. Dead; not alive any more; never coming back to Dos Pozos; never to ride with her over the range again.

Something in Virginia Valdés McVeagh died likewise. When Aleck was there she had seemed less than her age; now she was more. She ceased at once to be “Ginger.” Swiftly, almost, it seemed, with a single motion, she grew up. She had always been cognizant of every detail of enterprise on the big cattle ranch, and now, with Estrada’s help, she took competent charge. She rode with him over the rolling hills on Aleck’s horse, brought in her cattle from remote pastures, saw to the planting of her alfalfa crops and the harvesting of her wheat, held rodeos, marketed her stock. Leaving off the mellow corduroys which toned alluringly with her skin and eyes and hair, and the brave scarlet sweaters and wine-red velvet dresses which sharply underlined her Spanish coloring, she swathed herself in black as bitterly as her Valdés grandmother would have done. She knew that it cut her beauty in two and she was glad: there had been flagelantes on her mother’s side of the house, three generations earlier.

The slow and difficult year had crawled away; February ... December. Virginia had refused to go to relatives in Los Angeles or San Francisco and asked them not to come to her. This first black Christmas (the one a year earlier had been vibrant with hope) she must be allowed to spend alone, in the luxury of uninterrupted and unconsoled grief. Even the servants—Estrada and his men, old Manuela, the housekeeper, Ling, the moon-faced Chinese cook—were banished to San Luis Obispo on the morning of the twenty-fourth, not to return until the twenty-sixth, but her gift to herself of solitude had been snatched away from her. Dos Pozos was five miles off the highway, but in good weather motorists often took the dirt road for a short cut. This year Virginia had neglected to have it kept up; the bridge, half a mile from the house, was a frail and ancient structure. Aleck had meant to replace it with a permanent one of concrete, and Estrada had begged her to carry out the young señor’s plan, but she would not. Later, perhaps; for the present, she was thankful for anything which made for isolation.

And then, ironically enough, the very thing which was to have kept the world away, brought it to her. It rained in torrents, lavish, riotous California rain; the road sank down into a batter of soft mud; the bridge whined in the storm; at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve four machines and ten persons, wailing children among them, were stranded and helpless. The telephone line was down; the vaqueros spending their holiday in town; and tradition was rigid; no one, gentle or simple, ever lifted the latch of Dos Pozos in vain. Grudgingly, with unadorned civility, Virginia had taken them into the old adobe ranch house and prepared to give them camp fare, for there was no way in which she could summon her servants.

It immediately appeared, however, that her servants did not require summoning; they were already there. The good creatures had merely driven round the turn of the road in the morning, waited until she had ridden off in the rain, and crept back again, hiding themselves discreetly in their quarters. Their idea had been to feed her as the ravens fed the prophet and to keep out of her sight, for they were on intimate terms with her temper and her tongue. When the house party enforced descended upon their mistress they had come boldly forth, rather giving themselves airs; what—they wanted respectfully to know—would she have done without them?

So it fell out that two brisk and cheerful school-teachers and a forlorn widower and his shabby children and a couple of Stanford students and a personage in a limousine made philosophically merry beneath the roof which had fully intended to cover nothing but desolate grief and decent silence, and Ling plied happily between his table and his glowing range, his queue snapping smartly out behind him, and old Manuela built fires and made up beds in the guest rooms, and Estrada rode into San Luis Obispo to send telegrams to distracted families.

When she went to bed at midnight Virginia had worked out something of her rebellion in weariness. She had resurrected toys for the pinched children, helped the school-teachers and the Stanford students to trim a tree for them and to decorate the big rooms with snowberries and scarlet toyon—spurred herself to a civil semblance of hospitality. As she fell asleep she was aware of a feeling she had sometimes had when she was a rather bad and turbulent child—that, having been good, unusually, laboriously good—something good should and must come to her.

It came at sunrise, when Estrada wakened her, calling excitedly in front of her window. She slipped her feet into Indian moccasins and threw a serape about her and padded down the long corridor and out on to the veranda. She heard people stirring as she passed the guest rooms; one of the children was whimpering with eagerness to be dressed and allowed to hunt for its Christmas stocking.

Behind the mayordomo stood a tall man in uniform: for one mad moment her heart stood still and her eyes dilated and blurred and the figure in khaki swam dizzily in the keen morning light.

Then the old Spaniard stepped quickly forward and she saw that his eyes were wet. “Gracias a Dios, Señorita—it is a friend of Señor Alejandrino! At last he has come, over the sea and over the land, to bring you the message!”

The stranger came slowly nearer, staring at her. She saw then that he was a young man, but he did not look young. His eyes were intolerably tired and tragic and he was weary with weakness. He blinked a little as he looked at her; it was as if the brightness of her eyes and mouth and the gay serape hurt and dazed him. “You are—‘Ginger’?” he wanted gravely to know.

He spoke in a hoarse whisper and in a whisper she answered him, breathing fast. “Yes. I am Ginger. Aleck——”

He began to speak, very slowly and carefully, pushing the words before him, one at a time, as a feeble invalid pushes his feet along the floor. He had been with her brother for a month; they had come to regard each other as friends, in the red intimacy of war; they had had a feeling ... something ... that last day, that they would not both come through it. They had written letters and exchanged them, promised each other——

She cried out at that. “A letter? He wrote—you’ve brought me a letter?” She held out her hands, shaking.

He was fumbling at a pocket and his fingers were likewise unsteady. He explained, very humbly, why he had been so long in coming. He had been wounded, too, not an hour later. Shattering wounds ... he moved his thin body uncomfortably as if at a bad memory; shell shock; he had forgotten everything, even to his own name. A month ago, in England, he had started in to remember, and he had been traveling to her ever since. He gave her a worn and soiled bit of paper, folded up like a child’s letter. Estrada slipped softly into the house.

She snatched at it hungrily and read it three times through before she looked up again. Aleck’s crude and boyish backhand; Aleck’s crude and boyish words, hearty, heartening, lifting the black blanket of silence; Aleck.

Then she looked up and caught her breath sharply. A strong shaft of winter morning sunlight had fallen along the veranda, and it was shining on his face and through his face. Virginia had never in all her days harbored an eerie imagining, but she was harboring one now. Her Valdés mother had died when she was a baby, and her upbringing had been along the gray lines of the McVeagh Scotch Presbyterianism; nevertheless, from old Manuela, the housekeeper, she had heard many a colorful tale of the santos. Now, it flashed upon her swiftly, this worn young soldier, more than a man in spirit, less than a man in body, was like a saint; a warrior saint; a martyr saint. He swayed a little, backward, away from her; it seemed entirely possible that he might melt into the bar of sunlight, into the morning.... She had hoped and imagined so many things for so many months ... it was conceivable that she was only hoping and imagining this....

Estrada came out again. His quick Spanish cut into her phantasy. “Señorita, this gentleman is very tired and ill—he must rest!” He put a steadying hand under the young man’s arm and he sagged heavily against him.

Virginia came out of her abstraction with a sharp sigh. “Yes, he must rest. Come!” She caught the serape together with one hand and she was magnificently unaware of her bare brown ankles and her bare brown throat, and the tumbled ropes of black hair swinging over her shoulders, and held open the door. “Come,” she said again, smiling mistily back at him.

The widower’s children were registering shrill rapture over their stockings and the tree; the older members of the house party, having been enlightened by Estrada, drew quietly back and watched with leashed curiosity as the trio went through the room and down the long corridor. Virginia halted before the door of the last bedroom, the heavy old-fashioned iron latch in her hand. “This is Aleck’s room. No one ever comes here but myself; no one else ever takes care of it.” She flung open the door. Then, at the dim prompting of some Spanish forbear, she made a little ritual of it, taking his hand and leading him over the threshold. “Now I give it to you.” She led him gently across the red tiled floor to a great armchair, cushioned with a brilliant Navaho blanket. “This was Aleck’s chair.” She began quite steadily. “He always sat here. And now you are sitting here. And you saw him die, didn’t you? I saw him live, all the years of his life, riding the range, in this house, in this room—and you saw him die. You saw—Aleck—die.” Then she started to cry, very quietly. She slipped down and sat huddled on the floor beside him, her forehead against the big arm of the chair. He leaned over and laid his hand uncertainly on her hair, but he could not manage to say anything to her. It was as if the courage and energy which had driven and dragged him across an ocean and a continent had left him utterly, now that his pledge was kept, his message given.

So they stayed there, in silence, save for the slight sound of her grief, until old Manuela bustled in and took soothing but competent charge. Manuela was not unaware of her mistress’ bare ankles and throat. She cast a scandalized black eye upon them, hurried her off to her own room to dress, flung up a window to the quick morning air, brought a footstool, tucked the Navaho snugly about the young soldier.

“And now, I go to bring the señor something warm to drink. Would you like coffee or chocolate, Señor?”

Dean Wolcott roused himself with a palpable effort. “I must not stay. My cousin is waiting at San Obispo; he will be anxious—”

“Coffee or chocolate, Señor?” The old woman slipped a soft, small pillow behind his head.

“Coffee, then,” said the stranger, wearily.

“Chocolate will be better, Señor.” She beamed approval on him, quite as if he had chosen chocolate. “I go now to bring chocolate for the señor.”

She was back in ten minutes with a steaming cup and stood over him until he had drunk the last velvet drop of it. “And now the señor will rest.”

The warm comfort of it went over him like a drug. He leaned his head back acquiescently. “Yes; I will rest for a few moments.”

Manuela turned back the spread of delicate Mexican drawnwork and patted the pillows. “The señor would rest better upon the bed,” she said silkily.

Dean Wolcott shook his head. “Thank you; I do not care to lie down. I will sit here for a few moments....”

She was kneeling before him, swiftly and surely divesting him of his shoes. “The señor will rest better upon the bed,” she stated with soft conviction. He got up out of the chair when it became clear that she would lift him out if he did not, and at once he found himself lying in utter lassitude on Aleck McVeagh’s bed. “For an hour ... no longer ...” he said with drowsy dignity.

The old woman drew a light serape up to his chin, nodded indulgently, shaded the window, and went away, treading with heavy softness down the corridor.

She met her mistress at the end of it. The girl had flung herself swiftly into her riding clothes and her eyes were shining. “I must talk to him, Manuela! There are a thousand things to ask!”

“Not yet, my heart,” said the old woman. “First he must sleep. He is broken with weariness.”

Ginger turned reluctantly. Her house party enforced was at breakfast and her place was with her motley guests. What she wanted to do was to wait outside Aleck’s door until Dean Wolcott wakened, but she was feeling amazingly gentle and good, so she went at once to the dining room and presided with her best modern version of the Valdés tradition.

She kept on being gentle with the wayfarers; she was not annoyed with them any longer for having mired down on her neglected road before her neglected bridge. It seemed almost as if she would never be annoyed with anything or anybody again, now that the black blanket of silence was lifted; now that she had word—warm, human, close-range word—of Aleck, and Aleck’s letter.

Her heart lifted when she thought of the messenger. Aleck had sent him to her, and he had come—over the sea and over the land, as Estrada said, fighting his weakness as he had fought the enemy. She summoned up the echo of his tired voice, pushing the words before him slowly, one by one, the memory of him there in the shaft of morning sunlight, the austere beauty of his worn young face. Her guests, filled with lively, kind curiosity, wanted to hear about him, but she let Estrada tell what there was to tell. When she spoke of him it was in a hushed voice—as if he might hear and be disturbed, the length of the rambling old house away; as if he were something to be spoken of in deep respect. It was that way in her own mind; she whispered about him in her thoughts.

CHAPTER II

BY three o’clock Estrada had mended the road and propped the bridge and gotten the four machines under way. Ginger saw them off very patiently. They were volubly grateful and expressive and she let them take all the time they wanted for the thanks and farewells, and waited to wave them out of sight. The last car to round the curve was the one containing the widower and his children—forlorn no longer but exuding sticky satiety and clutching their new treasures.

Then she hurried into the house. The soldier guest was still sleeping, the housekeeper reported. Ginger went on tiptoe to the door and listened. There were the countless questions to ask him about Aleck; she grudged every missed moment.

“We dare not wake him,” said Manuela with authority. “And he must eat before he talks again. Go away, my heart. I will keep watch.” She sat down again in a chair in the corridor and folded her hard brown hands on her stomach. “Listen! Some one comes!”

There was the sound of a motor and Ginger went to see who it was—the house party might have found worse going beyond, and turned back. It was a car from the garage at San Luis Obispo, and before it reached the house she saw that it carried one person beside the driver—a young man who held himself singularly erect. He was, he announced, the cousin who had been waiting, waiting all day, at San Luis Obispo, for Mr. Dean Wolcott. He wanted to know where Mr. Wolcott was. His manner rather conveyed that Mr. Wolcott might have met with foul play; that almost anything might occur in a wilderness of this character.

Miss McVeagh explained that Mr. Dean Wolcott was sleeping; he was greatly exhausted and had been asleep since morning.

The other Mr. Wolcott was clearly annoyed. The trip from Boston to California, undertaken only a day after his cousin had landed from England, had been wholly against his advice and judgment. He had been unable to understand why his cousin could not have mailed Miss McVeagh her brother’s letter, and written her any details.

Ginger, looking levelly at him, saw at once that he had been and always would be unable to understand. She said, very civilly, that she hoped they would both rest for a few days at Dos Pozos before making the return journey.

“Thank you, but that will be quite impossible,” said the young man, hastily. “It will be necessary to leave Los Angeles to-morrow. The entire Wolcott connection—” it was as if he had said—“The Allied Nations,” or “The Nordic Peoples”—“will postpone the holiday festivities until Mr. Dean Wolcott’s return.” He desired to be shown where his cousin was sleeping, and he went briskly in to rouse him, past the protesting Manuela.

Ginger went out of the house. Large as it was, there did not seem to be room enough in it for the newcomer and herself. He brought her sharply out of her mood of whispering gentleness, and she walked a little way toward the bridge and planned to begin work at once on the permanent structure of Aleck’s intention. A big and beautiful idea came to her; there was no way of marking Aleck’s grave, but this bridge should be built in his memory, inscribed to him. It brought the tears to her eyes and she turned, at sound of feet on the path, and saw Dean Wolcott coming toward her, and now, as in the morning, the sun was on him—this time the evening sun, slipping swiftly down behind the hills.

He was faintly flushed with sleep and his voice was stronger and steadier. “I am ashamed,” he said. “I have slept away my one day with you. I had concentrated for so long on the single purpose of bringing Aleck’s message to you that, once it was done, everything seemed to be done. I sank into that sleep as if it were a bottomless pit. I must go back to-night. My mother—my people— You see, I spent only a day with them.”

“You must go,” said Ginger. “You were good—oh, you were good to come!”

They stood then without talking, looking at each other, gravely. They seemed to be groping toward each other through the mists of grief and tragedy and strangeness which encompassed them. The little scene had—and would always have in their memories—a lovely and lyric quality. It was a fresh-washed world; the hills, the roads, the trails, the chaparral were a clean and shining bronze; the distant alfalfa fields were emerald counterpanes and the toyon berries, freed from the last stubborn summer dust, were little shouts of color.

He passed a hand across his troubled eyes. “There is so much to tell you.... Every day, every hour, things grow clearer; I remember more and more. But I will write to you. I will write you everything.”

“I don’t know, I can’t explain—” Ginger was whispering again—“but it almost seems as if you’d brought Aleck back to me. I can never see him again, but—it’s different, somehow. That dreadful, black, lost feeling is gone. I won’t wear black any more; Aleck hated black. And I’m going to build that bridge, as he planned to build it, of stone, and—and put his name on it. It’s—all I can do for him.”

His tired eyes lighted. “Will you let me share it with you—let me design it? I do that sort of thing, you know. I should love helping you with Aleck’s bridge.” His voice was kindling to warmth now. “A bridge—there could be nothing better for a memorial.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a notebook and pencil. “Shall we go a little nearer? I’ll make just a rough sketch of the situation.” They walked on.

The cousin came to the edge of the veranda and called a warning; there was very little time. Dean Wolcott frowned and kept steadily on, Ginger walking beside him in her strange new silence. He did not speak again until he had made the small, unsteady sketch on a leaf of his notebook. Then he came a little closer to her, peering at her through the fading light. The sun had gone and the brief afterglow was going. “I will send the design as soon as I am sure of doing it decently—within a few weeks, I hope.” It was as if he were seeing her—her—not merely the person to whom with incredible difficulty and delay he had delivered a message. “And after a while, when I am—myself—may I come again?” His voice was huskily eager. “May I come back? I want to know Aleck’s country; I want to know Aleck’s—you.”

She took his thin fingers into a warm brown grasp. “Please come! Please come and stay!” The other Mr. Wolcott was coming down the path, picking his way neatly through the mud, but she did not let Dean Wolcott’s hand go. “And please come—soon!”

The capable cousin took him away at dusk. They would get a train out of San Luis Obispo at midnight and leave Los Angeles for Boston the next forenoon. He had it all compactly figured out. If they made proper connections—and he looked as if trains rarely if ever trifled with him—they would reach home on the day and at the hour when he had planned to reach home.

Ling and Manuela had hastily cooked and served an early supper and Ginger sat across the table from her two guests, looking at them and listening to them, eating nothing herself. It was to be observed that the worn young soldier and his kinsman shared certain characteristics of face and figure—the same established look of race—but they were two distinct variations on the family theme.

For the first time in her assured and unquestioning life Ginger was acutely aware of her table—of the contrast between the fine old silver and glass which her mother, Rosalía Valdés, had brought with her to Dos Pozos as a bride and the commonplace and stupid modern china which she herself had bought at San Luis Obispo; of old Manuela’s serene crudities of service. The other Mr. Wolcott was carefully civil, but he managed to make her stingingly conscious of the number and variety of miles between Boston and her ranch: he had rather the air of a cautious and tactful explorer among wild tribes. Whenever he looked at her, which was not often, she felt like a picture in a travel magazine—“native belle in holiday attire”—like a young savage princess with strings of wampum and a copper ring in her nose.

But she did feel, at any rate, like a princess: he aroused in her an absurd desire to talk about the McVeaghs in Scotland and the Valdés family in Spain; to drag out heirlooms and ancient treasures.

Dean Wolcott was very white again and said little. When they were in the machine he rallied himself with a visible effort. “I will send the sketch soon,” he said, rather hollowly, “and I will write you—everything.” Then he seemed to sink back into his weary weakness; even the glow died out of his eyes.

Ginger watched the machine’s little red tail light disappear around the curve. She was certain that, directly they were under way, the other Mr. Wolcott was telling him how very much wiser and more sensible, how much less exhausting and expensive it would have been to mail Aleck’s letter to her.

Then she went briskly into her own room and came out into the corridor presently with her arms overflowing with black clothing—black riding things, black waists and skirts, black dresses.

“Manuela,” she said, as the old woman came up to her, staring, “these are for you and your daughters. I’ve done with them.”

Manuela squealed with rapture. “Mil gracias y gracias a Dios, Señorita mía!” she purled. She had begged her mistress to leave off mourning, much as her Spanish soul approved it, and now she had her wish, and this bountiful precipitation of manna besides. She gathered it up gleefully and waddled off with her dark face creased into lines of supreme content.

Ginger was very much pleased with herself. This was the way in which she—Ginger McVeagh—did things. She decided to lay off black, and instantly, with one gesture, she cleansed her wardrobe completely and forever of its somber presence.

The next morning she was early on her horse and she wore her worn and mellow brown corduroys and her seasoned old Stetson, and Estrada and his men nodded knowingly at each other and smiled shyly at her. It was curious how shy and how respectful they were, the hard-riding, hard-drinking vaqueros. The Spanish and Mexican ones among them had a manner which was just as good and decidedly pleasanter than that of the other Mr. Wolcott, and the Americans, old grizzled chaps in the main who had ridden for her father, had a whimsical poise and a rugged picturesqueness of diction.

It was an oddly feudal life for a twenty-two-year-old girl in the up-to-the-minute days of the twentieth century, the more so, of course, because of her brother’s death, but it had been sufficiently so, even before he went to war. Her mother had died when she was a baby, her father when she was a child; Aleck had firmly sent her away to boarding school three times, and three times he had weakly let her come home. He was bleakly lonesome without her; he concurred, in his happy and simple soul, with the ranchers who laughed and said—“Oh, let her alone—she knows twice as much now as most young ones of her age!” Family connections in San Francisco and Los Angeles protested mildly, but they were busy with their own problems and Dos Pozos was a marvelous place to take the children and spend vacations, and Ginger had probably had about all the schooling she needed for that life and that was undoubtedly the life she meant always to lead. Thus, comfortably, they dismissed the matter, and sent her an occasional new novel for cultural purposes and came months later to find half the leaves uncut. Ginger would have read it with a good deal of enjoyment if she could have stayed indoors long enough; evenings she was apt to be sleepy very early.

Now the word went over the wide neighborhood that Aleck McVeagh’s buddy had come and brought a letter from him, and told his sister all about his life over there, and his death, and Ginger had given away all her mourning and put on her regular clothes and the ranchers rode over on their hard-mouthed, wind-swift horses or drove up in their comfortable, battered cars and asked her to barbecues and rodeos again.

’Rome Ojeda, who lived thirty miles away, heard the news, came the thirty miles at a Spanish canter in a little over four hours, flung the reins over the head of his lathered horse to the ground, walked with jingling spurs on to her veranda and made hearty love to her.

He had intended to marry her ever since she came home from boarding school for the last time and he saw her in a scarlet sport coat and a scarlet tam. He was Aleck’s best friend and Aleck had looked on with satisfaction; he wasn’t keen to give Ginger up to anybody, but it wouldn’t be really giving her up to have her marry old ’Rome, and she’d be mortally certain to marry somebody. Ginger, however, wasn’t at all sure that she was. By and by, perhaps; certainly not now, when she had many much more interesting things to do. So ’Rome Ojeda had bided his time good-naturedly; she was pretty young, and he wasn’t so old himself; just as well, probably, to play around awhile. He let it be rather well known, however, that she was going to marry him as soon as she was ready to marry anybody.

Now he was direct and forceful. “Ginger, look here! You’re old enough now, and you’re all alone, and I’ve waited the deuce of a while. No sense waiting any longer!” He showed his very white teeth in a sudden smile and flung a quick arm about her. He was a big and beautiful creature, Jerome Ojeda, Spanish-American, hot-headed, hot-tongued, warm-hearted. He had almost graduated from the High School at San Luis Obispo; there had been a rodeo in which he wanted to ride, so he rode in it. He took a spectacular first place in the “Big Week” as the affair was called, and he had never experienced the palest pang of regret for the little white cylinder tied with a blue ribbon.

Ginger got herself promptly out of his arms. She wasn’t in the least shocked or resentful but she was disconcertingly cool. “I don’t want to marry—anybody, ’Rome,” she said.

He caught her shoulders in his dark hands and gave her a small shake. “Don’t be a little fool! Of course you want to marry somebody. It’s—what you’re for. You want to marry me, only you don’t know it yet. But you will.” He brought his brown face nearer. “When I make up my mind, I generally put it over, don’t I?” He gave her another little shake. “Don’t I?”

She considered him calmly. “Generally, yes,” she said.

He enveloped her swiftly in a rough, breathtaking hug, and as swiftly let her go again. “All right; I can wait a while longer.” He strode, spurs jingling, toward his horse.

Ginger called after him, hospitably: “Don’t go now,’Rome! Stay for dinner. Look at Pedro—he’s dead tired.”

He swung himself into the saddle without touching the stirrups and smiled back at her. His smile was very white and dazzling in his brown face. “When I stay, querida, I’ll stay—right. And Pedro’ll take me where I want to go; there’ll be horses when I’m gone.” He struck spurs into the dripping horse and was off at a smooth and rhythmic gallop.

Ginger frowned, looking after him. She did like old ’Rome a lot. She liked everything about him except the way he treated his stock. Still, he was no worse than most of them. But she didn’t want to marry him; she didn’t want to marry anybody; she was much too busy and happy.

CHAPTER III

DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere and lasting thing, and she never went over it too quickly to rest her eyes on the plate set into the rock which bore Aleck’s name and the dates of his birth and death, and, beneath—“From his sister and his friend.”

After a little time the letters had begun to come; long, fluent, vivid letters; realistic stories of the life he and Aleck had lived together. Ginger read them with laughter and with tears, and wrote short, shy answers on cheap stationery. Ordinarily, she would have used the official ranch paper, with the name at the top—“Dos Pozos, Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole proprietor,” and a neat cut of a long-horned steer at one side and a bucking horse at the other—but she had a dim sense of what the other Mr. Wolcott’s expression would be when he saw. Therefore, she used tablet paper and envelopes which did not quite match; sometimes she used the regular stamped envelopes. Her writing was unformed and uninteresting; she loathed composing letters and they sounded and looked as if she did. She had never cared about getting them, save Aleck’s. The Los Angeles and San Francisco relatives wrote chiefly to ask if they might come and bring the children for a little visit with dear Virginia, and grateful bread-and-butter notes after they had gone home. She liked getting letters now, however; she found Dean Wolcott’s many-sheeted ones the most enthralling reading she had ever done. He was steadily gaining weight and strength and poise again, he told her. In the early summer he began to talk about coming, and in July he announced that he would arrive at San Luis Obispo on the twenty-sixth.

Ginger sat a long time with this letter in her hand. Then she went to the telephone and called up her favorite aunt by long distance, in San Francisco, and asked if she might come up to her next day and do some shopping.

Her Aunt Fan was cordial and kind. She was really very fond of Ginger; fond enough to like having her with her for little visits but not quite fond enough to visit her on the ranch. Aunt Fan’s idea of the country was a tiresome geographical division through which you passed on your way to a city. Besides, it was a place of beguiling cream and broilers and hot breadstuffs; a place where one invariably and weakly ate too much.

Now she said that Ginger was to come at once and they’d have a wonderful time together; she’d been meaning to send for her, anyway.

Ginger took the day train from San Luis Obispo and reached San Francisco in the evening; this, she knew, was an easier time for her aunt to meet her than in the morning. Aunt Fan had a taxi waiting and bundled her delightedly into it.

“Dearie, are you simply dead? I told the doctor we might join him at Tait’s for a little while, to hear the music and— But I don’t know—” she broke off, looking at her niece’s costume, and shaking her head. “My dear child, where did you get that dress?”

It was a one-piece thing in blue serge of ordinary quality, listlessly trimmed with black braid, and the neck line was just too low and a good deal too high.

“In San Luis,” said Ginger, meekly. She was always meek with her aunt on the subject of clothes. “It was only twenty-two fifty.”

“It looks it,” said Aunt Fan, briefly. “And that mal-formed hat, and light-topped shoes (there hasn’t been a light-topped shoe worn since the flood!) and brown gloves! My dear!” She hailed the chauffeur. “Straight back to the St. Agnes, please.”

“I bought all these things ages ago,” said Ginger, humble still, “before I went into mourning. I’ve given all the black stuff to Manuela. I didn’t think it mattered, just for the train.”

“My child,” said her aunt with solemn and passionate conviction, “clothes always matter. I wouldn’t be divorced in a dress like that.” She sighed. “How you, with your Spanish blood, can have so little sense of line and color— Oh, I know you look well enough on the ranch, on a horse—‘Daring Nell, the Cattle Queen’—that sort of thing, but you can’t ride your horse into restaurants and drawing-rooms and theaters, and as soon as you dismount you look like the hired help!” She was heartily angry with her by the time they arrived at the apartment house. No one could fathom why it had been named the St. Agnes; it was a good deal more like the Queen of Sheba.

Ginger followed her into Apartment C. It was the first time she had visited her aunt here, and it struck her that it was like the inside of a silk-lined and padded candy box de luxe; it was a good deal like Aunt Fan herself.

It began to strike Mrs. Featherstone that her niece was turning the other cheek with unprecedented docility. “Look here,” she cried, catching hold of her and turning her face to the light, “let me look at you. What is it? What’s come over you?” She shook her as ’Rome Ojeda had shaken her but with less muscular authority. “What do you want clothes for?”

“Because I have only things like this, and—” she was entirely unflurried and direct about it—“because Dean Wolcott, Aleck’s friend, you know, is coming out for a visit.”

Aunt Fan studied her thoughtfully. “When’s he coming?”

“The twenty-sixth—a week from Saturday.”

“Oh, Lord!” said her aunt with deep feeling. “How I do detest the country in July! Well, Manuela’ll simply have to bring me a breakfast tray, whether she thinks it immoral or not. I will not get up in the middle of the night.”

“But, Aunt Fan, I didn’t expect you to come.” Ginger was wholly frank about it.

“My dear girl, I don’t suppose you want me any more than I want to come and listen to the crickets with their mufflers open all night, but—I ask you—can you entertain a strange young man, Boston, too, isn’t he?—alone?”

“I don’t see why not,” said her niece, coolly. “He isn’t strange at all; he was Aleck’s friend.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter whether you see or not,” said Mrs. Featherstone, crisply. “I’m coming. I suppose I’ll gain eighteen pounds as I did before. See here, will you promise not to let Ling make waffles?” Her carefully tinted face broke up suddenly into little wrinkles of smiles. “There, never mind! I love you if you do weigh a hundred and ten and eat everything!”

Mrs. Featherstone weighed a hundred and sixty-nine and she ate like a canary and thought about food most of the time, and her large, comely face had a chronic expression of wistful yearning. Clergymen and lecturers and interpreters liked having her in the front row; they found her intense concentration and her blue-eyed gaze extremely helpful and inspiring, and they had no way of knowing that she was thinking raptly to herself— “If I should go over to the Palace for lunch and have turkey hash and potatoes au gratin and popovers and a cup of chocolate, and walk all the way home, fast, I don’t believe I’d gain an ounce!”

She was Ginger’s father’s half sister, and she had been twice married. Her first husband had died and her second had been divorced, but she was still on very kindly and pleasant terms with him. He gave her a generous alimony and she was able to live in a smart apartment with a smart maid and wear the smartest of clothes and she wanted for nothing in the world except food.

“Here’s your room, dearie,” she said, piloting her niece into a tiny apricot-colored guest chamber. “I suppose it looks small after the ranch; you couldn’t rope a steer in it, but it’s large enough, if you’re not boisterous. You had to sleep on the davenport when I was at the Livingston, didn’t you? This is no end nicer; it ought to be, heaven knows, with what I pay for it. Jim voluntarily gave me another hundred a month, did I tell you?” She sighed and winked her blue eyes violently. “He’s a prince, if ever there was one. He said it was only fair—H. C. of L., and all that. Now, I’ll just slip into something loose and we’ll have a chatter. Lucinda,” she called the little trim negress, “you make Miss McVeagh a cup of chocolate. You’ll see,” she turned to her niece again, “I’ll watch you drink it without a quiver. I ought to be a martyr or something—you know—hunger strikes—” She went away breathlessly to get out of her armor, and Ginger opened the window and let the keen, foggy night air into the little soft room. She always felt trapped in her Aunt Fan’s pretty abiding places. Nevertheless, she stayed a whole week this time, and got snugly into her aunt’s good graces by buying everything she suggested.

“We’ll get downtown early.” Mrs. Featherstone planned earnestly, the night of her arrival, “oh, bright and early, before any one’s out—by eleven o’clock if we can possibly manage it—and get you some things you can wear right out of the shop, before any one sees you.”

She had an excellent sense of values, Ginger’s Aunt Fan, and she let the girl keep true to type in her selections—a mannish coat suit of heather brown jersey, sport blouse of rough creamy silk, snub-nosed little Scotch brogues and wool stockings, fabric gloves with gauntlet cuffs and smart buckles, and a small brown hat which had plenty of assurance even without its stab of burnt orange. “Now,” said Mrs. Featherstone with a sigh of deep relief, “let’s go!”

They went tirelessly, late forenoons and solid afternoons and Ginger had presently a large trunkful of clever clothes—gay ginghams and crisp organdies, boldly plaided sport skirts and sweaters in solid colors to match, and two evening frocks (though these Ginger protested she would never need) in scarlet and persimmon. “I’m having a color spree,” said Aunt Fan. “All the things I’d adore to wear and can’t.”

They were at Dos Pozos four days before Dean Wolcott was due. Mrs. Featherstone had been watching her niece narrowly. “What’s he like, this chap?” she had wanted to know a day or so after Ginger had come to her.

The girl waited an instant before answering. “I—don’t know, Aunt Fan.”

“You don’t know?”

The girl shook her head. “You see, he was only at the ranch one day, and he slept most of that—he was so exhausted. I don’t believe I saw him for two hours in all.”

Aunt Fan stared. “Well—but you must have formed some impression. What do you think he’s like, if you don’t know?”

This time she waited even longer before answering. She was calling up the memory of the Christmas day—the first meeting in the morning; the look of him as he came toward her in the rich light of the setting sun, his weary speech; the way his eyes had kindled. “I think,” she said, wholly unaware that she was speaking with the same whispering gentleness with which she had spoken to him, “he is different from—everybody else in the world.”

Aunt Fan said nothing more, and tiptoed hastily away from the subject. She wrote that night to her former husband—she always wrote to thank him for the alimony—“Jim, I’m keeping my fingers crossed! She’s simply bowled over by this chap, and he certainly must be interested, to cross the continent in July. Heavens, but I’d be glad to see her settled—married to somebody beside a cow-puncher—living in civilization! I wish you’d slip down to Boston and look him up, will you? That’s a lamb! His name is Dean Wolcott and he’s a Harvard man, and a sort of architect. When I think what it would mean to me, to be sure I’d never have to visit her on the ranch again! Be careful not to rush around in the heat, Jim; Boston air is like pudding sauce and you know you never had any sense of taking care of yourself. Let me hear immediately what you find out.”

Ginger had been honest with her aunt. She didn’t know what Dean Wolcott was like, but she would know on Friday! She was not analytical or introspective enough to know what he stood for; to realize that he was—up to that time—not a person to her, but a quality, a substance; he was all the heroes of all the books she had never read; he was the music she had never heard; the far places she had never seen. And he was silvered and hallowed by his association with her beloved dead brother.

Dean Wolcott’s cousin—the other Mr. Wolcott who had disapprovingly guided him across the continent and back—asked him, searchingly, what he was going out to California for. Dean Wolcott wasn’t able to tell him; he wasn’t able to tell himself. He said to his kinsman and reiterated to himself that he wanted to have a look at that bridge; he had designed it in a white heat of enthusiasm, and while he believed it was good, he was anxious to see it finished. Also, he was at some pains to tell his cousin and his own consciousness, he felt he ought to see Miss McVeagh again; he had been a spineless weakling, sleeping away his one day there; it was the very least he could do for old Aleck to see her once more, and tell her, by word of mouth, the things which were flat and cold on the written page.

Nevertheless, passing up many pleasant summer plans made by his family and his friends, making his little explanation over and over again, he felt rather foolish, and the Wolcott connection, as the cousin would have said, did not enjoy feeling foolish. The trip across the sweltering states was unendurably hot; while they were going through Kansas he thought several times of wiring to Dos Pozos that he was ill again, and must turn back. He was still wondering, in Los Angeles, just why he had come, and he wondered from eight to three, in the parlor car of the coast-line day train, rumbling through scenery that was brown and dry and hot, but when he got out at San Luis Obispo he stopped wondering. He knew, at once and definitely, why he had come.

The reason was waiting for him on the platform. She wore a white flannel sport skirt and a scarlet coat of jersey and a black hat with scarlet poppies on it, and she glowed like a poppy herself in heat which wilted other people and made them look faded and drained.

She was driving Aleck’s car, a seasoned and dependable old vehicle, and they said very little, after the necessities of luggage had been seen to, until they had left the town behind and were mounting into the hills. It was hot; Dean Wolcott thought he had never known such heat, but it had a fine, dry, shimmering quality; the breeze, though it might have blown out of an oven, was electric, bracing. He took off his hat and let the sun shine on his head and the wind muss up the precision of his hair. Ginger did not look at him; she never took her eyes from the road when she was driving—a promise she had made Aleck—but she could feel that he was looking at her. She felt very silent and shy and a good deal frightened.

Dean, on the other hand, was feeling, with every minute and every mile, more serene confidence; a greater sense of glad decision. This was why he had come; he must always have known, secretly, in his depths.

“I want to see the bridge,” he said, after the longest of their pauses.

“Yes. I’ll tell you when to begin looking. You can see it a long way.” Eyes rigidly front, even though they had left the worst of the grade now.

He knew that she was frightened and it made him feel tremendously triumphant; surer of himself than he had been since he went down on the last day of fighting.

“Now you can see the bridge,” said Ginger, lifting one hand from the wheel to point it out to him.

“Yes,” said Dean. He did not speak again until they had reached it. Then pride rose in him for an instant. “It is good,” he sighed, contentedly. “I couldn’t be sure. It’s good!” He got out of the car and waited for her to follow, but she would not.

“No; I want you to see it first—alone.”

He went over it, beyond it; stood well away from it and studied it. Then he came on to it again, halting half-way, looking at her. “Now will you come?”

And, just as he had stopped wondering, Ginger stopped being afraid. She went to him steadily, her head high.

He was bareheaded still, and she noticed now for the first time that his hair was very fair and very fine, brushed sleekly back from his forehead, shining; that he was taller than she had realized; that there was a look of power about him for all his slimness and his cool coloring. Then she stopped noticing altogether, because he had come swiftly to her and caught her in his arms.

“Here, on Aleck’s bridge,” he said, happily. “We’ve come to each other across Aleck’s bridge; it was Aleck who brought us together.” Then he ceased talking about Aleck and kissed her. “Scotch granite and Spanish flame; that is what you are,” he told her, holding her away from him for an instant to consider her. “There was never any one like you; you have a stern Scotch chin and a soft Spanish mouth; you are—” then, aware of the way he was wasting time, he left off making phrases and kissed her Spanish mouth, and Estrada, riding in from the range, reined in his horse and stared, wide-eyed, and Aunt Fan, coming out on to the veranda, looked down at them and gasped, and wondered when the result of Jim’s investigations would come, and old Manuela, watching from a window, crossed herself and called fervently upon her favorite saint.

But for the two on Aleck’s bridge there was, for that slender, golden, perishable moment, no one else in the glowing world.

CHAPTER IV

THE world continued to be otherwise uninhabited and to glow rosily for almost a fortnight. Ginger’s Aunt Fan received a very satisfactory letter from Jim Featherstone; the Wolcott Family was as solid as Plymouth Rock, and contemporaneous with it. Dean Wolcott was a young man of excellent lineage, character, and achievement—known already, at twenty-eight, for unusual and original work in his line. He had gone in mildly for athletics at Harvard, topped his classes, made two of the best clubs. He had been popular in a quiet and discriminating fashion.

At the end of his letter Aunt Fan’s ex-husband allowed himself a bit of facetiousness. “I’ve sleuthed the lad down very thoroughly. But—Tremont Street and Dos Pozos! Well, it may work out, if he likes paprika on his Boston beans!”

Mrs. Featherstone was extremely pleased with this report, but she was likewise thorough, so she sent out a hurry call for her good friend, Doctor Gurney Mayfield. This was the doctor with whom they should have supped at Tait’s on the night of Ginger’s shabby arrival in San Francisco, and he had known Aunt Fan since she was nineteen years old and weighed ninety-eight pounds and she would always be Miss Fanny to him. He had taken care of her first husband through his last illness, the more zealously and devotedly because he had always considered him a rival, and he had thought then, after a decent interval, to renew his suit (that was what he called it in his courtly and chivalrous heart) but his Miss Fanny, some time before his idea of that interval had elapsed, met and married Jim Featherstone and went with him to New York and lived unhappily ever after. He was honestly regretful and soberly elated to have her back in California again, and calling on him as always for escort and counsel, and now he came at once at her summons, driving down from the prosperous ranch where he spent his time after retiring from a beloved and almost boundless practice.

Ginger was a great favorite with him; he was keenly concerned about her choice. The thought of her marriage had always made him a little anxious; she was her father and her mother—truly, as her lover had said in his rhapsodic moment, Scotch granite and Spanish flame. The doctor had seen something of the home life of Rosalía Valdés and Alexander McVeagh; it had been quite lyrically perfect, but very high keyed, and he had wondered if it would—or could—last down the years. The Spanish woman had a small velvet voice, convent-trained, and she sat often at the rosewood spinnet which had belonged to her mother before her and sang the songs of the period. They were very sweet and very sentimental and packed with pathos, and some one invariably died in the second verse. He remembered that she had loved best one which ran something after this fashion—

Perhaps it is better we lived as we did,

The summer of love together,

And that one of us tired and lay down to rest,

Ere the coming of wintry weather—

and always turned away from the spinnet with her dark eyes wet.

That was exactly what she had done, herself, and Alexander McVeagh had followed her, ten years later, contentedly, for all his devotion to his son and daughter. He wasn’t at all sure, in his rugged and unadorned version of his forbears’ belief, that he should find her again in the world to come, but he was very sure that the world he was leaving was not much of a world without her. Aleck, the son, had been a simple and uncomplex creature; all McVeagh. It was the girl who combined her father and her mother in a baffling and intricate fashion. The doctor wondered; it would have been simpler and safer, he considered, for Virginia Valdés McVeagh to marry a neighboring rancher—even Jerome Ojeda—though he lacked a little of the fineness the doctor wanted for her—than a Wolcott of Boston.

Doctor Mayfield’s opportunities for studying them together were limited; when they were together—save at meal-times—they took excellent care to be alone together. They motored all over the surrounding landscape by day and by night—it was, by a special dispensation of Providence, a time of white and silver moonlight—and tramped high into the hills. This in itself was an amazing spectacle—Ginger McVeagh afoot; from her tiny childhood she had never walked except on her way to a horse. Dean Wolcott loved walking, however, and she loved Dean Wolcott and the thing was accomplished. Besides, by an odd and dramatically arranged combination of circumstances, she had not, for that period, a horse to offer him. Aleck’s horse, Felipe, which she usually rode, had a wrenched foot, and was turned out, and she was riding her own horse Diablo, about the business of the ranch. Estrada and his men were using all the others, bringing in the stock from the farther feeding pastures. Ordinarily, she would have borrowed a mount for him from a neighbor, but it was a part of the newness and strangeness of things to be motoring and tramping with her strange new lover.

At such times, however, as she had to be about the business of Dos Pozos, the doctor held satisfying converse with Dean Wolcott. He liked him heartily, and reported to Aunt Fan as favorably as Jim Featherstone had done, and after five days he went north again, satisfied with the newcomer as an individual, hopeful about him as Ginger’s husband, and Aunt Fan was left alone.

“Well, it’s ‘the summer of love’ they’re living now, Miss Fanny,” he told her at leaving. “We can only hope it’ll be big enough to see them through ‘the coming of wintry weather.’” But he shook his head. Since he had given up the patching and mending of bodies he had given a lot of thought to minds and souls and temperaments; he was rather well up on them.

Ginger jumped up from the dinner table one day and flew to the telephone. “I must get you a horse,” she said, excitedly. “I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about!” Then she colored hotly and suddenly; she knew very well what she had been thinking about. “You’ve been here nearly two weeks and we haven’t had a ride together, and Friday’s the big day!” She gave her number and stood waiting, the receiver in her hand.

“But—look here,” said Dean Wolcott. “I don’t ride, you know. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?”

He had told her several times, but it simply didn’t register. For a man—a hundred per cent man, who had been a soldier and her brother’s comrade, who was, above all, her man—not to ride was—ridiculous. He was using a phrase which didn’t mean anything; he probably didn’t care especially about riding (Boston was without doubt a wretched place in which to ride) or didn’t ride especially well; city men didn’t as a rule. But to say he didn’t ride— She was speaking into the telephone. “Hello! Hello! Oh, ’Rome, is that you? How are you?... ’Rome, can you lend us a horse? Felipe’s turned out with a bad foot, and we haven’t a thing for Dean to ride.... Oh, fine,’Rome! Thanks a lot! Bring him over with you Friday morning, will you?” She came back to the table radiant. “’Rome says he’s got just the thing for you; I knew he’d help us out.”

(’Rome Ojeda had heard, as all the countryside had heard, of Ginger’s eastern suitor; it was the chief topic in a land which was ordinarily bare of conversational thrills, but he had taken it quite coolly. He wasn’t, he had been quoted as saying, “worrying none.” Ginger hadn’t given him any thought. He had not, to be sure, telephoned to her or ridden over with congratulations as others had done, but he had been gay and good-natured when they met up on horseback.)

Dean looked at her quizzically. He was beginning, in the last day or two, to look at her with his mind instead of his heart, and he had made several discoveries. One of these was that she was as high-handed and autocratic as a feudal duchess; it was not only that she always wanted and took her own way—she was unaware that there was any other way to want, or to take. But, up to that time, he was not worrying any more than ’Rome Ojeda was. It was picturesque, it was pretty—her high-handedness.

The night before the “big day” she refused to walk or motor or even sit on the veranda, but told him a resolute good night at eight o’clock. “Ling will call you at three, and breakfast’s at three-thirty.”

“We attack at dawn, I see,” said Dean, steering her cleverly into an alcove and out of her aunt’s range of vision. “Then, if my evening is to end at eight instead of ten or eleven, I certainly consider myself entitled to something in the way of recompense.” He swept her into his arms and kissed her.

“Honey,” said Ginger, persuasively, “let me go! And you must get to sleep yourself—we’ve got a big day ahead of us!”

“My dear, I’ve told you several times, though you’ve seemed not to listen to me, that I’m no horseman. I rather think you’d better let me off, to-morrow; it’s highly probable that I’d cut a sorry figure in the saddle.”

Ginger drew back in his arms, wide-eyed. “But you’ll have to ride, Dean! You couldn’t possibly drive the car—we go by trail and straight over the hills—and you couldn’t walk.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll be a forty-mile trip, and—why, it wouldn’t be safe, goose! You are a tenderfoot, aren’t you? The steers are all right when you’re on horseback, but they’d rush over you in a wink, afoot.”

“Forty miles,” said Dean, thoughtfully. “It sounds rather a large order, Ginger, dear. Suppose I don’t go?”

“Suppose you don’t—go?” She stared at him and her voice was cold with astonishment. “Why—what’ll everybody think?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“What’ll everybody think about you, if you don’t go—when it’s my ranch and my cattle, and everybody coming back here for the big feed at night and the dance?” she wanted hotly to know.

Dean Wolcott colored slowly. “I fail to see where it is any one’s affair but my own—and yours, of course. If we decide that it is wiser——”

“But we haven’t and we aren’t going to!” she flamed out at him. “Oh, can’t you see how it is? Everybody, Estrada and his men and all the neighbors and people I’ve known ever since I was born, think it’s funny and queer, my being—engaged to you. They think easterners are just like foreigners. I did, too,” she was gentle for an instant, “before you came! And if you ditch the ride, and just sit around the house and wait for the big feed and the dance, they’ll say—anyhow, ’Rome Ojeda’ll say—that you’re bluffed out. ’Rome Ojeda’s been trying to make me say I’d marry him ever since I was fifteen; he’ll say you’re—afraid.”

He did not speak at once, and Ginger, watching him, breathing fast after her long speech, saw that he was looking a lot like the other Mr. Wolcott. “And what will you say, Ginger, if I tell you that I won’t ride? What will you say?” He was very quiet about it. “It doesn’t matter in the least to me what a lot of ranchers and cowboys think or say—Ojeda or any one else. But—what will you say?”

Even a resemblance to the cousin who had convoyed him disapprovingly across the continent made her truculent, and his voice was even more like the other than his expression. “I’ll say you must—” she caught herself midway, aghast to find how nearly she had said the unforgivable thing. She came close to him again and put her arms around his neck and clasped her hands behind his head, and pulled his grave face down to her. “I won’t have to say anything, because I know you’re going to do it for me—aren’t you, Dean—dearest?”

It was the first time she had ever, alone and unassisted—uninvited—kissed him upon the mouth. He caught her hard against him with a strength which seemed ready for any feats of prowess. “I’ll ride—anything—anywhere—you ask me,” he said, unsteadily.

Ling called him at three o’clock. It was dark and unbelievably cold, and he dressed himself with stiff fingers and went heavy-eyed into the dining room. He felt old and jaded and depressed; unhappily conscious of all the strength which hadn’t yet come back to him.

Ginger was there before him, dressed in her oldest riding things, a worn old Stetson on her head, a scarlet bandanna tied, cowboy fashion, about her neck, and she was warm and glowing. She looked as if she had just emerged from the conclusion of their ardent little scene of the night before; Dean felt as if it were something which had happened to him in his youth, and as if his youth had passed a long time ago. He had no appetite, and could barely manage a cup of coffee, and he was almost annoyed with her for eating with excellent relish. They spoke in low tones, remembering Aunt Fan’s earnest pleas that she should not be wakened, but before they left the table there was a pounding of hoofs and a shout from the front of the house.

“There’s ’Rome!” said Ginger, jumping up. “Come along!” She ran out onto the veranda and he followed her slowly.

’Rome Ojeda had ridden in from his ranch the night before and stayed with Ginger’s nearest neighbor, and his horses—the one he rode and the one he was leading—were quite fresh. He swung himself to the ground, dropped the reins, pulled off a buckskin gauntlet and strode over to Dean, holding out his hand. “Mighty pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, displaying very briefly his white smile in his brown face. “Here’s your mount, Mr. Wolcott,” he nodded toward the red roan.

“Very good of you,” said Dean, stiffly. He felt stiff, body and brain, aching for sleep, cramped and cold.

“Oh—the lunches!” cried Ginger. “Almost forgot them!” She bolted into the house.

Dean Wolcott looked at his horse and hunted wearily through his mind for something sapient to say about him. The fact was that he had not been astride a horse six times in his twenty-eight years. Others of the Wolcott family rode—several of his friends rode; it had merely happened that he had gone in, instead, in what leisure he had from school and college and later, the office, for tennis and golf and walking trips. He had very nearly made tackle in his junior year; three years on the squad. Now he would have traded all these glad activities for a good working knowledge of horseflesh.

One of Ginger’s men brought up her Diablo; there were a dozen riders in the distance, coming nearer at a swinging lope.

The vaquero looked at the roan. “I see you got new horse, Meester Ojeda, no?”

“Yeh,” Ojeda nodded. “Mr. Wolcott’s ridin’ him to-day.” Then he said, very slowly, “Only been rode a coup’la saddles.”

Dean Wolcott pulled himself up. “What do you call him, Ojeda?”

’Rome Ojeda rolled a cigarette. “I call him ‘Snort,’” he said. “He mostly does.”

Ginger’s suitor walked down the shallow steps and went up to the horse with outstretched hand. “Hello, Snort, old chap! Do you——”

The animal pulled back sharply, flinging up his head with a sound vividly descriptive of his name, and ’Rome Ojeda grinned, enjoyingly. “Aside from that, he’s as gentle as a kitten,” he drawled. “Look here, Mr. Wolcott—where’s your spurs?”

“Oh, I sha’n’t need spurs,” said Dean, easily. Just as Ginger had disliked his correct cousin in less than five minutes of acquaintance, so now did he detest this brown and beautiful ’Rome Ojeda with his appalling bigness, his flashing smile, and his crude sureness. He loathed the whole commonplace, rubber-stamp situation in which he found himself—competent wild westerner, eastern tenderfoot, cattle-queen heroine, mob scene of cow-punchers; it was like finding himself placed on the printed page of a tawdry story—like seeing himself on the screen in a cheap and stupid moving picture; like seeing himself in the rôle of unwitting comedian. He knew that, unescapably, he was about to be made to appear ridiculous; and that was a thing no Wolcott ever was. They had reverses, disappointments; they were ill, they suffered, they died; they were never ridiculous. And now Dean Wolcott, whose mother kept his Congressional Medal and his Croix de Guerre in the box with her delicate handkerchiefs, so that, with no parade of them, she could see and touch them every day, was about to afford rude mirth to yokels.

He went again and firmly to his mount, clutched at the mane and the reins, got one foot into the jerking stirrup, scrambled and clawed his way up. The horse, simultaneously with these motions on his part, noisily demonstrating the aptness of his cognomen, did incredibly swift and sudden things with his head, his neck, all four of his legs and his torso. Dean Wolcott, just as the riders came loping up and Ginger stepped out on to the veranda with the packets of lunch in her hands, rose clear of the saddle, appeared to hang an instant in mid-air, sailed over the head of his steed and fell heavily to the sun-baked earth.

CHAPTER V

IT was thus that Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole owner and proprietor of Dos Pozos, saddle-wise from babyhood, cool and competent as any man among them, presented her betrothed to the friends of her youth, to her world.

Her betrothed, in those swift seconds between his departure from the saddle and his arrival upon the ground, hoped fervently that he might have the good fortune to break his neck, but it appeared immediately that he had not broken anything whatever. He was dizzy, jarred and bruised and lamed, but he was entirely intact, as he curtly made clear to ’Rome Ojeda. ’Rome Ojeda, his white smile flashing, was first to rush to the rescue.

Dean Wolcott picked himself up and brushed himself off, resolutely keeping his eyes away from the veranda and Ginger; he felt he could bear all the rest of it if she would only keep away from him. She was there, however, almost as soon as ’Rome was, her face as pale as possible beneath its brown warmth. She wanted breathlessly and with unashamed anguish in her voice to know if he was hurt, but directly she saw—and heard—that he was not, the color rushed hotly back into her cheeks and she turned shortly away on a spurred heel.

“A little too much hawse, maybe,” said ’Rome Ojeda, smoothly. “Change with Mr. Wolcott, somebody with a quieter cayuse!”

Two or three of the riders promptly dismounted and came forward, but Dean Wolcott shook his head. “Thank you,” he said, stubbornly, “I shall ride this horse or none.” He sounded blatantly dramatic to his own ears. Why hadn’t he laughed it off, made determined comedy of the situation, made them laugh with him, instead of at him? He hated himself for the bombastic attitude he had struck; he hated ’Rome Ojeda and his quivering red roan; he hated his own fatuous folly of weakening the evening before under Ginger’s lips and promising her to make this ghastly fiasco; he was not at all sure that he didn’t hate Ginger.

Old Estrada came forward, respectful, helpful. Dean was fitted out with spurs and quirt, the horse was firmly held until the rider was solidly in the saddle, his feet braced, the reins in a tense grip. But now Snort, as if he had had his little joke, conducted himself in what was, for him, a staid and dignified manner; he pranced, he curvetted, he tossed his handsome head, but he made no effort to dislodge his passenger, and Dean, his head aching dully, his aching body intolerably jolted and jarred, followed in the wake of the procession.

The old mayordomo, riding beside him, explained. They were to drive two hundred and forty steers—two-year-olds that he and his men had been bringing in from the remote pastures—to the shipping point—approximately eighteen miles. On the way back they would collect close to two hundred yearlings and bring them back to the main ranch. It sounded, on the Spaniard’s lips, as simple as hailing a taxicab and driving down Tremont Street.

The other riders, Ginger among them, had spurred ahead. Dean could see through the steadily brightening light that the vaqueros were opening the gates of the great corrals, releasing sluggish, slow-moving, brown streams.

Estrada said softly in his heavily accented English. “Eef you kip near to me, I weel tell you all, Señor.”

“Thank you,” said Dean, civilly. “You are very kind.”

He was very kind, the black-eyed old mayordomo; there was no scorn in his hawklike gaze, nothing but the most respectful desire to be of service. Let others forget that here among them rode—however clumsily—the friend and comrade of his young señor, Alejandrino McVeagh; Vincente Estrada would not forget.

They came up with the other riders, with the brown stream. It was not sluggish now; there were waves, breakers. Brown, twisting, turning bodies, tossing horns, wild eyes; ceaseless bellowing; dust. Ginger and her vaqueros and her neighbors rode on the edges of the stream, shouting, waving their sombreros, now spurring ahead to guard a gate, now in sudden, swallow-swift pursuit of a bolting steer, passing him, turning him, heading him back into the herd.

Dean Wolcott tried to detach himself from the spectacle, to regard it objectively—something whose like he had never seen before, and never would see—but of course, he told himself, after he married Ginger he would often see this sort of thing. She would, he supposed, insist on coming back to her ranch occasionally, unless he could persuade her to sell it. He sought to see her in the frame and with the background of Boston; it was actually the first time, since that moment when they stood midway on Aleck’s bridge, that he had done this. The realization came sharply that he had been looking into a kaleidoscope for two glowing and highly colored weeks. On his summer vacations, when he was a small and quiet child, he had visited at an uncle’s Connecticut farm, and—better than the out-of-doors—he had loved the cool dimness of the big “Front Room.”

Being a gentle and trustworthy child he was allowed the freedom of it. He might turn the pages of the ancient album, lift the conch shells from the whatnot in the corner and listen to the imprisoned sound of the sea, climb carefully upon a chair to inspect the wax flowers and the hair wreaths framed and hanging on the walls; best of all he loved sitting on a slippery hair-cloth sofa, his eyes glued to the tiny window of the kaleidoscope, his soul warm with the joy of color and design. There was always, he remembered now, a distinct effort of his will necessary to remove his reveling eye, to take it away from crimson and jade and orange and ultramarine and deep purple, and return it to the grays and browns and drabs of the material world. And the time had come again, he told himself grimly, his head aching dully, his muscles aching sharply, to take his eye away from the kaleidoscope.

He was following Estrada into the thick of it; he was surrounded by the brown bodies; he was stifled by the brown dust which rose over him. The sun was high, now, and he had stopped being chilled, but he was miserable in so many other ways that he was not able to be thankful. He wondered dully, disgusted, why the powerful creatures, horned, capable of splendid battle, allowed themselves to be driven by a twentieth part of their number of men, herded docilely down to their death.

“Ur-r-ra, ur-r-ra, ur-rrrra!” said Estrada softly to them, “Ur-r-ra!”—and they gave way before him, backing, whirling, pawing at the earth, the bolder ones rolling their red eyes, blowing futile defiance through their dust-grimed nostrils. Now and then a couple of them, truculent, locked horns for an instant, made a little whirlpool of private strife in the brown stream, but at Estrada’s shout, his whirling quirt, his swung sombrero, they gave up; they went on again in their sacrificial procession. Estrada, what time he rode close enough to him and the steers were not bellowing too loudly, gave him bits of information. They would be loaded into the cattle cars at noon, if all went well; they would not reach San Francisco for two days or three, perhaps; yes, the railroad company was obliged to water them—Estrada really did not know exactly what the law was, but there was a law, he was comfortably sure. Yes—those were “loco” steers; the señor would do well to keep his distance from them—they might be sufficiently loco to hook his horse, and his horse, unhappily, was not entirely trustworthy. The ones with the huge and hideous swellings at the sides of their heads had “lumpy jaw”; it was hard to tell the señor exactly what caused it—a foxtail wedged between the teeth, perhaps, made the beginning. No, he shrugged, there was no cure that he had ever heard of; if it could be taken in the beginning—but it was never taken in the beginning. No, it did not hurt the meat, except that, as the señor saw, the lumpy-jawed steers were always poor; he thought—he was not certain of this, but he had heard that they went to feed the prisoners in State’s Prison. This was a very fine herd; the señorita had excellent feeding pastures; she was a remarkable judge of stock. And she was very kind, the señorita; the señor could see for himself that she allowed the cattle to go at a walk; she would not allow them to be driven with dogs or with whips. That was very kind, and it was also very sensible; dogs made them nervous and made them hurry too much; they lost profitable pounds in transit; and the packers did not like you to use whips—they made bruises on the meat. Was not the señorita a wonderful horsewoman? He himself had seen her riding after the herd, just as she was riding to-day, at the age of seven. A proud man, the father of Señorita Ginger, the old Señor Alejandro McVeagh; a proud family. He let his raven-black eyes rest upon his companion for an instant. If the señor would let himself go loose in the saddle, he would find himself riding in greater comfort.

Dean Wolcott tried it; he tried it faithfully. He was willing and eager to try anything which would alleviate his wretchedness, but there was no looseness in him anywhere. Everything was taut, shrieking with painful tension. If he leaned forward, if he leaned back, if he shifted the weight from the stirrups to the saddle, from the saddle to the stirrups, it was worse in another strained or bruised or blistered locality. He knew that his stirrups were too short but he would not dismount to change them; he doubted if he could get on again. “How many miles have we come, Estrada?” He knew they must be almost at their destination, but it would be a comfort to hear it from the Spaniard’s lips.

Estrada considered. “Oh, maybe seex mile, Señor. Maybe leetle more; maybe not so moach.”

“Then we have twelve still to go?”

“Well, we call eet eighteen mile from Dos Pozos, Señor. The time pass very queek now, Señor.”

But it seemed to the señor that no day in his life, even in the trenches, had ever been so long. It was hot, now, blazingly, glaringly hot; it was incredible that he had ever been shivering.

It would last for hours yet, this personal misery, this unendurable monotony; brown, twisting, turning bodies, tossing horns, wild eyes; ceaseless bellowing; dust—stifling, choking, blinding dust; the smell of sweating hides.

Shortly before eleven o’clock they took their lunches out of their pockets and ate, in the saddle, but at any rate they were stationary. The vaqueros held the herd, loosely, in a shallow valley where there was water for them. The neighboring ranchers rode up with Ginger and hoped heartily that Mr. Wolcott was all right after his spill, and they were cordial and kind. As a matter of fact, though he did not dream it, they were very well aware of his plight, and they were feeling a good deal of respect for his sporting endurance. The word had passed more than once, that morning—“Pretty game bird, that boy of Ginger’s!”—“Say, that feller’s not quittin’ any, is he?—sickly lookin’ as he is, too!” A couple of the older men had sharply criticized ’Rome Ojeda for putting a stranger and a guest on a horse like the red roan, and they wondered at Ginger’s permitting it.

The girl rode close to her lover, bright-eyed and glowing and spoke softly. “All right, Dean? Are you all right?”

He told her he was all right. (Could he sit like an old woman at a summer resort and catalogue the number and character of his aches and strains?) He swallowed one sandwich with difficulty; no one had thought to bring a drinking cup, and besides, the steers had hopelessly muddied the creek. Well, they would be at Santa Rita in about an hour.

Dean studied Ginger and Ojeda and the rest of them with angry and grudging admiration, their boundless endurance, their lazy confidence, their utter oneness with their mounts. Then, honestly disgusted with himself, he set to work to see the thing as it was, not in its interrelationship to his own unfitness. He told himself unsparingly that he was like the type of American who goes to a foreign land and talks disparagingly about the foreigners; his sense of balance came back. He, Dean Wolcott, was the failure here. These people were integral parts of the virile picture; they fitted strongly into the high brown hills and the blue mountains far beyond, into the wide dry valleys and the deep cañons: he belonged on the pavement, in the shadow of grave buildings, art galleries, quiet clubs, dignified offices. It was absurd to let himself be overcome with such a sense of bitterness and rebellion; suppose he didn’t and couldn’t make good here, according to their crude and simple standards? Could they make good in Boston, according to his? He was weary enough to begin to quote, bromidically to himself. East was east and west was west, and never the twain— Ah, but the twain did, occasionally, brilliantly, satisfyingly, as he and Ginger had met on Aleck’s bridge, the good, simple Aleck who had opened a window into a new world for him, in the trenches; who had given him Ginger.

He looked at her through the blazing and merciless sunlight, blinking as he had done on that first morning. She was in corduroy, worn, rubbed, dusty corduroy, as were almost all of the men. It was the only wear, in this lusty land, apparently. Corduroy; corde du roi: he smiled inwardly; once, long ago, wider waled and softer, and in delicate hues, kings had favored it; wine-red, emerald-green, royal-purple, it had glowed in courts.... Now it had come down in the world—drab, utilitarian ... dust-colored, dust-covered....

They reached the shipping point at last; there was a hectic half hour of getting the steers across the concrete highway; they advanced upon it warily, putting their noses down to it, snorting, pawing, holding back against the pressure of the herd behind them; then they went with a rush, over, up and down, wild, terrified; plunging, slipping. Some one told Dean, curtly, to tie his horse and go out on foot on to the highway to stop the automobiles. It was exquisite relief and exquisite torture to be walking; it was ludicrous to feel a sudden access of power and authority, holding up his hand like a traffic policeman, seeing the cars slam on their brakes and obey him, to have people lean out and ask him questions about the cattle. He was busily useful for thirty minutes; he was doing his job as well as any man of them. Then he was hauling himself unhappily into the saddle again, and they were off.

“Got to make time while we can,” said Ginger, “before we pick up the yearlings. Let’s go!”

She was away at a swinging lope, and Snort, without notification from his rider, went after her. In spite of shrieking muscles and weeping blisters, there was a keen sense of exultation about it; he had balance, equilibrium; he was able to conceive of liking this sort of thing, loving it ... dominion....

’Rome Ojeda passed them, drew his horse back on his haunches, waited for them. “Well, goin’ to make a hand with the yearlings, Mr. Wolcott? That was easy this mornin’; they’d been moved two—three times, those steers. These young-uns are different.”

“He sure is going to make a hand, ’Rome,” said Ginger, confidently. “It’ll take all of us, and then some!”

He saw, presently, why it would take all of them, why he must strive, in his awkward and unready fashion, to “make a hand.” The young steers were timid, suspicious, quarrelsome; stupid, quick to get into a blind and unreasoning panic—brown streaks of speed when they broke away from the bunch. Ginger was here, there, everywhere, swallow-swift on Diablo, darting after a fugitive—up a sheer bank, down a steep cañon, hanging low out of her saddle, Indian-fashion, to dodge a dangerous branch. Estrada had had to give up his duties as guide; he was in the thick of the job. Dean rode alone, and Snort, who, by some miracle of mercy, had been mild and tractable earlier in the day, now developed temper and temperament. Any sort of riding, after the long hours in the saddle, was active discomfort; riding Snort was torture.

A dog ran out of a ranch house and barked; the herd, which had settled down for half an hour into something like order and calm, started milling; round and round, like an eddying whirlpool, trying to turn, to start back; there was the sharp sound of a fence giving way—they were into the rancher’s orchard, they were into his field, and then over his hill—they were off and away.

Thundering hoofs; shouts, curses; Ginger went by him in a furious flash. “Dean! What’s the matter with you? Make a hand, can’t you? Make a hand!”

He made a hand, of sorts. He was part and parcel of the noisy, breathless chaos. He was never to know by what magic he remained in or near the saddle; certainly there was little left of power or volition in his racked and tired body. They were back at last upon the road; they were moving steadily forward again. ’Rome Ojeda came up to him. “Well, you sure are makin’ a hand,” he said, genially. Dust had settled thickly on his face; it made his smile whiter and more flashing than ever by contrast. “But we got’a watch ’em, still! They’re sure one wild bunch! They—” he broke off abruptly at Ginger’s cry—

“Dean! Dean! Head him off! Get him! Get him!”

A lone young steer had sneaked away from his side of the herd, from under his inattentive nose, and was galloping clumsily off across a field.

“’Atta boy!” said ’Rome Ojeda, loudly. “Go get ’em! Dig in your spurs! Ride ’em, cowboy!”

Doggedly, bitterly, he struck his spurs into his horse: they cleared the edge of the road at a bound, they were after the steer, up with him, beyond him, turning him: he was loping back to his fellows. Dean’s head felt light and strange; it had ceased to belong to his body.

“’Atta boy!” sang out Ojeda.

Estrada was smiling: Ginger was smiling, too. It was the first time she had smiled at him, in that fashion, all day. He was going to fall off of Snort presently, any moment now, simply because he couldn’t sit him any longer, but, meanwhile, he’d turned the steer. He was making a hand. By some convulsive and involuntary motion of his aching leg muscles he dug the spurs into Snort once more. Instantly the horse, snorting, trumpeting, had bolted with him. He didn’t care, especially; let him take him fast and far, away from the dissembled scorn of Ginger’s world, away from ’Rome Ojeda’s cool appraisal, away from Ginger. He would hold on a little longer; then he would let go. He would hold on; he couldn’t stop Snort—there was nothing left in his arms to stop him with—but he would hold on. Hold on ... hold on.... He thought, presently, that he must be saying it aloud, but it was Ojeda’s voice.

“Hold on! Hold on! I’m a-comin’! Hold on!” There was, on the surface, hearty reassurance in it; underneath, he knew, there was sneering scorn. He came up with him, nearer, nearer, exactly like a rescuer in a wild west film, came abreast of him, reached out, caught hold of Snort, pulled him to a standstill, turned back his head so that he could not buck. “He sure was goin’ wicked,” he said, gently. “He sure was goin’ wicked.”

If Ginger had seen it, she gave no sign. Estrada came back to ride beside him. “Ur-r-ra!” he said soothingly to the wild young steers. “Ur-rrr-ra! Ur-rr-ra!”

No one spoke to Dean Wolcott and he spoke to no one. He was too much occupied with his black and seething hatred of ’Rome Ojeda. He had been rescued, moving-picture style; moving-picture style he was hating his rival, his rival who had shown him up; he was wishing passionately that he might get even with him. He groped for his sense of humor, of fitness. He, Dean Wolcott, hating this cow-puncher, planning to be revenged upon him— His sense of humor was gone, lost, swallowed up in the dust. Now they were back again in the old monotony; brown, twisting, turning bodies, tossing horns, wild eyes; ceaseless bellowing; the stench of hot and sweating hides; dust; enveloping, smothering dust. Ginger, save for her scarlet neckerchief and her scarlet cheeks, was covered with dust, dust-covered, dust-colored; dust-brown. Corduroy; what was it that plants and animals took on from their surroundings? (Was it possible that he was beginning to forget again?) What was it? He had learned it when he was a child. It was gone, though. No! Protective resemblance! That was what it was, and that was what Ginger’s inevitable corduroy was; it was the color of the dust, the blinding, stifling dust of this parched land of summer; protective resemblance; dust; corduroy.

“Señor, we are here! We are arrive’ at home, Señor! Do you not weesh to get down?” It was Estrada, dismounted, standing beside him, and they were just below the veranda of the old adobe at Dos Pozos. “Señor, are you seek?”

He was not sick, he told him. (He was really not even suffering any longer; it was some time, now, since there had been any feeling at all in his arms or his legs.) “Yes, I wish to get down,” he said with dignity. He wanted to keep his dignity; ’Rome Ojeda was watching him, and Ginger was watching him, and the ranchers were watching him.

“Ees a long, hard day, Señor,” said Estrada, softly.

It was almost dusk now, and they had set out soon after dawn. “Oh—somewhat,” said Dean Wolcott, jauntily. “Rather long, of course, but very interesting.” Then he got down from his horse and stood for a moment, smiling uncertainly at the old Spaniard before he dropped to the warm earth for the second time that day. This time he had fainted.

CHAPTER VI

GINGER could understand bullets; she could understand a broken arm or leg or collar bone; a broken neck was entirely comprehensible to her. But she could not understand fainting; not, above all, a man’s fainting.

As soon as she was sure that he was not dead (she had heard of sudden death by heart failure) she was not aware of any feeling but deep chagrin. She did not follow when he was helped into the house and to his room by Estrada and ’Rome Ojeda; she sent old Manuela to him but she did not go herself. She went instead to her room and got out of her dust-grimed riding things and under a cold shower, and into one of the evening frocks which her Aunt Fan had made her buy. It was the scarlet one, and she piled her dark hair high and put in her carved ivory comb which had come down to her from her Valdés grandmother, and put a red flower behind her ear, and regarded herself in her small mirror with hearty and entire satisfaction. Not three times in her life had she ever dressed herself so painstakingly, or been so pleased with the result.

She went to the dining room and looked over the lavish supper and summoned in her guests, and after the riotous meal she started the dance with ’Rome Ojeda, and she was dancing with him for the fourth time in an hour when her aunt came into the room and called her.

Mrs. Featherstone told her that she was annoyed beyond words, but this seemed hardly a correct statement of her case, as she proceeded to emit sharp staccato showers of them. She called her niece among other things a heartless young savage and asked her what she thought of herself, eating and dancing and flirting like that, when her sweetheart was sick and suffering. Ginger, as a matter of fact, thought very well of herself that evening; she was as hard and bright as polished metal and no more tender. Presently—in the morning, perhaps—she would be wretchedly aware of the crudeness and cruelty of her attitude; now she was unyielding.

“Oh, does he want to see me?” She shrugged, and when she did that she was all Valdés. Dean Wolcott would have been reminded of a Goya painting, but Aunt Fan was too angry to be reminded of anything.

“Of course he wants to see you! Why shouldn’t he?”

“Did he ask you to bring me?” Her eyes were fathomless.

“No, he didn’t; he has too much pride, of course, but——”

“Pride!” said Ginger, bitterly. “I shouldn’t think he’d have much pride left, after to-day!”

“Now, that just shows how childish and ridiculous your standards are,” her aunt scolded. “Just because he happens not to be able to ride like a buckeroo—because he’s lived a different sort of life——”

“You don’t understand,” said Ginger. Her voice was adamant, too. “You don’t understand at all. Well—I’ll see him, for a minute.” She nodded to a hovering partner and went down the long corridor to Aleck’s room. Her aunt did not understand and she did not understand herself, all that was swaying her. It wasn’t alone that her lover had cut a sorry figure on horseback; it was that she, Ginger McVeagh, feudal lady of the range, princess of the blood in the eyes of her henchmen, had said, in effect—“There is no one among you all fit to be my mate; I must have a stranger, an easterner, some one higher and finer. Now I have found him! Wait until you see him—wait, and behold why I have chosen him.” They had waited and they had beheld, and now, she knew, for all their civility about it and their good-natured inquiries about him they were amused and amazed that she should have picked Dean Wolcott; they were aghast, as she was aghast.

Old Manuela was seated beside the bed but she rose at once and waddled out into the hall. She had been waiting and watching anxiously for her mistress for an hour, and she was sure, in her simple heart, that everything would be all right now.

The big room was only dimly lit, but she could see how shockingly white and ill he looked. Nevertheless, it roused in her no whispering gentleness this time, as it had done on Christmas Day; healthy young animal that she was—she had taken mumps and measles and chicken pox on her feet and never spent an hour of daylight in bed in all her life—it rather repelled her.

He opened his eyes in time to catch something of her mood in her expression and his own face stiffened. “You shouldn’t have bothered to come; I’m quite all right. Manuela and your aunt have looked after me.” Again, he blinked his tired eyes a little, as he had at his first sight of her, months ago; she was too bright, too vivid, too glowing.

It would not have been difficult to recapture the magic of the night before; if Ginger had dropped to her knees and kissed him as she had kissed him then—if Dean had managed a ragged sentence of regret for disappointing her—’Rome Ojeda would have waited long for his next dance. But instead, she stood looking down at his pallor and limpness and he lay looking up at her scarlet cheeks and her incredible vigor, and the moment got away from them. Presently, Ginger hoped with an edge in her voice that he’d have a good night, and Dean trusted, with ice in his, that she’d have a good time.

They did their best, in the week that followed. Dean was limping about by noon and Ginger staying at home to be with him, and they were gentle with each other, but it scared and sobered them to see that it wasn’t any use. It was as if they had been blowing bubbles together, lovely, shimmering iridescent ones, which had fallen and burst, and now they were trying to gather up the little damp spots which were left and make billowy, floating bubbles out of them again.

The truth was that they had arrived, simultaneously, at the third stage of their knowledge of each other. The first had been her breathless reverence for him, the messenger from her dead brother, the worn young visitant from another world, and his dazed recognition of her warm and vital beauty; next—when they had come together on Aleck’s bridge and in the fortnight following—she had made him into a saint and fairy prince and lover, and he—his senses smitten with loveliness, his returning strength and virility leaping to meet hers, leaning on it, mingling with it; now they were regarding each other quite clearly, with detachment. She saw a rather pale and precise young man, obviously out of drawing in her landscape, and he saw a highly colored and careless young woman who fitted so snugly into the rough western picture that he doubted the possibility of ever seeing her against a different background.

For a little space they were painstakingly gentle with each other; then, mysteriously, irritations sprang at them out of thin air. If it made Ginger impatient to find him clumsy and inept at the things of her world, it jarred increasingly upon him to have her say, “It sure does look like we’re going to have a scorcher,” to find her utterly blank about books and plays and music. In her milder moods it seemed as if he might beguile her into reading, but the question of where to begin appalled him. It was not what she should read, but what she should have read. It was all summed up in that one sentence—the empty lack which he found in her. In her swiftly melting moods of tenderness, when she gave up a ride to stay with him in the cool old adobe, closed against the hot air from eight o’clock in the morning, after the California tradition, she was singularly unsatisfactory as a companion, what time she was not in his arms. He discovered exactly why this was the case. She might pull off her jingling spurs and fling aside her Stetson and come into the big living room and sit down, and stay docilely for an hour or more—but her mind never came indoors. That was it. She might sit as softly as her Valdés great-grandmother in Sevilla, but her whole preoccupation was with the vigorous world outside.

He began to see, reluctantly, and with a chill sense of disaster, the impermanence of their relation. While he was kissing Ginger there were no questions and no problems, but life, he was cannily sure, could not consist wholly of kissing Ginger. The house of their love had been built upon the sands; shining, golden sands, but sands for all that, and he told himself grimly—able, now and then, to stand away from his situation and see it with a saving grain of humor—that the lasting structure of his affection must be built not only upon the rock, but upon Plymouth Rock. He found himself stressing his purity of speech, professing even more ignorance than was really his with regard to horses and cattle and crops; and Ginger, for her part, let the dresses she had bought in San Francisco hang idle in her closet and strode in to supper in her worn corduroy trousers and her brown shirt.

It needed, presently, only a small weight to tip the scales, and ’Rome Ojeda supplied it. It was a day of dry and dazzling heat, and they had planned a cool and quiet afternoon in the merciful sanctuary of the house. Ginger had brought out the old Spanish chests which had come to Dos Pozos with Rosalía Valdés and they were to revel in old Spanish laces and embroideries and jewelry, and puzzle over yellowed Spanish letters, and Dean was happier and more hopeful than he had been for days. Ginger had changed her riding things for a thin thing in yellow, and she was adorably gentle.

Then ’Rome Ojeda rode noisily up to the veranda and called them to come for a ride. He was on Pedro, leading Snort, and he said he would slip down to the corral and saddle Diablo while Ginger was changing her clothes.

It was astonishing to see how quickly the cool old room, dimly shaded, had changed into a field of hot battle. They were never able to remember subsequently, either of them, just what went before the final challenge; there must have been speeches ripe with bitterness on both sides before Dean heard himself saying slowly—like a person in a play—“Very well, then; if you go, this is the end.”

Ginger went, flinging herself into her riding suit and marching through the house with her Scotch chin held high and her Spanish mouth hard, slamming the door for good measure and springing into Snort’s saddle and loping furiously away, but she didn’t really believe it was the end. She had a very good time with ’Rome Ojeda and a wild and satisfying ride, and when she came back, four hours later, she was good-natured again. She wasn’t entirely ready to forgive Dean, but she was ready to consider forgiving him, and she went into the house to find him and tell him so.

She did not find him. She found, instead, an irate and voluble Aunt Fan who had been generating rage for hours.

“You needn’t call him,” she said. “He won’t hear you, not unless you can shout loud enough to make yourself heard at San Luis Obispo. I dare say you could, if you put your mind to it—it’s simply horrible, the way you yell to the men in the corral. Tomboys are all right and very fetching, but let me tell you, Ginger McVeagh, you’ve grown up, and tom-women aren’t cunning at all, and if you can’t key down and act more like a lady and less like a——”

“San Luis?” Ginger stood still and looked at her. She did not seem to have heard anything else beside the name of the town. “San Luis? What’s he doing there?”

“He’s catching the Coaster to Los Angeles to-night; that’s what he’s doing there, Ginger McVeagh. And to-morrow morning he’ll be on his way to Boston, and why he hasn’t gone before, heaven only knows—I don’t. Now if you’ve got anything in your head but ’Rome Ojeda and long-horned steers and alfalfa crops you’ll stop staring at me and get——”

“Did he say anything?” she wanted to know in a mild and wondering voice. “What did he say, Aunt Fan?”

“He said, ‘Tell her I’ve gone; she will understand,’ and he was white as a sheet. If ever anybody in this world looked like death on a pale horse, that boy did when he walked out of this house. He telephoned into town for a machine and he was packed before it got here, and he shook hands with me and with Manuela and Ling and out he marched, and if you want my opinion, Ginger McVeagh——”

Ginger did not in the least want her opinion; she wanted Dean Wolcott, sharply and imperatively. She walked out of the corridor and into the living room where they had begun the afternoon together. The old chests were there still, and the table was spread with a litter of ancient treasures. She picked up a fichu of yellowed lace and put it down again, and a fan with sticks of carved ivory and looked at it gravely, as if she had never seen it before. It had surprised her and worried her a little to find him so warmly interested in things of that sort; she would have preferred having him clumsily ignorant about them, good-humoredly tolerant. Now, she realized, it would never need to worry her again. She stood staring down at the beautiful old things; they looked mellow and very wise. Three generations of Valdés women had used them before her, but she knew, suddenly, that she hated them and never wanted to see them again. She began to stuff them hastily back into the carved chests of dark and satiny wood, and called to Manuela to put them away in the storeroom.

Her aunt followed her before she had finished. “If you hurry,” she said urgently, “if you get out the car this minute and fly, you can catch him at San Luis!”

Ginger did not answer her for an instant. Then she said, deliberately and without passion, “I don’t want to catch him at San Luis, Aunt Fan. I don’t want to catch him—anywhere.”

Mrs. Featherstone went home to San Francisco the next day, thoroughly out of temper with her niece and heartily willing to wash her hands of her. She told her, at parting, that she had missed the one golden and handsome opportunity of her life which was far beyond her deserts, and that she would never have another such and it served her right; she sincerely hoped she would marry ’Rome Ojeda and have seven wild children, all born with spurs on. It sounded like the laying on of a robust old-fashioned curse.

Ginger let Estrada drive her aunt in to town to take her train. She was very tired of being berated; she didn’t want to talk about Dean Wolcott any more and she didn’t want to think about him any more. She went steadily about the business of Dos Pozos in the days that followed; old Manuela wiped her eyes furtively and burned three candles to the saint of the impossible, and Estrada was gravely regretful.

“I miss very much that young señor,” he said to his silent mistress. “That is a very fine gentleman, Señorita.”

There were many inquiries for him at first among her rancher neighbors, but after she had said—“He has gone. No, he is not coming back,” to a few of them, the word went over the whole vicinity; they stopped asking for him, and they were immensely cordial and approving in their manner to Ginger.

’Rome Ojeda showed less restraint; he was openly triumphant about it. “Snappy work,” he said to Ginger, with his flashing grin. “I guess maybe we didn’t show him up, between us, me’n Snort! Say, I’m a-goin’ to get that hawse a medal! He sure did spill the Boston beans!”

Ginger listened to him at first without comment, but she said, presently, “’Rome, he was Aleck’s friend; I’m never going to forget that.”

“Lord,” said ’Rome Ojeda, comfortably, “I guess a feller’d bunk in with ’most anybody, over there.” But he stopped talking about Dean Wolcott and he did not immediately urge his own claims. There was something about Ginger, about her looks and her voice, that he didn’t quite understand. He told himself that he’d better just let things loaf along, “as was,” for the present.

Dr. Gurney Mayfield made a detour to take in Dos Pozos on his motor trip next month. He was greatly surprised and disappointed not to find his young friend, Dean Wolcott.

“Well, well,” he said, regretfully, “so Dean had to go home, did he? Well, I expect he had to get back to business. How was he feeling?”

“He seemed to be feeling all right,” said Ginger briefly.

“That’s good,” said the doctor, heartily, “that’s good! You know, Ginger, that boy isn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long sight. Shell shock ... meanest thing in the world to get over, clear over! They’ll think they are fit as a fiddle, and then let something out of the ordinary happen—some slight shock, or strain or overexertion— By the way, Dean didn’t do any rough stuff here, did he? I thought afterward that I should have warned him, but it never occurred to me that he’d try it. Did he?”

“What do you mean by rough stuff?” said Ginger. Her voice was very low, and she did not look at him.

“Oh—hard riding—all-day-in-the-saddle trips—anything that would tire him beyond his strength, you know. It’ll be many a long day before he’s absolutely himself again—body or brain. Was he pretty careful and sensible? I know how hard it is to make these young chaps take care of themselves, but I expect you could manage him, Ginger!” He twinkled upon her, kindly. It was one of the dozen excellent reasons for his belovedness that Dr. Gurney Mayfield always fitted people out with the best possible motives and intentions. He presupposed them to have justice and fairness and gentleness and good will, just as certainly as they had tonsils and livers and lungs and spines, and he confidently expected to see the manifestations of them.

“I don’t believe I—managed him—very carefully,” said Ginger. She did not meet his eyes. “I expect he did—overdo, sometimes.”

Manuela came in, then, to say that dinner was waiting, and Ginger jumped up thankfully and hurried the doctor in to the table, and she began to talk briskly about her Aunt Fan and to ask interested questions about his summer camp in Monterey County, and it was not until he was well on his way again that Dr. Mayfield realized how skillfully she had kept the talk away from the subject of Dean Wolcott.

CHAPTER VII

IN the last week of September Ginger went with a flag of truce to her Aunt Fan and asked her to go east with her.

“Boston?” asked Aunt Fan, shrewdly.

“No,” said Ginger, coloring hotly but steady-eyed, “New York.” She considered for a moment and then said, gravely. “But it is—connected with Boston, in a way, Aunt Fan.”

She put it, rather stumblingly, into words. Dr. Mayfield had made her realize how unjust she had been to Dean Wolcott with regard to his riding, and that had made her understand the possibility of being unjust in other ways. She was very brief and very dry about it; Mrs. Featherstone was not the sort of person to whom one opened the shy depths of one’s heart—she pounced too much, and chattered. It was enough for her to know that her niece was open-mindedly going to give eastern culture a chance at polishing the surface of her rugged westernism.

Aunt Fan was delighted. “Of course I’ll go, child! We’ll have a wonderful time—you’ll see! You’ll be crazy about it! Just wait till you see Fifth Avenue—and Peacock Alley! You know, Jim’ll just be pleased to the bone to beau us around—you can’t see anything of New York at night without a man, of course—and if we see it with him, we’ll see it right!” She beamed affectionately upon the girl for the first time since Dean Wolcott’s exodus from Dos Pozos. “Honey, I’m tickled pink to go with you. We’ll see all the new shows, and you know what I’m thinking of?— You know, I may have my face lifted!”

Ginger thought grimly that she, personally, might have her heart lifted, but she didn’t say so. She went downtown and saw about reservations and bought a wardrobe trunk and put her two evening gowns in it (Aunt Fan had banned all the rest) and in a fortnight they were on their way across the continent.

It surprised Ginger a great deal and at first annoyed her considerably to find how much country there seemed to be outside of California. She had known, of course, that New York would be larger and more impressive than San Francisco or Los Angeles, but she had felt that most of the desirable out-of-doors was contained in her own state. The great city itself startled and saddened her; she had not realized that there were as many people as that in the world, and most of them tired-looking and pale and in a hectic hurry to get somewhere else. They stopped at an opulent and ornate hotel and Aunt Fan was very gay and amiable, and on their first day—they had arrived in the morning—they shopped on the Avenue, lunched at the Ritz, did a matinée and had tea, and then Jim Featherstone called for them and took them down to dinner at the Brevoort and to a play, and afterwards to one of the roofs, where they ate again and danced.

Jim Featherstone was a tall, thin, middle-aged man with a rather melancholy expression and much skill in assembling a meal. He and Aunt Fan were unfeignedly glad to see each other, and Ginger was content to have them talk together and leave her to herself. They left her to herself a great deal in the days and evenings which followed—not that they ever forgot her or neglected her, but she had a sense of being with them but not of them, and she felt that it always would be so. Her aunt, languid as a wilted lily at Dos Pozos, developed an amazing energy in New York; from their nine o’clock tray breakfast in their sitting-room until one the next morning, she was in perpetual and enthusiastic motion—always panting a little, taking her short, chugging steps in her short-vamped, high-heeled pumps, her blue eyes prominent, like a gold fish’s.

“This is the life, dearie,” she said, breathlessly, one day. “And you know, I haven’t gained an ounce, for all I’ve eaten like a human being; it’s being so active that saves me. Jim doesn’t want me to have my face lifted; not for two or three years anyway, he says. He says you get a sort of hard look; he says he wouldn’t like to have my expression changed.” She sighed. “Isn’t it a crime— A man that can be a friend like that, a total loss as a husband?” She patted Ginger’s arm (she was very fond of her, in these days) affectionately. “Dearie, I don’t know that I regret—you know! He was a sweet boy, and class, class if ever I saw it in my life, but I’m not so sure he would have made you happy. If Jim Featherstone couldn’t make a woman happy, I don’t know who——”

“I think,” said Ginger, almost to herself, “a woman has to make herself happy, Aunt Fan. I guess no one can do it for you.” Ginger was saying “I think” a good deal at that time, and she was actually thinking. She was growing very tired of long parades of food, and the pavements made her feet ache for the sun-baked earth, for her stirrups. She had seen so many plays—“shows,” Jim Featherstone and her Aunt Fan invariably called them—“a good show,” “a bad show,” “a peach of a little show,” that they were blurred and jumbled in her memory, and her eyes wanted distance and sky line instead of bright lights indoors and quivering electric signs on the streets.

She had been more than a month, now, in the east, and she had docilely done everything and bought everything she was asked to do and to buy, and she had gone everywhere they wanted to take her, but she was puzzled. Was this the sort of thing which had made Dean Wolcott different from ’Rome Ojeda?

Her aunt sensed her restlessness and grew uneasy; she had no wish to terminate her own holiday. “Jim,” she said urgently, “I wish to goodness you could rustle up a man for Ginger—not just anybody, of course, but some really nice chap. One that looks like a collar ad—you know! The child’s getting homesick and blue, and if we don’t give her something to think about she’ll rush home and marry that wild-man—that immorally good-looking Ojeda boy.”

Jim Featherstone was interested, but he really didn’t know what to do about it. All the men he knew were his own sort and age; hard-boiled old birds, he called them; wouldn’t do for Ginger. He had a very soft spot in his leathery heart for Ginger, Jim Featherstone. They decided that they must try to give her a better time, and they set earnestly about it, but the girl did not respond.

“Dearie,” her aunt would say in the morning, “don’t you want to come along with me while I get my henna rinse? You could have a manicure while you’re waiting, or a facial. Or just sit and look out at the Avenue—that’s as good as a show, I always say.”

But Ginger had had a manicure two days earlier (she had come to like the look of her brown fingers after careful grooming) and she never had facials, and looking out at the Avenue made her long unendurably for the range; and it seemed to her that Aunt Fan had had her mind as well as her hair henna rinsed; as if she’d had a permanent wave in her personality. Then, suddenly, she remembered Mary Wiley.

Mary Wiley was a girl she had known at boarding school in Los Angeles, a slim, frail girl who had been sent west for the mildness of the winters. She was three or four years older than Ginger, but they had roomed together for several months and the younger child had liked her warmly, without ever understanding why. She had very smooth, cool hands and she was always delicately and pleasantly pale, and never in a hurry. She always had her lessons learned and her themes written and had generous margins of time for other people.

They had corresponded for a while; it was Ginger who had stopped writing. Mary Wiley had sent her a brief, bracing little note when she had heard, through other channels of the old school, of Aleck’s death, but Ginger had never acknowledged it. Now she wanted to find her. The telephone book was rich in Wileys but she knew she would recognize the address when she saw it and she did—up in the Eighties, and just off Riverside Drive, the hotel door man told her. She could take the bus. Ginger liked taking the bus when she could ride on the top; it gave her a comforting little sense of leashed freedom for a while, and she loved the river. It was the first river she had ever known, personally, and she had the merest bowing acquaintance with it now, but she knew that she would like knowing it if she could.

It was a narrow, quiet-looking house; it made her think of Mary Wiley herself. A neat, middle-aged maid answered her ring and took her name and said that she would see if Miss Wiley was at home. She had hardly finished her leisurely mounting of the stairs when Ginger heard a low exclamation of pleasure and her friend came skimming down to her. (She recalled, now, the way Mary Wiley had of moving, of coming downstairs.)

She did not kiss her but she took both her hands and glowed her deep and quiet gladness. “Virginia McVeagh! My dear! It’s so nice to see you! And how lovely you are—much lovelier, even, than when you were little!”

Mary Wiley was a plain young woman herself but she drank up Ginger’s beauty thirstily. She was still slim and frail, with rather colorless hair and skin, but she had good gray eyes and a singularly intelligent sweetness of expression.

They sat down to talk in the small drawing-room which was rather scantily furnished, Ginger thought, and presently she telephoned to her aunt that she was staying for luncheon and would not be back until late in the afternoon. It just happened, Mary Wiley said, to be her lazy day, so they could have a fine visit.

Her mother and father were at luncheon, elderly, mellow people with low voices and much gentle warmth of manner and they were extraordinarily kind to their daughter’s school friend without in the least making what Aunt Fan would have called “a fuss over her.” Luncheon was a very simple meal—clear soup in dull blue bowls with thin slices of lemon floating on it, something creamed on toast, tiny graham muffins and a fruit salad, and there were the plainest possible doilies of unbleached linen on the dark, lusterless table. The middle-aged maid served silently and slowly, and—in contrast with the hotel and the restaurants where Jim Featherstone had taken her—it was like leaving the pounding surf and coming into a little still bay.

The Wiley family, it appeared, had not seen a fourth of the plays which Ginger had seen; they were astonished at her energy. They had seen three of the better ones and there were one or two more which they meant to see during the winter; they did not—the parents—go out very much at night. On the other hand, they seemed to have heard a great deal of music; they had season tickets for the Symphony and the Philharmonic, and they were going that afternoon to hear a young Russian pianist whom their daughter had heard the evening before, and they spoke of art exhibits in the smaller galleries. When they first asked Ginger if she had seen any interesting pictures she thought they meant on the screen and she answered accordingly that she had been too busy seeing plays; she was relieved, an instant later, to see that they had not realized her mistake. Mary Wiley said she would take her to the Ehrich Galleries next day; there were some delectable old Dutch things there now.

Mrs. Wiley wanted to know if Ginger had seen any other parts of the east, and her husband and her daughter began to smile at her.

“What she really wants to know, Virginia,” said Mary Wiley, “is whether you’ve seen Boston?”

Ginger could feel herself coloring. “No,” she said, “I haven’t seen anything but New York—yet.”

“My wife is a Bostonian, you see, Miss Virginia,” said Mr. Wiley, “and she still has, after thirty years, a little the feeling of the Children of Israel in Egypt.” He chuckled enjoyingly and his wife defended herself gently.

“My dear Walter, you know I have become—I am—a loyal New Yorker!” She gave a very small sigh. “New York is a wonderful city; it is stupid to compare the two. Boston——”

“‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,’” her husband quoted, teasingly. “Though it is to be admitted, Deborah, my dear, you have wept unobtrusively.”

“‘For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song,’” she flashed back at him.

Her daughter leaned over and patted her hand. “She’s sung the Lord’s song in a strange land, hasn’t she, father?”

“She has—loyally and lustily,” he laughed.

“Well,” said Mrs. Wiley, smiling pacifically upon them both, “I like to think I’ve brought a little of Boston with me and transplanted it. My people”—she turned to Ginger—“have never yet, after all these years, become entirely reconciled to having me a New Yorker, but I say to them—‘My dears, cannot one have a lamp, and a fire, and a book, even in New York?’”

Ginger liked their voices and the way they looked at each other. She wondered if Dean Wolcott’s mother was something like Mrs. Wiley. Presently the parents went away to their concert and the girls talked for an hour, and then Mary Wiley, who said she had been indoors all day, offered to walk with Ginger back to her hotel. They went beside the river as far as Seventy-second Street, and Mary Wiley walked with her remembered smoothness of gait, swiftly and easily on her low heeled and gray-spatted feet. Ginger, in footgear of her Aunt Fan’s choosing, seemed to be on stilts in comparison. She learned, during the walk, what her friend had meant by calling that her lazy day. Every other week day she had classes at an Italian Settlement House far uptown; she thought Ginger might enjoy visiting it with her, one day.

This was the beginning—when Mary Wiley walked back into Ginger’s life on her low heels—of Ginger’s entrance into the inner city, where her Aunt Fan, ardent pilgrim that she was, and Jim Featherstone, born on West Fortieth Street, could never penetrate. She still went once or twice a week with them to dinners and “shows,” but for the rest of the time she was quietly busy with her friend: afternoons at the Settlement, early morning walks in the Park, trips on the river—over the river to the Palisades; the Russian quarter, the Syrian quarter; a service at the Greek cathedral, performances at little theaters which Jim Featherstone had shied away from as dangerously high-brow; exhibitions of strange new pictures at the smaller galleries—or mellow old pictures. Mary Wiley seemed always occupied but never hurried; her life was a brimming cup which never ran over.

She took Ginger to an upstairs shop in a cross street where low-voiced saleswomen conferred together over her and sent for certain special models—“Miss Hadley, don’t you think that old-blue frock for Miss McVeagh—the one with the silver fringe?”—or “I believe that Russian peasant thing would suit Miss McVeagh——”

Mary Wiley urged her to take the Russian peasant thing; it was richly red, of a soft wool stuff, boldly embellished in cobalt and dull silver. “It’s the sort of thing I’ve longed all my life to wear,” she said, and her satisfaction seemed all the deeper for being vicarious. “You can’t think what a joy it is to see it on you, Virginia! My dear, are you half thankful enough for being so beautiful? You ought to set aside a Thanksgiving Day for every month in the year!”

Ginger liked her cool compliments. She liked everything she did with Mary Wiley. Perhaps, best of all, she liked the luncheons at the Woman’s City Club and the Query Club and others to which her friend belonged or went as a guest, where she—Ginger—might sit in mouselike silence and hear brisk and vigorous talk. Mary Wiley sometimes spoke, quietly and effectively. Once, in the midst of a discussion on the iniquities of the retailer, she said suddenly—“I think Miss McVeagh could tell us something of interest on that subject; you know, she owns and operates one of the largest cattle ranches in her part of California.”

“That baby?” A lean, elderly woman bent forward in her seat and smiled at Ginger, and—her cheeks crisping hotly—she heard herself speaking. It was incredible that they should all stop, those keen and purposeful women—and listen to Ginger McVeagh, but they did.

“Did you get that, Helen?” she heard them saying to each other when she had finished her three or four sentences. “That’s all she gets a pound—and consider what we pay our local butchers!”

Several came and spoke to her afterward; California was always a name to conjure with, they said, but a California cattle ranch— They made her feel definite and worth while; once Mary Wiley asked half a dozen of them in to meet her at tea, and made her wear the red peasant dress.

But most of all she found herself at the Symphony. When she was homesick, which was often, in spite of her new contentment, she found that music—not solo things nor chamber music, but the crash and volume of an orchestra—most nearly approximated the breadth and freedom of her life at home. Sitting beside her friend or quite alone, serenely ignorant of composition and composer and interdependence of instrument, she was as wholly content as when she was riding Felipe or Diablo into the heart of a sunset. When she tried, gropingly, to tell Mary Wiley what she felt, she quoted to her a line of Huneker’s; it ought, she thought, to be graven over the door of every concert hall: “Other arts give us defined pleasures, but music is the only art that restores us to ourselves.”

It restored Ginger not only to herself but to her lover. Whether they ever came together again, whether she ever saw him again, sitting perched in her high balcony seat in Carnegie Hall, all the pride and criticism and bitterness were cleansed away; she went to him once more as she had gone to him on Aleck’s bridge; she found harmony in harmony.

“You are radiant,” said Mary Wiley to her as they came away from Carnegie on an afternoon of dazzling snow. “I knew you would love Tschaikowsky. You look—my dear, did you love it so much?”

Ginger fell into step beside her. “Let’s walk, shall we? Yes; I loved it. But I was thinking just then about—Mary, I would like to go to Boston.”

“Would you, really? How warmly mother will approve of you for that chaste desire!”

“Mary, there is some one in Boston I must see. I was unjust, and ignorant, and—mean. Mean and stupid. Now I’m going to Boston and tell him so.”

Mary Wiley smiled at her. “I think that’s big and fine, Virginia. Shall I go with you—to Boston, I mean? I’ve been wanting to run down for a day or two, to see my cousin Sarah; she is ill again. There’s a mousy little hotel just across the street from her house where you could stay. Let me see ... my young aliens would adore not being Americanized for a few days; suppose we go Monday and come back on Friday? That will give you time for a little sedate sight-seeing to please mother—and for—for your own affairs.” She smiled sunnily at her. “My dear, I’m very glad. I’ve been sure that there was some one.”

Ginger shook her head, her color mounting. “I don’t know, Mary; I’m not sure of anything, except that I must go—and tell him.”

“I’ve known there was some one,” said Mary Wiley. There had been some one, with her, once, but he had not come home from France. Mrs. Wiley had wept when she told Ginger about it, but if Mary Wiley ever wept she made her tears turn the wheels of her serene and selfless activities.

Aunt Fan lifted her plucked eyebrows when she learned that her niece was going to Boston. “I should say it would be much better form just to drop him a line—one of those postcards with a picture of the hotel on it—and say—oh, ‘West is East,’ or something kind of cute like that, and wait for him to make the first move!” Aunt Fan was feeling a trifle acid; she and Jim Featherstone were getting on each other’s nerves again, and in spite of being so triumphantly active she had gained six pounds.

On the way to Boston Ginger tried to formulate what she would say to Dean Wolcott; she wanted to make it proudly clear to him that this was no overture for a return to their former relation; it was simply and solely an acknowledgment of her wrongness of attitude at Dos Pozos, of her new respect and liking for the world he had always lived in, but always when she rehearsed it her phrases were swallowed up in great waves of gladness which rolled over her—like the music she had heard from her high perch in Carnegie. After all, she was Virginia Valdés McVeagh, feudal lady of her own land; under her novel humility there was the conviction that she had only to extend her forgiveness and her understanding. She summoned up the memory of his look, his tall slimness, his walk, the tones of his voice; his arms, his lips.

Directly Mary Wiley left her at the hushed little hotel she wrote a note to him—four lines—and sent it by messenger, and sat down to wait in the lobby. A grave bell boy tried twice to show her to her room, but she told him she wished to wait there for the answer to the letter she had just sent. She was joyfully sure what form the answer would take; Dean Wolcott would come himself. She could picture him, crossing to her from the front door to the chair where she sat; he would look as he had looked that golden day, when they came together on Aleck’s bridge.

The door opened and closed nineteen times by count. She would know her messenger the instant she saw him; he was a rather small boy, copiously freckled, and he wore thick spectacles.

He returned in exactly twenty-seven minutes by the office clock and handed Ginger’s note back to her, unopened. There was only a caretaker at the Wolcott residence, he reported: she had told him that the entire Wolcott family had gone to Florida.

CHAPTER VIII

MONTEREY; Monterey.... Dean Wolcott liked the look and the sound of the word. Directly the train deposited him there he liked the place itself. His one impression of California was of dust and glare, of dry and dazzling heat: this was a land of gray and gentle summer—June-veiled. Some one sent him down to the old wharf for his luncheon and he ate zestfully of “Pop Ernst’s” piping hot chowder and meltingly tender abalone and then set out for his afternoon of exploring. He liked the old customhouse; he liked the “Sherman Rose,” and the fishing boats in the bay; he liked the flavor of tradition in everything; he hadn’t supposed there was as much background as this in all of California. He drove out to the Mission at Carmel and had his tea at a little house close by, and went back to Monterey and did the seventeen-mile drive, and he kept stopping the car and getting out to go close to the gnarled, embattled trees on the cliffs. He thought they looked as if Arthur Rackham had drawn them; they satisfied him deeply. He stayed the night at Del Monte and liked the old hotel and the precise and formal gardens; he was amazed to find how heartily he was liking everything he saw, for he had not undertaken his western pilgrimage in the spirit of a joy ride. He had undertaken it grimly, purposefully, resentfully, but it began to look as if he should actually enjoy it. He felt his spirits mounting as he climbed into the front seat of the Big Sur stage next morning and found himself the only passenger. The driver told him that he didn’t carry much beside the mail until around the Fourth of July; then people began to swarm down to Pfeiffer’s Resort, and the deer hunters came in with the open season, the first of August.

“Won’t be many folks where you’ll be, though,” he said, grinning. “If you’re the lonesome kind, you’re out of luck.”

Dean Wolcott said he did not believe he was the lonesome kind. He was enjoying the five-hour drive enormously. The scenery was oddly satisfying to him—now along a rocky and precipitous coast, now on a bleakly barren hillside, and the sea shone with the colors of an abalone shell; it made him think a little of Italy. And—just as he had adjusted his mind to rigor and stern plainness—the road turned inland to lush and lavish beauty—redwood trees mounting nobly, deep carpeting of ferns, streams, wild flowers, enchanting sudden vistas of the distant sea. They toiled gaspingly up the Serra grade and rushed down the other side with hurtling speed; they stopped at every ranch gate with mail and papers and parcel post and held leisurely converse with unhurried men and women; they left the Little Sur country behind and forged on through changing loveliness, now in the muted sunshine, now in green shadow.

The stage driver looked at his watch. “Going to make it by five, like I told you we would,” he said with satisfaction. “Look—there’s Pfeiffer’s!” They made a last sharp turn and swung into the yard. “And there’s the doc’, come to meet you!”

Dr. Gurney Mayfield was clambering out of an ancient surrey and he secured a weary-looking, putty-colored horse to the fence before he hurried over to meet the newcomer. “Well, well, my dear boy, but it’s good to see you—here!” he twinkled at him. “Pardon my not coming right over but I had to tie Sam; he may look as if he had the sleeping sickness but he’d be off for camp the minute my back was turned. Now, let’s have a look at you, Dean!” His keen eyes went competently over him. “Feel as fit as you look?”

“Absolutely.”

“Ready for the rough stuff?”

“Quite.”

“Good!— You’re going to have plenty of it. Well, did you enjoy the work, the training?”

“Enormously, Doctor! It’s made me as hard as nails; exactly what I needed.” He was crisp and brisk and confident; his color was wholesome, emphasized just now by a flush of sunburn after his long day’s ride, and his eyes were steady. “You have been no end kind, Doctor; I was amazed at your being able to fix it up for me here.”

They had walked back to the surrey. “Get in,” said Dr. Mayfield. “Now, I call it a rare treat, in an age of mad motors to ride behind old Sam in this surrey.” He backed the venerable steed away from the fence and started him down the road. “My camp is a mile and a half further; no machines allowed—riders and hikers only. As to being able to arrange things for you here, it wasn’t difficult; the regular Ranger is a very good friend of mine, and he has had a real vacation coming to him for a long time. He’ll stay with you for a while, of course, and put you on to the ropes. Steady, Sam, old boy!” He applied a shrieking brake as they jolted down a bank and into a shallow, hurrying stream. “The Sur goes through the camp in three places,” he said. “This is great country, my boy. Wildest county in California, and I hope it always will be.” They splashed noisily across the little river and climbed steeply out again.

“Well, I fancy you haven’t any difficulty in keeping machines out,” commented Dean, looking back.

“They don’t often try it twice—not the same machine,” his friend exulted. They were jogging along on a curving road, now, through the narrow valley. “The ocean’s over there, three miles,” he gestured to the right. “Near enough to get the tang of it, but far enough to miss the fog; the mountains on this side are the Santa Lucia range—Ventanas off to the left. Just wait till I get you on a horse and give you the first real glimpse of it! Oh, by the way—I got Snort for you!”

“Really! Great work, Doctor. I am pleased!—But I don’t know how I can ever thank you for taking so much trouble.”

But Dr. Mayfield had been taking trouble for people all his life and now that he was retired from practice he considered that he had nothing else to do. “’Rome Ojeda didn’t want to let him go, not a little bit, but I said I simply had to have him for a friend of mine, a Ranger up here, and Ginger brought him round. I guess Ginger can make him do just about anything she wants,” he chuckled, “hard-boiled cow-puncher that he is.” He was rather elaborately casual about it, and he thought he saw the young man’s sunburn reinforced by a deeper color.

“Is she—I hope Ginger is well?” said Dean Wolcott civilly.

“Oh, good Lord, yes,” said the doctor, comfortably. “Never knew the child to be anything else. I remember offering her a dollar a day for every day she’d stay in bed while she had the measles but she took it standing! I was in great luck to keep her off her pony. Come on, Sam—can’t you spruce up a little? We’ve got company on board! Yes, Ginger’s well; I should say she is—blooming! Busier than a whole hive of bees, of course, running the ranch. Remarkable girl, Virginia McVeagh; combines her father and her mother to an astonishing degree. They were an odd pair to come together, different as chalk and cheese—but they made a success of it.” There was the faintest possible emphasis on the pronoun. “Heard a good deal of talk, the time I went down there after Snort, about her being engaged to ’Rome Ojeda.”

“Yes?” said Dean, courteously attentive.

“Yes. In fact, ’Rome himself rather gave me to understand—but I don’t know. I won’t believe it till I hear it from Ginger. I hope she won’t be in too much of a hurry. Still, he’s a fine, upstanding boy, ’Rome Ojeda, and he’s known her all her life and he understands her. Well, Snort’s waiting for you in the corral! A good horse, but he hasn’t been handled right—not what I call right. ’Rome’s pretty hard—and pretty harsh, I consider, with his stock. I’m afraid you won’t find him a very comfortable mount.”

“I don’t expect to,” said Dean Wolcott, grimly, a look of reminiscence in his eyes. “But I expect to ride him. I—doubtless it seems rather absurd to you, Doctor, my desire for that particular horse, but I think I’ve come to consider him as a sort of symbol; he showed me—and incidentally the rest of the world”—he was able to grin, ruefully, at the memory—“my utter unfitness; it will be a satisfaction, now that I can ride, to prove it on Snort. It will rather—redeem me in my own eyes.”

“I can understand your feelings perfectly,” said the doctor cordially. As a matter of fact, the young man had no idea as to how thoroughly the doctor understood all of his feelings. “But I’m going to caution you about overdoing; it’s hard work, and rough at times, as I said a little while ago, but you can take it reasonably.”

“I’m hard as nails, Doctor; quite fit.”

The doctor nodded. “Yes, I believe you are. But there may be slumps, you know; I don’t want to alarm you, but—arm you for them.”

“You’re very kind; I will bear it in mind.” It was quite clear, however, that he considered the warning wholly superfluous; there was a triumphant strength and verve about him.

“That’s our gate,” said the doctor, presently, and his pleasant voice warmed suddenly with pride. “Here we are at the camp!” He spoke of it as if it might be the New Jerusalem. “Of course, we’ve kept things very plain and crude but”—the doctor always tried to be modest about his camp, to take the attitude that there were other camps in the state, in the country, some of which, many of which, perhaps, might equal his, but his voice and his eyes betrayed him. This was his promised land, where, thanks to the everlasting mercy of things, he was to sojourn for his life’s rich afternoon after long years of ardent service. It was his creation and his recreation; his child. “You see, we have the little individual cabins with a shower bath in every one, and the central dining room, and we bring down a cook and a maid and a chore boy, and there’s the little bathhouse where you can have a hot tub—oh, we figure we’ve got camping down to a pretty fine art—all the glory and none of the grime! Mild nights we sit round the camp fire, and when it’s nippy we have the Lodge, and the phonograph to dance by, and tables for bridge. You must join us whenever your duties will let you, Dean.”

“Thank you,” said Dean Wolcott. “I fancy, however, that I shall be busy by day and sleepy by night, sha’n’t I?” The fact was that he was hungrily eager for the vigorous, muscle and nerve testing job he had undertaken, and rather fed up on bridge and dancing, Boston—his own very particular corner of it—having welcomed him home with a warmth which was soothing and healing after Dos Pozos. “And—who are your guests at camp, Doctor?”

“They’re not my guests, really; it’s a coöperative affair, this lodge of ours in the wilderness—old friends, relatives, San José people, in the main; some from San Francisco; jolly, folksy folks who like to get their feet off the pavement.”

“Does Ginger come?” He was very direct about it.

“Oh, Ginger came once, long ago—twice, I believe, come to think of it—but I’ll tell you what it is, we’re not wild enough for Miss Ginger! We take some pretty hard trips—as you’ll find out—and do some pretty stiff stunts, but we haven’t her hell-for-leather, ride-’em-cowboy ideal!”

Dean Wolcott nodded. “I shall want to see her, once, before I go east again,” he said, levelly.

“Oh, certainly,” said Dr. Mayfield, hastily. “Certainly! And here’s Snort! Be careful how you go up to him, Dean; he has a very bad habit of pulling back, and he’s due to hurt himself or somebody else. I rather imagine he was tied up and beaten over the head when he was first broken to saddle, and ’Rome Ojeda hasn’t exactly—soothed him!” He paused in the unhitching of old Sam and watched the meeting between the quiet young man and the quivering wild-eyed horse. The moment was heavy with memory and challenge and promise.

“Hello, old son!” said Dean Wolcott, cordially. Snort trumpeted and flung up his head at the touch, but the easterner’s voice was smooth. “Steady, boy.... Those fireworks don’t register with me at all, now. I’ve had almost a year of that sort of thing, you see. If you’re feeding your fancy on what you’re going to do to the tenderfoot who rode you that historic day, you’re foiled. You and I will never dazzle the Big Week crowd, but I think you’ll find me remaining in or near the saddle during all our excursions together.” The red roan cocked his sensitive ears and rolled his eyes whitely.

Dr. Mayfield nodded approval. “That’s the idea, Dean. No quick movements.... Steady does it, with Snort. You know, I consider that there are very few essentially vicious horses; one now and then, of course, but in the main it’s only terror, terror and suspicion and the vivid memory of abuses.”

“Doctor,” the young man wanted to know, “is it too late for a ride?”

The doctor’s lips twitched. He liked the impetuous youngness of it ... the lad couldn’t wait to show him, and to show himself.... “No, of course not, Dean! I’ll saddle Ted—”

He noted with satisfaction the authority with which Dean Wolcott swung himself into the saddle and set off, ahead of him, up the precipitous Government Trail, and he kept his keen eyes on the slim figure—the easy seat, the vigilant relaxing, the sure coördination of body and brain. Beyond question, he told himself, deeply content, the boy had learned to ride. When they finished the twisting climb and came out on a level shoulder of the mountain he saw Dean Wolcott lean suddenly forward in the saddle, and Snort shot ahead in a plunging lope; horse and rider, a splendid, pulsing unit, flashed over the open space in the warm glow of the sunset, wheeled sharply at the foot of the next rise, and came back, Snort curveting, prancing, flinging up his handsome head, his flanks lathered with excitement rather than heat.

“Well?” said the young man, nakedly bidding for praise. “Well, Doctor?”

The doctor had not seen the serio-comic exhibition at Dos Pozos but he had had it fully and faithfully described to him, so he was able to balance that day’s performance with this, and he was moved to warm commendation. “Upon my word, Dean, it’s astonishing! In less than a year’s time—and you’ve been physically fit for only a few months— Well, this has removed my last lingering doubt of your ability to swing the Ranger work. You’ve a good hand, a good seat; authority. I consider you”—he went on, speaking with relish, bestowing his accolade, and the words sounded richer to the young man than the ones which had accompanied the pinning on of his medals—“I consider you a horseman.”

Dean Wolcott swung himself smoothly to the ground; there was a silkiness of movement, now, a sure competence about him. “Then”—he colored hotly but his gaze was steady—“then you think I should not cut a ludicrous figure now, before—’Rome Ojeda—Ginger?”

“I should say not!” said Dr. Gurney Mayfield with immense heartiness.

The easterner slipped a hand under Snort’s mane and the roan, trembling a little, let him rub his neck slowly and steadily. The young man took time, at last, to look about him. They were on the shoulder of a brown and rugged mountain, looking forward to range on range of other mountains, brown, gray, blue, purple in distance, piling up against the warm sky, looking back to the shining sea three thousand feet below them, with a crimson sun sinking swiftly on the edge of the world. With his hand on Snort’s arched neck it was a moment of highly colored happiness such as he had not known for eleven months—since he had taken his eye away from the kaleidoscope at Dos Pozos.

“This is—tremendous, Doctor!” He gave a long sigh of utter satisfaction. “There aren’t any words for it.” Then he turned his attention to the doctor’s mount. “I’ve been so engrossed in my horse I haven’t noticed yours, Doctor. Splendid, isn’t he?”

“Well, now, I was beginning to wonder when you’d get round to old Ted,” said Dr. Mayfield. “He’s used to compliments, Ted is. Wouldn’t sell him for his weight in sapphires!” The horse, a tall and powerful creature, turned his head and listened to his master with delicately twitching ears. “See those ears? Many’s the time Ted’s pointed a deer for me, before I saw it. He’s a gentleman; he’s a man and a brother; you can count on him in a tight place. I’ll have to tell you how he saved my life once. It was—but I guess we’ll have to be jogging along to supper, right now.”

The young man, however, stood still, looking at him with an enhanced color in his keen and eager face. “If you’ve a moment more to spare, Doctor, I—I should like to make myself clear to you on the subject of—Ginger; of my attitude toward Ginger.”

The older man saw that this, too, was immediate. Just as he had had to justify himself in the saddle, so now he must clear his mind of a studied explanation. He wanted his supper but he said comfortably, “Of course, Dean.”

He began with entire composure. “You know the shape I was in last year, body and mind. I was a miserable weakling, a supersensitive, hysterical idiot, and my sense of humor, which I had always considered as much a part of me as an arm or a leg, seemed to have been amputated. We—Ginger and I—were utter strangers; not strangers as a Boston girl and myself would have been, or Ginger and a western man, but—aliens. We had lived in different worlds; we spoke different tongues.”

His friend nodded, understandingly. “That’s a fact, Dean. That’s a fact.” He could see that the young man was not only telling him—he was telling himself; urging himself to be convinced.

“We mistook a romance, a sort of midsummer, moving-picture romance,” Dean went on, “for a solid and lasting affection. And it is, of course,” he was very clear and definite about it but his expression was rather bleak, “extremely fortunate that we became aware of our mistake when we did.”

Again the doctor nodded. “I wonder if Ginger’s father and mother were not assailed by doubts of that sort,” he mused. “Far apart as the poles, they were—race, type, creed, training—and yet that marriage was a success; an ardent success. Of course, Ginger’s mother, Rosalía Valdés—and she was more beautiful than Ginger, I believe—died when the girl was a baby. I’ve often asked myself if a marriage of that sort can stand the slow procession of years, the humdrum cares, the fading—”

“I think not,” Dean Wolcott cut in. “Marriage,” he stated with young sapience, “any marriage, where blood and breeding and background are the same, presents sufficient difficulties of adjustment. It was undoubtedly a most fortunate termination.” He had pulled off his hat, and now a brisk wind traveled up from the sea and mussed the shining precision of his fine, fair hair, as a sudden confusion marred the precision of his careful speech. “Doctor, I have—I needn’t say that I have the highest—that I admire and shall always admire her beauty and charm—and—and courage and ability—and I hope you won’t misunderstand my motives, my feelings—” he got very warmly flushed and young looking and his gaze besought his friend for credence. “I must see Ginger and I must see Ojeda, simply as a matter of decent self-justification. It is intolerable for me to leave any place, any persons, with such a contemptible impression.”

“I can get your angle on it, Dean,” said the doctor, gravely, “but aren’t you overemphasizing—exaggerating—the whole affair? After all, why should you have been able to ride like a ‘buckeroo’—a city man, an easterner? (Though a fellow from San Francisco or Los Angeles would have been in the same boat.) And besides, you were in no shape to stand such exertion; it was mad folly to attempt it. I blame myself bitterly for not having warned you against that sort of thing, but I never imagined——”

Again the young man interrupted him heedlessly. “Yes, of course, the whole thing was absurd! If my sense of humor hadn’t been left on the other side, if I had made determined comedy of myself for them, or if I’d had sense enough to refuse to ride”—but his flush deepened as he remembered why and how he had capitulated—“it need never have happened. But it did happen, Doctor. I did make a sickening spectacle of myself in the eyes of those people. I failed utterly according to their standards, and—granted that their standards are immature and crude ones—the fact is intolerable to me. That’s why I’ve learned to ride, that’s why I wanted Snort; that’s why I must go once to Dos Pozos for a day, before I—before I put a period to that episode.”

The doctor bent his head close to the Ted horse as he tightened his cinch. “I understand perfectly, Dean. The chapter is closed. You wish merely—and quite naturally—to show that girl and that buckeroo boy—that you can succeed now along lines where you failed before.”

“Exactly,” said the young man, gratefully.

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.”

On the third night of silence he camped on Pine Ridge. He had climbed the tortuous Golden Stairs in the golden, burning afternoon, and man and horse and dog were weary and warm. Once, on a narrow and treacherous bit of trail, a rattler had sounded his warning just ahead of them, and Snort, with a swift reversion to his earlier manner, had trumpeted, reared, whirled dangerously, but his rider had sat him capably until he was calmed, had dismounted and crept forward, reins over his arm, revolver in hand, located the venomous sound, taken cool aim, and shot the big snake neatly in two. Then, remembering the doctor’s warning, had stamped on its head for good measure before he cut off the twelve rattles. “Well, Rusty, not so bad, eh?” he had inquired complacently of the Airedale, and the dog had replied with a brief and grudging wag of his shabby tail.

He had watered his horse, staked him out to graze, made his supper and fed Rusty, spread his sleeping bag on a foundation of crisp leaves, lighted his pipe, folded his arms beneath his head; reveled. He was the only human being in forty precipitous miles; sometimes the dog gave a sleepy and luxurious sigh; there was the low sound of Snort’s cropping of the dry grass; twice a twilight bird dropped his six silver notes into the silence; otherwise, it was incredibly still. Beyond him there was another mountain which presented a profile to him with a forest of young pines dark against an apricot sky; far below, faintly seen, the sea shone again like an abalone shell. Presently the glow faded and the trees turned black, and a fairy-tale moon came out, primly attended by one pale star.

He was up at dawn and off at six for his ride to Tassajara, tingling with zestful well-being. He made a swift detour about the lively Springs, picked up Tony’s Trail and followed it into the heat of the afternoon, made an early camp at Willow Creek and was off again in the morning dew, headed, the long way round, for home. Past Shovel Handle Creek, through Strawberry Valley, gay as a garden with little flowers of yellow and magenta and hearty pink, up and up, and up again, unceasingly, to the summit of Marble Peak. He loosened his cinch, lighted his pipe, granted himself a half hour for gazing.

He understood perfectly how the gentleman had felt in Darien. It was beyond words, above words. Not even the Wolcott connection could do it justice.

Then, greatly to his surprise, he found that he didn’t want to be silent any longer. He wanted to talk, not to Snort and the tolerant Airedale, but to some one who would reply. He wanted to point out Lost Valley, far below and far away; to explain about the Ventana—how once, the oldest settlers said, it had been closed across the top of that sharp, square-cut space in the mountain’s upper edge, making a perfect ventana—window; he needed a looker and a listener in order that he might demonstrate how perfectly he remembered all the peaks and places the doctor and the Ranger had named to him. It was probable that he would have been moved to quote a restrained amount of poetry; the Wolcotts quoted a good deal, not to be bookish or superior, but because of their nice sense of values; people like Keats and Tennyson had said these things so handily, had brought the art of poetic expression to a fine point while the Wolcott connection was busy with the law and medicine and anthropology....

Now he recalled that the stout (and misnamed) gentleman upon the peak in Darien could be silent as long as he chose and then address his men (there was distinct mention of them in the sonnet) and receive their respectful raptures. He, however, could only address, unavailingly, a horse and a frankly bored dog, so, with swift decision, he tightened his cinch again and set off down the mountainside in the direction of Slate’s. He would change his plan, make port there, hearten himself with cheerful human intercourse and toothsome fare, and return to Post’s next day. His beasts seemed to catch his idea and approve it, and they made excellent speed.

But Slate’s was deserted. No promising smoke curled out of the chimney; his hail brought no reply, but echoed hollowly against the big barn. It was evidently one of the rare occasions when the head of the house made a saddle trip over the long trail to the Post Office at Big Sur, and his wife might be far afield on some ranch matter. There was nothing for it but to push on to his headquarters at Post’s, by the long route, now; he would not reach there until well after dark.

He set out, doggedly and joylessly. He could not even take time for a rest and a meal; he munched at crackers and raisins as he rode. Rusty began to lag wearily behind and he caught him by the collar and dragged him up and across his saddle and held him there, crouched and disapproving, his tail clamped dismally down. He passed three or four little deserted houses on long-abandoned ranches; it was strange, whatever could have brought people into that wilderness; it was pitiful to think of the losing fight they must have put up before they admitted themselves beaten and went away. Sometimes he drew rein and studied them; at one there was a rattlesnake asleep in the sun on the worn sill of the open door; after a little while, to accentuate his loneliness, the sun went under a cloud and a damp and penetrating fog rushed in from the sea; then the little, gray, ghostly houses seemed to shiver and shrink. He found himself picturing the people who had pioneered in them—the men who had come back to them at meal-times, aching-tired and lagging with discouragement, the women who had swept the sagging floors and tacked up calico curtains; women who had said, red-eyed, “It’s more’n a month since we’ve had the mail,” and the other sort of women, who had said—“Look! My seeds are comin’ up a’ready! We’ll have a truck garden here before you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’”

Visualizing them kept him occupied for several miles and when he had left them all behind and found the gray emptiness of the world more and more trying he began to recite to himself—verse, fragments of orations, scraps of old high school debates....

My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills

My father feeds his flocks—

What was the rest of it? Where was it from? He must have learned it years ago, in grammar school, probably. Well, now, he exulted, this was something to do; he would remember the next line; he would remember the poem or whatever the lines came from, the author.

Even Snort, the wire-fibered, fire-breathing Snort, was lagging. Overridden! Dean Wolcott was thankful Dr. Mayfield needn’t know. And he, himself?—was he overridden and under-talked? The doctor had been good enough to caution him, but he—fat-headed fool—hadn’t listened or heeded. There would be slumps, his friend had said. There was one now, right enough; perhaps he’d better dismount and make camp in the next sheltered hollow. No; he must keep on; he might meet the Slate’s Spring people, and go back with them, or at least, for a few heartening moments, hear human speech, the blesséd sound of talk.

My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills—

Just as soon as he had located and pigeonholed that thing he would be all right. He was all right now, in his body—no sense of lameness or weakness; it was just this childish, contemptible lonesomeness when he wasn’t actually alone—the warm body of his horse beneath him, the dog—even if he wasn’t a very expansive dog—across his saddle. They came out of a lush green cañon with ferns and tall brakes and delicate blooms and a rushing silver stream where the dampness pressed in to the marrow, climbed a stiff trail. Then he looked down, with a gasp, upon a chimney with a curl of smoke issuing from it; it was not able to mount into the air on account of the fog but it made a brave start.

Dean Wolcott had to gather his thoughts before he could place exactly where he was. This must be the ranch of Mateo Golinda, the Spaniard, and his American wife. The doctor and the Ranger had spoken to him of the Golindas and said that he must be sure to call upon them, but he had forgotten, and then he had entered on his period of silence. He was so glad that he wanted to swing his hat and shout. Now he was to be among his kind again, with limitations, of course. The converse would be crude and the fare would be rough; there would be no point of mental contact. There would be—he grinned stiffly at the absurdity—no afternoon tea; chilled and fog-drenched as he was, he would have to wait for the late supper, if, indeed, it was his good fortune to be invited to remain.

There was no dizzy sum, no cherished treasure he would not part with for tea, hot and heartening tea in a delicate cup, and the sort of talk which nourished the mind. And an open fire. But there would be a “cookstove,” at least, and it would give out comforting warmth while the woman was getting supper ... he would be warm....

He had let Rusty down and they were making for the house at a smooth running walk. He would judge what sort she was, Mrs. Golinda; perhaps he could ask her to make him—or to let him make himself—a cup of tea; he could say quite honestly that he was cold and overdone. He knew people of that sort called tea “eating between meals” or “piecing,” but he didn’t care what she called it if only he could have it. He got awkwardly down in the yard and found that he was shivering uncontrollably and that his teeth were chattering, and he felt odd and confused. He stood still and made himself rehearse for an instant. He would march up to the door, he would knock at the door, and she would come—she must be home, with that smoke charging at the fog!—and he would take off his hat, and try to keep from shaking and jerking, and say—“My name is Dean Wolcott. I am the new Forest Ranger. May I—”

But he could not wait to complete his rehearsal. He found himself moving swiftly upon the small, silvered house. It was very old and weathered looking; it made him think a little of the houses on the fog-drenched islands in Maine. He stood upon the gray, worn step and rapped with blue knuckles, and almost instantly he heard the sound of quick, light feet coming toward him, and the door flew open.

The woman who stood there was not quite young, but she would never be old. She wore a smock of dull blue linen and her very smooth brown hair was sleekly parted and coiled, and she looked at him keenly and gladly. Her eyes were a dark hazel, fearless and friendly, and very bright.

He opened his lips and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. “My name—” he began, steadily enough, “my name—” and then confusion and chaos descended upon him. He might have been back in the hospital in England, fighting for memory through black clouds. “‘My name is Norval—’” he said, rapidly, and broke off gasping, horrified.

The woman stared at him for the fraction of a second, her eyes widening; then they narrowed and warmed and fine little lines came round the corners of them and she laughed aloud, delightedly. “Well,” she said, “aren’t you a long way from the Grampian hills? Come in! Do come in—I was just having to drink my tea all alone!”

CHAPTER X

HE stumbled over the threshold and found himself in an amazing room. He was to observe, later on, that two partitions had been knocked out to make three cubby-holes into a living room of pleasant dimensions, that the floor sagged and that the walls slanted, that the raftered ceiling was rough: at the moment he was aware only of a leaping, crackling fire on the hearth, of a Chinese wicker tea table drawn up before it with a wicker armchair on each side, and—beyond these joyful things—shelves of books, books, books, running along one entire end of the place; the gleam of good brass in the firelight; good prints on the walls.

“You are Mr. Wolcott, of course,” the woman said. “And I am Margaret Golinda—but you know that! We have been hoping you would come to see us. Sit down, and pull your chair closer to the fire—you must be fog-chilled to your marrow! Tea is just ready and piping hot—I just lifted the kettle off as you knocked! You see, I always pull up another chair for tea, on the hope that Mateo may come in and join me—and he does, once in a blue moon!” Fine little lines of mirth framed her eyes again. “He does like it, when he can spare the half hour, but I dare say it’s a slothful habit for ranchers!”

“It’s a heavenly habit,” said Dean Wolcott, fervently. He leaned toward the fire, holding his stiff fingers in the stinging, scorching heat. “I must ask your pardon, Mrs. Golinda, for what must have seemed my clumsy facetiousness, just now. I will tell you how I came to say—”

“Ah, but you mustn’t tell me anything until you’ve had your first cup,” she said quickly, giving him a keen glance. She handed him his tea in pale green china, with a thin old silver spoon, and watched him, smiling. “You are an easterner, I have heard, and you haven’t realized what our summers can be in Monterey County! Many mooded, they are. One can shiver—and perspire—in two hours!” She talked on in her very low, very clear voice, and there was no chance for him to speak until he had drained his cup. “Now—the second cup, and toast, this time, with it, and some of our wild sage honey—we brag about our honey, Mr. Wolcott.” She filled his cup again, and this time she gave him an oblong wicker tray to hold on his knees, with a pale green plate of toast and a small fat pot of amber honey, and she kept on talking. He knew that she was talking so that he would not have to talk.

“You must have another cup—all really sincere tea drinkers take three!” He took it docilely. “I can see that you’re rather surprised at my little house; tea tables and brass and prints amaze you—here? And everything came here on the back of a mule, over that trail, for there is no road beyond the Gomez ranch, as you know. There were eighty loads!” She shook her sleek head, sighing a little at the memory. “But I lost only two cups and one saucer! Now, I wonder if you’ll pardon my leaving you for a few moments? There’s something rather urgent in the oven!” She went swiftly out of the room and closed the door behind her, and for a moment or two he heard sounds of activity in the kitchen—an oven door opened and closed again, a faucet turned on and off. Then he stopped listening and settled limply and luxuriously down into his armchair. There was a cushion on the back which fitted into his neck as if it had been measured for him, and he yielded body and brain to a delicious drowsiness; he would hear her step, and rouse himself before she opened the door. An old banjo clock on the wall stated that it was twenty minutes past five ... she would doubtless be back in five minutes and then he would chat a few moments, and be on his way again....

He heard her step, just as he had known he would, and roused himself, and looked at the clock to see if it had been more than five minutes, but he could not see the clock very clearly.... He must be half blind with sleep.... He got up out of his chair and went close to it, and saw that it was twenty minutes before seven, and the room was soft with dusk.

“I’ve been gone a fearful time,” said Mrs. Golinda, regretfully. “My wicked little horse elected not to be caught and put in the barn, and we’ve been holding a sort of field day all over the home ranch!” She stirred the fire to brightness and threw on fresh wood. “I hope you helped yourself to tea and toast and found something to read—or did you just rest and get warmed through again?”

“I just rested and basked,” said Dean Wolcott, gratefully, “but I must be off now, for I won’t make Post’s before nine o’clock and—” he stopped aghast—“good heavens, my horse! I’ve left him standing in the fog, when he was—”

“Oh, but I put him up, directly I went out,” said his hostess, easily. “Of course you’re going to stop the night with us. What do you suppose Mateo—with his traditions of Spanish hospitality—would say to me if I confessed to having you here and letting you go? We can put you up quite nicely, and you can fancy what it means to us to have a house guest! Should you like to go to your room, now?”

She did not wait for him to answer but stepped briskly toward another door. “This way—and a step down! My funny little house is on four different levels, but I like it. Some day, when our ship comes in, we mean to have sleeping porches—but it takes a long time for a ship to come in, on this foggy coast—and to come ashore as high as this!” She laughed with entire contentment. “Hot water in the pitcher, and towels there, do you see? Perhaps I’d better light your candle—these tiny windows let in very little light after the sun sets.” She lighted a candle in a satiny brass candlestick and went away, and left him to the comfort of hot water and rough, clean towels, and presently he heard a hail from without and her glad answer, and then exchange of rippling Spanish.

Mateo Golinda was a rather small, middle-aged Spaniard with piercing eyes and a fine aquiline nose, and his welcome was as picturesque and colorful as if it had been given in his father’s native Valencia. Dean Wolcott remembered now, the things the doctor had told him of this household, and he drank the wine of astonishment. Margaret Burton had come into the Big Sur country on a sketching trip; she had left it only long enough to go home and tell her aghast and staggered family that she was to marry a Spanish rancher who spoke almost no English, to live with him on his difficult ranch, fifteen high and winding miles from a telephone. The young man had seen a generous portion of the world considering his years, and he came to regard this as the most remarkable marriage he had ever known; it could not, he felt, have succeeded so signally if either Margaret Burton or Mateo Golinda had brought less to it. They worked out-of-doors like peasants, both of them, like pioneers, but when they came into the silver-gray house they left the toil behind them; they came into a gentle world of candlelight and firelight, of shining brass and thin, old silver spoons, of limber-covered ancient Spanish books; probably nothing else would so have completed the picture for Dean Wolcott as to find the current number of the Atlantic Monthly in one of the Chinese chairs.

The supper was excellent and a beautiful and dignified dog sat a little withdrawn, watching his master worshipfully.

“Mateo,” said Mrs. Golinda, after Dean had noticed and commented upon him, “let us show Mr. Wolcott how seriously he takes his position. You see, Mr. Wolcott, Mateo had Lobo before he had me and Lobo wishes that point to be very clear. He likes me—he is even fond of me—but he considers me simply another of his master’s possessions, and a later and less important one.”

“Dame tu mano,” said the Spaniard, softly, reaching his brown and work-hardened hand across the table to his wife, who laid her own within it. Instantly the dog arose, the pupils of his golden eyes contracting, and went close to Margaret Golinda, growling. When she drew her hand away he ceased growling and wagged his plumy tail, slowly, approvingly, and after an instant, to make sure the incident would not be repeated, he returned to his place. “You see?” said his mistress, laughing. “Lobo likes women as many persons like dogs—‘in their place!’”

Dean Wolcott felt his throat tighten, suddenly, but it was not because of Lobo’s jealous fealty; it was because these people who had worked unceasingly for years to win a livelihood from their steep and stubborn acres, who had sometimes seen only each other for weeks on end, whose existence was narrow and circumscribed, according to the ordinary standard, had kept the gleam alight; still said—“Give me your hand.” And—good heavens—how they had given each other a hand, late and early, in good weather and bad weather, in rich seasons and barren seasons; it was sign and symbol. Now the ranch was almost clear; now Mateo Golinda spoke a careful and correct English and his wife a fluent Spanish; now, year by year, something of comfort was added, something of hardship was conquered. It was a thing to have seen; a thing to remember.

They set him on his way in the pearly morning, and not by look or word did Margaret Golinda betray her knowledge of his condition on arriving the day before. When he had tried the second time to explain she had stopped him again. “It was odd that you’d been thinking of that old thing—I expect you learned it in the grammar grades as I did?—for it had come into my mind just a few days ago, when I was watching the sheep for Mateo. One remembers the old things, in places like this!” And when he rode away they called after him to come soon again, to make them a regular port of call. There was no need to urge him; the weathered gray house on the high hill above the sea would always spell sanctuary to him; it would always be what he would have called, twenty years earlier, “King’s X!”

That afternoon he wrote to an old Harvard friend who lived in San Francisco and was ardently interested in a troop of Boy Scouts in one of the poorer portions of the city; he had stopped over with him for two days on his way to Monterey.

I want you to send me one of your boys for the rest of the summer [he wrote], for I find that the solitude I so earnestly wanted is being served to me in rather too large portions. I see that I want and need companionship, of a sort. But, please, don’t send me your prize lad, your huskiest and handiest Scout! I want instead the unlikeliest one in your troop. I want the most utter little gutter snipe you can lay hands on, and the most ignorant of the woods and wilds. What I need—which you have already guessed and I may as well confess—is a young person to whom I can exhibit my new-found wisdom; I want a trusting child who will look up to me and regard me as a brilliant and dashing admixture of Daniel Boone and Dan Beard and Bill Hart. Kindly ship same to me charges paid and I will at once remit!

His friend replied at once and told him, rather doubtfully, that in Elmer Bunty he had a youth who fulfilled all his specifications and more, but if, after a week or so, he found him more than he could stomach he might return him; the boy would be told that he was going for a fortnight only. He was an orphan and made his home, so-called, with a vinegar-visaged aunt and a mean and hectoring girl cousin; a really determined daddy longlegs could put him to flight. He—the friend of Dean Wolcott—had had something of a chore to make the aunt consent to the outing for Elmer; she had planned for him to spend his summer vacation in some gainful occupation, and he had only succeeded by painting a dark picture of the boy’s physical unfitness and the benefits which would unfailingly accrue to him. Not that the lady was unduly moved at that, but she had had, she asserted, more than her share of doctor’s bills for Elmer before—and she just taking him in and doing for him like he was her own, and precious little thanks for it, too! Dean Wolcott got a very sharp pen picture of Elmer’s aunt and he answered his friend immediately and told him to send the boy, and to tell his relative that he should receive a salary of ten dollars a week for such services as he might prove able to render, and that he would see that he sent the lion’s share home to her.

The boy arrived at Pfeiffer’s by stage a few days later. He was, he stated, thirteen, but it seemed improbable. He was thin to emaciation—pipe-stem arms and legs which dangled from his lean little torso as if they hardly belonged to it but had been carelessly hooked on—a hollow chest, huge, flanging ears which looked ready to fly away with his pinched small face and quite capable of doing it, friendly and frightened eyes, and gopher teeth, all of which he was never able to keep in his mouth at the same time.

He sat beside the good-natured driver, huddled in the corner of the seat and clinging desperately to the iron rod which supported the top of the stage, and the man told Dean that he didn’t believe the poor young one had shifted his position once since they had left Monterey.

“Hello, old top!” said Dean, robustly, swinging him to the ground. “Come along and meet Snort and Rusty, and your pony!” (He had succeeded in renting a small and amiable old horse for him from one of the ranchers.)

The boy went with him, setting his cramped legs stiffly to walk again. He kept the Ranger’s hand and shrank back against him when they came nearer the animals. “Does he bite?” he whispered when the Airedale rose languidly and approached him, sniffing indifferently. “Do—do they kick?” he wanted fearfully to know when he found himself within range of the horses’ heels.

“Never!” said the Ranger, cheerily. He tied Elmer’s bundle to his own saddle and lifted him on to the small horse. “Let’s see about these stirrups—must always have your stirrups right, Scout.” He adjusted them swiftly and capably. “Now, then, all set?”

“I g-guess so,” said Elmer Bunty, palely.

“We’re just going to walk our horses, this time—and lots of times till you get used to it. Then we’ll ‘Ride ’em, Cowboy!’ like they do in the movies, won’t we?”

“I g-guess so,” said the Scout again.

Dean sprang into his saddle and spoke to the two horses, and they set off at a brisk walk, and instantly the boy leaned forward and clutched the pommel of his small saddle desperately with both thin hands.

“Oh, come, Scout, that will never do—hanging on that way! That’s what we call (‘we,’ he grinned to himself) ‘pulling leather,’ and any regular cow-puncher would rather break his neck than be caught doing it! It simply isn’t done in these circles, old top. Just try letting go, and holding your reins, and keeping the balls of your feet in the stirrups, and sitting easy—like this, see? You can’t fall off, and even if you could, I’m right here to catch you!”

The Scout reluctantly unclasped his small claws and sat erect. He was the color of thriftily skimmed milk, his eyes rolled with terror, and he kept swallowing hard.

Snort, impatient at the snail’s pace, pranced and curvetted, but the boy’s mount went sedately, and Dean kept up a running fire of casual talk, and at the end of ten minutes he could see that his lad was breathing more easily.

“That’s right,” he said, cordially. “Now you’re letting yourself go! Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it fun?”

“Yes, sir,” said the Scout. After an instant, nodding toward the drooping head of his steed, he inquired, “What’s his name?”

“His name is Mabel,” answered Dean, gravely.

“Oh...” said Elmer, pondering. “Is he—” he hesitated delicately, “is he a lady horse?”

“He is a lady horse. Almost, I should say, by the gentleness of this present performance, a perfect lady.”

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then, “Mabel is a nice, pretty name,” said the child, thoughtfully. “I think it’s a nicer name than Edna ... Edna,” he added, after an instant of burdened silence, “is my cousin’s name....”

“I see,” said the Ranger. “Now, do you think you would care to have Mabel walk just a trifle faster?”

“Would he—stop again if I—if I didn’t care for it?”

“Instantly, when you pull on the reins and say ‘whoa,’ firmly and decisively. It’s just like putting on a brake, you know. All set?” He chirruped to Mabel who changed from a walk to a languid trot.

At once, involuntarily, the Scout clung to his pommel as to the Rock of Ages, but after a shamed moment he let go of it and sat up again.

“Snappy work!” said the Ranger, cordially, once more.

“I g-guess,” said Elmer Bunty, a faint and furtive pink coming into his small face, speaking jerkily with the motion of the clumsy old horse, “I g-guess Edna c-couldn’t c-call me ’Fraid-Cat if she s-saw me now!”

There was the most astonishing amount of satisfaction, Dean Wolcott was to discover, to be derived from the presence of an admittedly inferior and worshipful companion. Never before had he been looked up to in this fashion. He had been quite frank in writing to his San Francisco friend, but he had not known, then, how much he wanted the qualities he was ordering. A Wolcott among Wolcotts, he had been treated as one of them, of course; a Wolcott had also been treated like a Wolcott at Dos Pozos but in a very different sense indeed; to Elmer Bunty he was the final word in horsemanship, in marksmanship, in woodcraft, in courage and wide wisdom. The young man, holding himself up to his own hearty mirth, nevertheless enjoyed it shamelessly. One thing he had not counted upon, however, was his immediate fondness for the boy; it was odd that so unbeautiful and unpromising a youth should seem to dive headlong into his affections, but this was exactly what he had done. It was a positive pleasure to feed him until his pallid skin grew visibly more taut, to tuck him up at night with an extra blanket pulled high about his meager neck, to guide and guard him in his timid steps forward into a red-blooded world.

Rusty, the Airedale, adopted him at once. Elmer had never had a dog; his aunt disliked and disapproved of them on sound, economic principles and held, quite reasonably, that they made extra work and “dirtied up a house,” and he had not known how to go about the business of conciliating Rusty, but he had not needed to know; Rusty had known for both of them. He still treated the new Ranger with a grudging civility, but the Scout was taken into his heart on the second day. He taught him to play; he unlocked starved chambers in his flat little chest, and in the short evenings when Dean Wolcott read aloud from stout and hearty boy-books he charged contentedly beside the lad, his chin on the small sharp knee.

CHAPTER XI

THE middle of July Ginger’s Aunt Fan began writing her and begging her earnestly to come to San Francisco and visit her at the St. Agnes. She was lonely and blue, she wrote, and although she ate less than a microbe she now tipped the scales at a hundred and seventy-three pounds, and a New York friend had written her that Jim Featherstone was “stepping out” with a woman young enough to be his daughter—not that she cared, of course; her warm wish was to see old Jim happy, for he was a prince if ever there was one, but not to have him make a fool of himself.

Ranch affairs were too numerous and pressing when the first letter came, but after three of them, and a breathless long distance telephone call, the girl put the reins into Estrada’s brown and weathered hands and went north. It had been a hard and busy season and she found herself, oddly, a little tired; it was not like her to be tired. She would like a week or two of brisk San Francisco climate, a lecture, a play; perhaps, most of all, she would be glad to be away from ’Rome Ojeda’s ardent importunities. She was quite sure that she was never going to marry ’Rome, but he was just as sure that she was, and was beginning to get boisterous and vehement about it, and was drinking a good deal, and she was rather worn with the struggle. Sometimes she thought it might be simpler to marry him ... but she knew that it wouldn’t be anything else.

This time her Aunt Fan met her without a criticism of her clothes. “Well,” she said, looking her over pleasantly, “I’ll say this—if you didn’t get anything else out of that—that Wolcott episode, you learned how to dress, and that’s something! I suppose everything you bought in the east is as good as new; that’s what it is to be a string-bean figure. I’ve burst through every rag of mine like an elephant through a jungle; I expect any day now I’ll have to get a larger apartment! My dear,” she shook her intricately waved head, “you simply can’t imagine how lucky you are—never having to go into shops and ask for ‘out-sizes’; never have to let saleswomen as flat as paper dolls show you their ‘stylish stouts’ and patronize you! I’m about discouraged, Ginger. And that’s one reason”—she spoke more briskly—“why I’m going down to the doctor’s camp. He’s asked me, year after year, but you know how I hate the country; ranches are bad enough, but camps— Well, I know I’d lose there—rough fare, and exercise. The doctor says I’d lose.”

Ginger tried to be grave and sympathetic. She thought her Aunt Fan would enjoy it, and it was surely only right to go, when the doctor had asked her so often. “And you mustn’t let me keep you, Aunt Fan, if you want to go at once. I intended to stay only a few days with you.”

Mrs. Featherstone opened her prominent blue eyes. “But I want you to go with me, child! You must go with me!”

“Oh, Aunt Fan, that’s dear of you, but I don’t believe I can—possibly.”

“Nonsense! Of course you can—what’s Estrada for, I’d like to know? The doctor particularly wanted you to come, too. He says there’s a lively bunch of young people this season.”

“I know,” said Ginger. “He wrote and asked me, but I told him I was too busy.” She had the feeling that she did not care to be with a bunch of lively young people; she did not feel like a lively young person herself; she felt like a serious-minded proprietor of a big and busy ranch, and she meant to go east again in the winter and feel a little like Mary Wiley.

“Well, you’re not too busy—that’s too absurd for words, Ginger—and you are going! Let’s see—this is Tuesday. You can telephone Manuela to send your riding things straight to the Big Sur, and whatever else you think you’ll need, and we’ll go direct from here, say, Friday—I’d like to get a facial and a henna rinse before I go off to the wilderness. The doctor said he’d drive in to Monterey for us.”

“Oh, Aunt Fan, you go without me, please! I—some way, I’m not in the mood for it.”

“‘Mood for it,’” mocked her aunt, severely. “Since when have you been having moods, I’d like to inquire? You talk like a girl in a sentimental novel. No; I won’t stir a step without you, Ginger McVeagh, and if you have any gratitude, after the way I traipsed across the continent with you last year—” then, as her niece looked dangerously unmoved, she came closer to her and spoke in a breathless whisper. “Listen, Ginger, I haven’t told you the real reason, and I didn’t intend to, but you’re so stubborn I see I’ll have to.” Aunt Fan had out-sizes in speech as well as in hose. “The fact is, I’ve made up my mind to—make up my mind about the doctor!”

Ginger frowned. “To make up your mind—I don’t understand, Aunt Fan.”

“Then you’re a ninny-hammer if you don’t,” said her aunt, complacently. “You must know—every one else in California does—that he’s admired me for years—before I married Jim—even before I married Henry! I feel this way about it; I’m not getting any younger; if ever I’m going to—take another step, now’s the time. I wouldn’t make a spectacle of myself as I hear Jim Featherstone’s doing, but a suitable, dignified—I tell you, Ginger,” sudden tears shone in her very blue eyes, “there’s nothing funny about the last years of your life alone. I shall be all right for ten years more, and then—fancywork, chimney corners, solitaire!” She began to cry a little.

Her niece put an arm about her as far as it would go. “Oh, don’t cry, Aunt Fan! You’ll always have me, you know. We’ll do a lot of things together—travel, spend winters in the east—”

But her aunt shook her head vigorously, producing a small, pale pink handkerchief and delicately drying her tears. “It isn’t the same, as you’ll know some day. Well, will you or won’t you come with me?”

“I’ll come with you for a little while, Aunt Fan; a week, perhaps.”

It was true that she owed her plump relative something in the way of escort and companionship, after her good offices of last winter, but the keynote of the pilgrimage rather shocked and startled her. She thought her aunt must be mistaken; the keen, splendid, out-of-doors doctor, and Aunt Fan tapping endlessly on high heels down restaurant floors—breathing always steam-heated air, knowing as little about a horse as a zebra—

“All right, then—go and telephone old Manuela this minute, and I’ll drop the doctor a line. My—when I think what it may mean to me, what I may lose—” she went with heavy swiftness, taking her short, chugging steps, to a tiny pink-and-gold writing desk, and it seemed to the watching Ginger that she was considerably keener about what she might lose than what she might gain.

The doctor, brown and hard and happy, met their train at Monterey and motored them down to his camp. It was in full swing: thirty persons sat down to meals together in the big screened dining room—pleasant, poised people from San José and San Francisco, people who had achieved and arrived and were comfortably slackening the pace—but for the rest of the days and evenings they were scattered. The doctor, undisputed chief, by right of discovery and conquest of the wilderness, captained the hunts, the long rides over the mountain trails, the daybreak fishing trips; the judge rallied two teams for lusty morning games of volley ball; an ardent golfer found a meadow where enthusiasts might improve their form; the women spent long, soft afternoons over intricate needlework for an orphans’ home bazaar; there were tables of bridges, hammocks and magazines, picnics at the beach, stories by the camp fire, dancing in the evening.

Ginger knew most of the older people, but the three or four girls were strangers to her, and it is doubtful if they welcomed her with any deep degree of pleasure; everything that they were—in riding, in pictorialness, Virginia McVeagh, the far-famed “Ginger” of Dos Pozos, was—and more. She was the doctor’s prime favorite; his keen eyes rested on her in affectionate approval. She was quieter than she used to be, he believed, but it was a sure and serene quiet, not a shy one.

They had been discussing a two days’ riding and camping trip and a very blond girl leaned forward in her chair at table and called down to Ginger. “Listen, Miss McVeagh, I want to give you fair warning about the new Forest Ranger! I saw him first—I’ve got my fingers crossed!” She held up two slim digits, twisted. “Ah ... wait till you see him! Wallie Reed and Tommy Meighan and Valentino rolled into one! We’ll never be the same again, any of us! Even Laura”—Laura, a brown-eyed beauty, was newly and patently betrothed—“has missed a mail or two! He’s—”

“Now, now,” said the doctor, rather quickly, “he’s a nice, likely lad, but nice, likely lads aren’t any treat for Ginger—she has a whole landscape full of them, down south. Well, she can judge for herself; she’s going to ride out to Cold Spring with me this afternoon, and meet him and get our camp-fire permit.”

“Oh, doctor!” wailed the very blond girl. “That’s playing favorites! You know Miss McVeagh looks as if she had invented horseback riding—it gives her a terrible handicap!”

“Won’t you come, too, Miss Milton?” Ginger wanted calmly to know.

“I should say not! I won’t be a mob scene. But it’s not fair. I shall stay in my cabin all afternoon and think up ways in which I may outshine you.”

“I’m sure it won’t take you long,” said Ginger, amiably. She felt a great deal older than the chattering, pretty creature; she felt older and wiser than all of them—immeasurably older and wiser than the rapt-eyed Laura.

She was ready at one to ride with the doctor, but when she walked down to the corral, her Aunt Fan, panting beside her, she found Dr. Mayfield putting her saddle on his own horse.

“Ginger, I’m going to desert you,” he said. “I don’t know whether Miss Fanny has confessed to you or not, but she’s inveigled me into a game of bridge.”

“My dear, I simply have to play bridge after the lunches I eat here, or I’d take a nap, and that’s fatal! I’ve been shamefully deceived about this place, anyway—‘camp fare!’ Better food than you get at the Ritz, and much more fattening—hot biscuits—honey—”

“But, by way of apology, I’m letting you ride Ted,” said the doctor, handsomely. There was nothing beyond that in his gift. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind riding Ted?” Ginger smiled at him, putting a respectful hand on the big beast’s cheek.

“Mind going alone, Miss! And you’re to take this—” he strapped a belt about her waist and slipped his pistol into it.

“Of course I don’t mind going alone, but what is this for?”

“Oh, there have been several mountain lions about, recently, and it’s just as well—not that any mountain lion living could catch Ted, of course, even if it wanted to!” He nodded approvingly as she swung herself surely to the tall steed’s back. “You remember the way, of course—up the Government Trail to ours, where we went yesterday, on over the hill, past Post’s old barn—”

“I know,” said the girl, securely. “How long should it take me?”

“Well, Ted’s admittedly the fastest walker in the state, and part of the time you’ll be able to let him out, but it’ll be two hours, each way; you’ll be back by five-thirty, I should say, if you don’t linger too long at the spring.”

“I sha’n’t linger,” said Ginger, with dignity. “He won’t keep me waiting, I hope. I am just to ask him for the camp-fire permits?” She turned Ted toward the mountain.

“Yes, he’ll have them made out, and he’ll be on time. Oh, yes—and ask him to come down for supper with us, Saturday night, if he can, and dance.”

Ginger nodded and rode away, and the doctor and her Aunt Fan stood looking after her.

“Gad, Miss Fanny,” he said, ruefully, taking out his cheerful red camp handkerchief and wiping his moist brow, “I wonder what she’ll say to us when she comes back?”

“She’ll say ‘Thank you,’ if she has any gratitude,” said Mrs. Featherstone, severely. “Now I’ll go and get my nap!”

Ginger had said truly that she did not mind riding alone. Much as she liked and looked up to the doctor, she was not quite comfortable when she was alone with him; she found his keen eyes too searching, and she was always a little afraid he might say in his brisk fashion, “Now, then, Ginger, suppose you tell me all about it!”

It was a joy to ride Ted, to feel his great bulk and power beneath her, like a stout ship, like an eight-cylindered machine, and the afternoon was clear and jewel-bright. The inevitable after-luncheon languor left her when she drew rein on the first crest; the Ted horse had his second wind and they went on with smooth speed. Once, about midway of her trip, she figured, the horse stopped short, his ears twitching, his delicate nostrils distending; her heart quickened a beat at what she saw before her on the trail; lion’s tracks, positive, unmistakable; a big one, clearly. She leaned forward and patted the shining neck. “All right, Ted; I see it. Maybe we’ll get him!”

But the prints of the big pads left the trail abruptly and went off into the brush—for a hapless fawn, doubtless, and Ginger and the doctor’s horse went forward without adventure, until they espied, half an hour later, another horseman coming toward them; the Ranger, she thought, had ridden on from the spring, and she was sorry; it was, she remembered, the clearest and coldest water in all those mountains and she was thirsty and warm.

Immediately, however, she saw that the figure was that of a child on a small old horse. He kicked the animal into a livelier pace at sight of her, and saluted her graciously. “How do you do?” he said in a thin and piping voice. “I’m not the Ranger. I expect you thought I was, at first, didn’t you?—but I’m not. He’s waiting at Cold Spring. I’m his Scout, and I rode on alone to meet the doctor, because I’m not afraid of anything, hardly, and I ride everywhere alone, almost. Where is the doctor?”

“The doctor didn’t come,” said Ginger, smiling at him. She liked boys enormously, and this one was engaging. “He sent me instead to get the camp-fire permits.”

“Gee! He let you ride Ted, didn’t he? I guess you must be a pretty good rider.”

“Pretty good,” admitted Ginger, modestly.

“I’m a pretty good rider, too, now,” said the Scout, frankly. “I guess maybe this horse isn’t quite as good as Ted, but he’s a very good horse. His name is Mabel. He”—he leaned toward her and sunk his treble a tone or two—“he’s a lady horse. Well, I guess we’d better be going back to Cold Spring.” He turned the lady horse in the trail, looking over his shoulder to explain to her. “I don’t know if you understand that you must always turn your horse with his nose toward the cañon—then he can see what he’s doing. If you turned him the other way, he might back over; many a horse and rider’s been lost that way.”

“I’ll remember that,” said the girl, gravely, “and thank you for telling me.”

“That’s all right,” he said, easily. “I guess there’s a good many things I could tell you about horses and camping. Of course”—he was painstakingly honest about it—“the Ranger taught me. I lived in the city, and a person can’t learn much there. The Ranger knows—everything.”

“Does he, really?”

“You betcher. He can ride like anything and he can shoot like—like anything! He was a soldier in the War, and I’ll bet he killed two or three hundred Germans himself. But he doesn’t like to kill things, the Ranger doesn’t. He won’t shoot deer—only rattlesnakes and varmints. But he can shoot—oh, boy!” He glanced back at the shabby Airedale who was heeling sedately behind Mabel. “I guess you didn’t notice my dog. His name is Rusty.”

“Hello, Rusty!” said Ginger, politely.

“Of course he isn’t really my dog, but I call him my dog. He likes me better than he does the Ranger, but you ought to see how Snort loves the Ranger.”

“Snort?” she said sharply. “Why—oh, of course—this must have been the man the doctor wanted him for!” It was strange how the sound of that horse’s name, all these miles away, and after thirteen months, could make her heart turn over. She had been thankful to persuade ’Rome Ojeda to let him go because she hadn’t wanted ever to see him again; now, it appeared, she must see him again.

“Look!” said the Scout as they rounded a sharp curve in the trail. “You can see Cold Spring from here and the—” he stopped, catching his breath, pointing. “Looky!” he gasped. “It’s a mountain lion, chasing a fawn! Oh, gee ... gee—”

Cold Spring was in an elbow of the trail—it was like an arm sharply crooked to hold it. Snort, his reins over his head, cropped the sparse, green grass; the figure of a man lounged at ease. It was an entirely peaceful picture. But, just beyond, in the opposite direction from that in which the girl and the Scout were coming, there was no peace, but war; relentless war of extermination by the strong upon the weak. A young fawn, breathless, almost exhausted, ran stumbling and swaying, a pitifully few paces before a lion, long, lithe, trotting easily, sure of its prey.

Ginger, watching from above, saw the scene unwinding before her like a film. The horse flung up his head and trumpeted wildly and the man, catching up the rifle from the ground beside him, sprang to his feet. The baby deer saw him; it hesitated, staggering, its great eyes wide with terror, its mouth open: before it was the trail, and the lion gaining steadily, inexorably, and to its left, just off the trail—Man—Man with the black and shining stick which barked fire and death.

“Come!” said the man, softly, too low for the girl to hear, but the fawn heard him. “Come! Come on!”

The little creature turned from the trail and ran weakly to the Ranger and collapsed in a quivering heap at his feet. Instantly, above it, his rifle spoke: the lion leaped, twisting, into the air and fell to the ground, writhing, uttering a wild, unearthly cry.

“Oh, good work, Ranger!” cried Ginger, half sobbing. She spoke to Ted and plunged heedlessly over the edge of the bank, cutting down without waiting to take the winding trail. She had never seen a surer shot; she had never seen grim tragedy changed in a flash to peace and security, and no scene in a New York play and no passage in a symphony had ever moved her more. Her eyes were wet and her lips were trembling. “Oh, fine, Ranger!” she said, unsteadily. “Good work, Ranger!”

And then Dean Wolcott, turning round from his inspection of the fallen lion, faced her.

CHAPTER XII

DEAN WOLCOTT had many times—on his solitary rides, in his cabin, after the Scout had gone to sleep—rehearsed his next meeting with Ginger McVeagh, planned it, pictured it, set the stage: never had he dreamed of such utterly satisfying scenery, such glorious action; riding a gentled Snort after cattle at Dos Pozos before the respectful gaze of the girl and ’Rome Ojeda was a slow and pallid film beside this!

He had wheeled sharply at sound of her voice, and now they were looking at each other. His face flamed scarlet, but the bright color slowly drained out of Ginger’s and left it in golden, creamy pallor. They held the pose for a stunned instant, the man, rifle in hand, standing over the beautiful dead beast, the girl, wet-eyed and breathing fast, erect upon the doctor’s splendid horse.

“I didn’t know you were ... at the camp.” He heard himself speaking.

“I didn’t know you were the Ranger,” Ginger said, unsteadily.

It seemed then as if they had said all there was to say, and a pause stretched out silently between them. It was broken by the Scout who had slipped swiftly from the Mabel horse and was kneeling on the ground, his ecstatic arms about the fawn. It was panting and struggling, its dappled sides heaving painfully in the battle for breath, and its big eyes rolled in sick panic.

“Oh, Ranger, can I keep him? Can I keep him and tame him and have him for a pet? Can I?” The boy shrilled into their silence. “Oh, say, can I? I betcher Aunt Lizzie would let me keep a baby deer, maybe! We got a back yard! Can I, Ranger?”

There was rescue and relief in walking over to him, in addressing himself wholly to him, his back toward the girl. “Well, Scout, you could, of course, but I think it would be a pretty mean trick to play on him, don’t you?”

The kindling eagerness in Elmer’s face died hard. “But—if I was awful good to him and fed him—’n’ everything? And no mountain lions would ever chase him in the city! Oh, Ranger, can I?”

Dean Wolcott thought that perhaps the girl would speak—he remembered her hot convictions on the subject of captive wild things—but she did not; perhaps she was likewise thankful for this instant of shelter.

“You can put your rope around his neck and see how he takes it, Scout,” he said. “See if you can get him to drink, first of all. He’s too weak to run away, yet.” Then he turned back to Ginger. “Will you dismount?”

“Thank you, no,” she said.

Even through the mists of amazement he sensed a difference ... what was it? Intonation? Phrasing? It was too tiny a thing to notice, really, but hadn’t she always said—“No, thanks”—with a certain slouchiness of articulation? He could not know that this was one of Mary Wiley’s small, smooth habits of speech.

“Then, may I give you a drink?” He pulled out his folding cup.

“Please! I remember Cold Spring; I’ve been remembering it, thirstily, for the last hour.”

Gravely, he knelt and rinsed his cup and filled it and carried it to her, and gravely she drank, and the stillness about them was charged and quivering. If they had been alone— But they were not alone. The Scout called upon them in a thrilled whisper to revel with him in the spectacle of the fawn drinking from his cupped hands, and again they were grateful to him, thankful for him. They watched absorbedly while he got his hair rope from the neck of Mabel, the lady horse, and put it, shaking with excitement, about the slim little throat of the young deer.

Then Ginger turned her gaze to the mountain lion, round which Rusty, the Airedale, was walking, the hair standing up in a line from the crown of his head to the tip of his tail. He was emitting low, ferocious growls. “That was a good shot,” she said, levelly.

“Thank you,” said Dean Wolcott, pleasantly. “The element of surprise was the only doubt; one could hardly miss a target of that size, at that distance.”

Another pause came down out of the blue and enveloped them thickly, and again the boy and the little wild beast filled up the stage. The fawn had staggered to its feet at the feel of the rope and now, refreshed by the water, by the minutes of rest, it began to battle this fresh terror.

“Careful, Scout! If he gets away from you with that rope he’ll be out of luck; he’ll hang himself in the brush within an hour!” Dean’s voice was sharp.

“Oh, gee—will he? Oh, golly! Gee! Then—then help me to let him loose!”

“I’ll help you!” Ginger was out of the saddle, down beside him, her arms about the madly struggling body. It had been more than she could bear, Dean Wolcott had calculated surely. “I’ll hold him. Get your rope off. And boy, Scout”—she looked at him earnestly across the head of the fawn, just as he slipped the hair rope clumsily off—“never keep anything—tied or in a cage! Never keep anything—that—that doesn’t want to stay!”

“I guess I won’t,” said Elmer Bunty, soberly. “I thought I could take awful good care of him, but— Look! Looky!”

The baby deer was trotting unsteadily back in the direction from which he had come, making all the speed his weakness and weariness would allow, but at the bend in the trail he paused and looked back over his shoulder; he stood there, looking back at them for a long instant.

“He’s thanking you,” said Ginger, gently. “He’s thanking you—both.”

Now the boy was free to give his undivided attention to the dead lion, and he joined the Airedale in his sentry go, and now Ginger was aware of being off her horse, aware that she was—good heavens, what had the doctor said about “not lingering”? He had known, of course, and planned it all, and Aunt Fan had known—and perhaps the very blond girl had known, and the whole camp—the whole gay, jovial, joking camp had known.... She blushed, swiftly and scorchingly, and sprang into her saddle.

“I must go,” she said, curtly. “It’s a good two hours—”

She gave Ted his head, and he sprang forward on the trail. She could not even say good-by.

“Oh—wait!” Dean Wolcott called after her, but she pretended not to hear. She was in a hot fury; she had been tricked and fooled; this was why Aunt Fan had brought her down here; they were all waiting for her now at camp, talking her over, laughing, conjecturing. “Ted!” She flecked the shining flank with her ramal (sacrilege, this!) and they sped fleetly up the trail. She heard him following her; Ted heard, too, and laid back his ears; there would be no passing him on the trail—no catching up with him.

She could not forbear a look behind; she must see him on Snort; it was not enough to hear the thundering hoofs, to imagine him. The instant she turned her head he waved his hand with something—a paper—a card in it.

“Your—permits!” he called. “The doctor’s camp-fire permits.”

Then she must wait, pulling in the mettlesome Ted, furious at herself for forgetting, for betraying her confused bewilderment. The crisping color stayed in her face, but she had a cool hold on her voice. “Thank you—I’m sorry. Seeing the lion, and the fawn—it went out of my mind—”

“Naturally,” said the Ranger, gravely. He handed her the permits, and he did it slowly, filling up his eyes with the sight of her. It was he who wore the corduroy now; Ginger was in creamy linen, smartly cut, with a scarlet band on her linen hat and a soft scarlet tie under the rolling collar of her sport shirt; she was more radiant, more glowing, more breath-takingly lovely, even, than he had remembered, and he had remembered a great deal.

Then, just to make entirely clear the fact that she was wholly at her ease, that there were, for her, at least, no stinging memories, the girl said pleasantly—“Snort is in fine condition, isn’t he?”

And the man, quite as coolly, made answer, “Yes; he’s a great horse—I’ve enjoyed him.” Then, as if to paraphrase ’Rome Ojeda’s drawling words on that gray and baleful morning of the cattle drive, he added, slowly, “But I’m thinking of changing his name. You see ... he doesn’t ... any more!”

It was her turn, now, during his leisurely sentence, to snatch a fuller look at him, to sense the breadth and vigor, the brown and vehement power of him; he looked older, in the way of poise and serenity, yet more boyish—younger, winningly young, and it seemed as she looked at him, meeting the eagerness leashed in his eyes, as if some force beyond their stiff young wills must pull them down off their horses and push them back into each other’s arms.

She did not answer what he had said about Snort, but she was not aware that she had not done so, for she had paid full and instant tribute in her own mind, and she knew that she must go now if she meant to go at all. She nodded, and spoke to Ted, and he sprang forward, but before he had gone a dozen lengths she had to halt again; she could have wept with rage at herself, but it would be intolerable to go back to camp and confess to a forgotten message.

She called after him, not “Dean,” not the ridiculous “Mr. Wolcott,” just a hail; but it stopped him instantly. “The doctor”—he could feel the emphasis she put on the two words—it seemed to make the doctor stand out, unique in his strange desire—“the doctor hopes you will come to supper at the camp Saturday night, and stay to dance.”

He asked her to thank the doctor and to say that he would try to come. Then they went steadily on in their opposite ways and neither one of them looked back again, and Ginger had almost two hours (Ted made even better speed on the home trail) in which to get herself thoroughly in hand before she met the campers. It suited her to find them all assembled at the “Civic Center” as they called the cleared space about the camp fire. The mail had just been brought over from Pfeiffer’s, and they had all had their tingling cold showers and made their bluff, informal toilets for dinner, and there was a chattering over letters and magazines which ceased instantly as Ginger rode up. She might be imagining a sort of electric quiet on the part of the whole group, she told herself, but she was not imagining anything about the doctor and her Aunt Fan.

The doctor paused in the middle of his gesture in handing a plump letter to the betrothed girl, and his eyes twinkled uncontrollably, and Mrs. Featherstone put her pink sport handkerchief to her lips. “Well,” said Dr. Mayfield, genially, “did you meet the Ranger? And did you get our permits?”

“Yes,” said Ginger. “I met the Ranger at Cold Spring, and here are your permits.” She leaned from the saddle to hand them to him. Then, addressing herself to the others, smiling a little at the very blond girl who was holding up two crossed fingers for her attention—“And it was a very nice surprise! I find your Ranger is an old friend. Yes; he was Aleck’s best friend—over there. He was with him—on the last day.” (Let them laugh now, if they could! But they didn’t laugh; they smiled at her and murmured kind little fragments of sentences, and she went on.) “And he made Aunt Fan and me a visit at Dos Pozos last summer. You’ll be glad to see how husky he’s grown in this work, Aunt Fan!” Mary Wiley could not have done it more handily, with nicer values. “And it was very thrilling—I saw him shoot a mountain lion! I’ll tell you all about it at supper, but I must fly now, if I’m to have my shower!”

She delivered Ted over to his master with a warm word of homage, and ran to her cabin and went into it and locked both doors. She didn’t want her Aunt Fan’s prominent blue eyes. Swiftly, an eye on the little traveling clock in its case of scarlet leather, she pulled off her clothes and jumped under the shower, and her slim brown body was shivering before the nipping water touched it.

CHAPTER XIII

AT supper time she told them, graphically, and with full and generous credit to the Ranger, about the mountain lion and the fawn, and was entirely amiable about repeating in detail to any one who wished to hear more.

She said to the doctor, while they were at table, lifting her voice a little over the neighboring talk, that she was delighted to see Dean Wolcott so robust. This life must agree tremendously with him. How long—she was brightly, coolly interested—had he been in the west?

“Well, he’s been west of Boston for almost a year, I should say, what with his work at the School of Forestry, and riding in Wyoming, and all, and he’s been here in the Big Sur since early in June.”

The doctor was a little puzzled; he did not quite understand and he did not at all like this hard serenity; she had not the look of a girl reunited to her lover, he told himself rather anxiously. Later on, when they were settling to bridge, he managed a worried word aside to Mrs. Featherstone.

“I wonder, Miss Fanny, if we bungled it?”

“Certainly not,” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan, comfortably. “She’ll have to stand off and act like her great-grandmother Valdés for awhile, of course—that’s part of the picture, but I’m not worrying—not about them, at least!” She reached a plump hand into a candy box on the next table. “Doctor, can’t you make it a camp misdemeanor for those girls to leave this stuff around?—Chocolate creams the size of young sofa cushions—”

And when she and her niece had gone to their joint cabin, three hours later, and the girl maintained her cool serenity, she rode blithely over it.

“All right, my dear! Keep it up! I glory in your spunk. But don’t you ever think you’re putting anything over on your Aunt Frances May!”

Dean Wolcott came to supper on Saturday night. The doctor said he was sorry he had not thought to include the little Scout, but the Ranger shook his head. “No, I’ve parked him at the cottage with Rusty, the Airedale, inside and the Mabel horse saddled and ready in case he has to do a hasty Paul Revere to get me. He’s reading Pontiac, Chief of the Ottawas, and listening for the telephone, and reflecting, chestily, that Edna couldn’t call him a ’Fraid-Cat if she saw him now. Edna is a slightly older cousin who has been a great help to her mother in making life miserable for him.”

“I’m simply mad about him,” the very blond girl whispered to Ginger. She was wearing a baby blue organdie and looked like the fairest of all the very young angels, and she had a slight lisp which one felt she had not made very stern efforts to eradicate. “I adore the way he talks, and the things he says—and that golden, patent-leather effect of hair—oh, and the way he carries himself, and everything!”

“Aside from that, you don’t admire him especially, I gather,” said Ginger, smiling carefully at her. She felt like a swarthy gypsy beside her, and crudely strong and weathered.

Dean asked the very blond girl for the first dance, and Ginger for the second, and the betrothed girl with the dreaming eyes for the third, and he did not dance with Ginger again after that, but divided himself among the rest, with two or three extras with the pale blue organdie. Ginger knew and was sure that he knew that the doctor and her aunt and some of the others were watching them keenly, and she held her Scotch chin at a firm angle, and her Spanish mouth did not look in the least as it had that day upon Aleck’s bridge. She asked him if he had been able to save the skin of the mountain lion and was cordially pleased to hear that it was in excellent shape, and had been sent into San José to be mounted. Dean inquired for her henchmen at Dos Pozos with especial emphasis on Estrada, to whom he sent his remembrances.

If the contact set their hearts to galloping as Snort had done in the historic runaway, there was no visible evidence of it. They danced beautifully together, and Dean applauded enthusiastically for an encore, and they finished it out, and then he relinquished her to a gray-haired, black-eyed gallant whose heels had remained as light as his heart, and sat chatting pleasantly with Mrs. Featherstone. Almost at once he was aware that she and her niece had spent the greater portion of the winter in the far east, and when he went away to dance again he said bitterly to himself:

“Well, that does settle it. Months in the east, and never a sign, never a word—” and he asked the Fra Angelico angel in the blue organdie to walk down to the creek in the moonlight after their next fox trot together.

And Ginger, for her part, had told herself a hundred times, “He has been here since early in June; he has never let me know; it is simply over, that’s all; finished between us,” and she wondered just how soon she could reasonably and with dignity persuade Aunt Fan to go back to town.

Before the Ranger left that evening the doctor had persuaded him to go with them on a riding trip, or rather, to let them time their excursion with his regular ride to Slate’s Springs. The very blond girl was to go; she had had a riding suit made by the smartest tailor in San Francisco for just such an occasion as this, and—last and greatest wonder of the world—Mrs. Featherstone was to go. The doctor had told her seriously that the heroism of her diet must be supplemented by exercise if she meant to melt her too too solid flesh—strenuous exercise, not chugging down to the camp gate in her high heels and short vamps after supper—and she had dared two or three very brief equestrian outings on old Sam.

Ginger was amazed. “I think it’s sporting of you, Aunt Fan, but I don’t think you realize how hard it’s going to be—and the doctor doesn’t realize how soft you are! You keep telling that you lead an active life, and he believes you, but if he knew that you think it’s activity to walk from the St. Agnes to the Palace Hotel for lunch—”

“Now, don’t be a crape hanger, my child,” said her aunt, severely. “Just because you’re out of sorts yourself—honestly, Ginger, the way you let Dean Wolcott be gobbled up alive by that little, pale blue string bean—”

Ginger was brushing her mane of black hair, and it hung over her head and down before her face in a thick curtain. Her voice came through it, muffled but wholly amiable, “He seems to be enjoying it, doesn’t he?”

“Seems, of course! That’s just it. Any man with the spirit of a caterpillar— Do you expect him to sit in a corner and twiddle his thumbs until—”

“I expect him to do just as he’s doing,” said her niece, pleasantly. She was giving her hair, it appeared, an especially thorough brushing.

“Ginger,” said Mrs. Featherstone, sniffing, “Ginger! I guess we’ll have to get another nickname for you. Very weak Lemon Extract ... Vanilla....”

The girl flung up her head and the black mane swung back over her shoulders, thick and shining. Her face was a little flushed. “I’m worrying about your riding to Slate’s, Aunt Fan. I’m positive it will be too much for you.”

“Well, I don’t say I’ll enjoy it,” Mrs. Featherstone conceded. “That isn’t the idea; I shall take it as I would take a dose of medicine.”

“But you can’t swallow it down with one brave gulp, Aunt Fan! You haven’t any idea what it will be like, hours and hours—and hours! Three days in the saddle, and one of the nights you’ll camp out and sleep on the ground—”

“I’m not going to sleep on the ground; the doctor’s loaning me his pneumatic-cushioned sleeping bag!” Then, as Ginger still shook her head, “I’ll tell you, dearie, it’s this way. I haven’t quite made up my mind about the doctor yet, but I’m making it up, and if I do—well, I must learn to like the sort of things he likes, mustn’t I?” She finished very sweetly, with a great deal of wistful earnestness in her blue eyes.

“Well, I wish I could follow you with an ambulance, that’s all,” said her niece, darkly.

The doctor was much surprised and a little hurt to find that Ginger was going to stay in camp and not make the ride with them, but she was very logical about it. She knew his well-known preference for taking only a small party; more than six made a cumbersome excursion, he held—they were only as fast as the slowest horse in the string, and there was constant dismounting for cinching and saddle-setting, and endless delays; there would be seven in this party without her. She pointed out, gently, that riding wasn’t after all such a treat, such a new experience to her as it was to Aunt Fan, and the very blond girl.

They got off at nine on a blue-and-gold morning and Ginger was very helpful and attentive to her aunt, who was large and impressive upon old Sam in her borrowed riding things. Some one among the women had produced an old-fashioned divided skirt of corduroy and her legs were wound with spiral puttees of khaki. She was not ill-pleased with herself. “Of course, I’m stout,” she whispered to Ginger, “but I do taper. I have the wrists and ankles of a woman half my weight. This isn’t a very snappy outfit, is it? But who knows—if I keep up this sort of thing, by next summer I may be able to ride in pants and get away with it!”

The doctor rode up to them. “Won’t change your mind, Ginger, even if I let you ride Ted?”

“Thank you, no, Doctor. I’m going to be a magazine and hammock person.” She held, indeed, a magazine, one of the sober and substantial ones. She waved them out of sight and then found a hammock in the sun and devoted herself to a rather stiff article on California’s attitude toward the Japanese problem, and at luncheon she was very gay with every one, and let the black-eyed gallant (who was just a little flattered at her staying behind) take her down to his improvised golf course and instruct her in driving off, which involved a good deal of minute demonstration as to the position of her hands on the club.

Later in the afternoon she saddled a horse and rode over the hills to the ocean and visited the valiant little old grandmother of most of the families in the vicinity. She had come from Alsace when she was a child, and she had crossed the plains in a prairie schooner when she was a very young girl, and married and settled in that remote and difficult spot. She had borne and reared nine children and buried four of them, and she had been a widow for long years. Ginger had come to see her on her last visit to the camp, and the old lady remembered her perfectly and thought she was even prettier than she had given promise of being, but she was a little worried to find she was not married, at twenty-three, and had no prospects. Twenty-three was high time, “Gramma” considered, to be about the real business of life. Clearly sorry for her, she made haste to show her all her treasures—the many patchwork quilts which she made in the wet winters when she couldn’t work out-of-doors, slowly, because she had two paralyzed fingers and the rest somewhat warped with work and rheumatism, the quaint, water-colored picture which symbolized her father’s honorable discharge from the French army, the curios her most venturesome son had brought back from Alaska, her clock. This was a massive affair of onyx, elaborately embellished, and there was a plate upon its front with an inscription. The old lady had risen, one night of wild and violent wind and rain, impelled by she knew not what impulse, and placed a lighted lamp in her upper window, and hours later the shipwrecked crew of a coast steamer had groped to her door. “Gramma” had warmed and dried and fed them and put them to bed, and after their sojourn with her they had sent the clock from San Francisco, inscribed with their names and her name and the date.

“The boys fetched it down in the hay wagon, dearie, and it’s never run,” she said regretfully, looking up at its silent and impassive countenance—it was stating, mendaciously, in late afternoon, that it was only ten o’clock—but clearly she bore it no grudge; it was almost too much, she seemed to feel, to expect a clock as handsome as that to keep time; the kitchen clock could do that: this one was dedicated to being a thing of beauty, and therefore a joy forever.

Ginger, looking down at the dauntless small figure, the work-warped hands and the unconquered brightness of the eyes, put an arm about her suddenly and gave her a little hug. If the very blond girl and the betrothed girl made her feel old and wise, “Gramma” made her feel her untried youth. She had crossed an ocean and a continent, and helped to hew a home out of a stubborn wilderness; she had borne and reared and buried—there was a little graveyard on the high hill above the ranch—done a woman’s work and a man’s work: three wars had roared and flamed and guttered out again in her ken; the world had leaped forward in science and invention, but she had lived on in her quiet corner, and she seemed as old and as wise as the hills, and as glad as the morning.

She pulled Ginger down and kissed her warm cheek. “You hurry up, dearie,” she said, urgently. “You hurry up! And I’ll give you a quilt—that’s what I’ll do! A basket pattern, or a log cabin, or a rising sun—you can take your choice!” She stood nodding and beaming like an ancient seeress at the door of her cave. “You hurry up! You’re young, dearie, but time goes fast—spring and summer, and then the fall comes and the winter—you hurry!”

CHAPTER XIV

THEY had expected the riding party back for luncheon on Saturday, but they did not come, and Ginger was unhappily sure that it was her Aunt Fan who was retarding the procession. Some one raised a shout at six o’clock that they were on the trail above the camp; ordinarily, they would arrive in ten minutes, but it was half an hour before they wound down beside the creek and through the rustic gate. The doctor rode first.

“A fine trip,” he said stoutly. “Yes, it was a remarkably fine trip, but Miss Fanny is pretty tired; it was just a little too much of an undertaking for her, I’m afraid.”

“Just a little,” said Mrs. Featherstone, bitterly. She was bracing herself in the saddle with both hands on the pommel, and her feet were out of the stirrups, dangling. Her hat was pulled far forward and wisps of damp hair adhered pastily to her face, and she was grimed with dust.

“I’d ride right up to my cabin, if I were you, Miss Fanny,” said the doctor, his kind eyes solicitous.

“Yes,” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan through set teeth, “I shouldn’t like to miss anything.”

Ginger, running beside old Sam, thought that he looked haggard and sagged a little at the knees. One of the boys followed them, and with his help she got her aunt to the ground. Mrs. Featherstone did not speak until the boy had led the horse away to the corral, and then, leaning heavily on her niece’s shoulder and breathing hard, she hissed, “If you tell me that you ‘told me so’ I’ll kill you; I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

Ginger bent her head and bit her lips. “Let’s get into the cabin, Aunt Fan.” She was very gentle about helping her. “Now, I’ll get those puttees and shoes off, the first thing! You sit right down—”

“Sit down?” said her aunt, with bitter fury. “Sit down? I never expect to sit down again. If you can get my clothes off me standing up, all right. Otherwise, they stay on.” She braced herself against the wall and looked truculently down at the kneeling girl.

“Wait a minute,” said Ginger. “Aunt Fan, if you could walk up to the bathhouse and get a hot tub—”

“Walk?” said Mrs. Featherstone. “Walk?” She looked as if she would enjoy doing her young kinswoman an injury. “I guess you’d better leave everything on; if you can lash me to the wall, some way, I dare say I can sleep standing up; they say the men often did, in the War.”

“Oh, do let me get your things off,” Ginger pleaded. “You don’t know how much better you’ll feel!”

“No, I don’t,” said her aunt, grimly. She shut her eyes and maintained a brooding silence while her niece dragged off her puttees and shoes and stockings and got her hot and swollen feet into soft knitted slippers. “I can give you a foot bath, one foot at a time, Aunt Fan,” she said, soothingly. “Don’t you worry—I can manage nicely!” She set a basin of water to heating over an alcohol stove and ran back to divest her of her other clothing, and to cold cream the dust from her burning face; sometimes she had to rush into the tiny dressing room and fight down a positive hysteria of mirth, but at last she had the large lady cleansed and in her nightdress and kimono. “And now, if you’ll get into bed, Aunt Fan, I’ll bring your supper!” she said, cheerfully.

“I sha’n’t move,” said the sufferer, firmly. “You can bring me food—”

“Yes—a little soup, and some hot tea—” said Ginger.

“Food,” said her aunt, with sudden vigor. “Added to everything else, I’m half starved. Bring—everything you find.”

She was still standing, braced against the wall, when the girl came back with a laden tray, and Ginger put it on the waist-high shelf which served for a dressing table and she was able to manage very nicely. Nourishment seemed to unseal Aunt Fan’s lips. “I’ve made up my mind about the doctor,” she said, darkly. “My Lord—that man isn’t a suitor; he’s a mule driver! It wasn’t so bad the first hour, and even the second hour I could stand it by thinking about other things, but we rode until one before we stopped for lunch, and then I had to get off ... and to get on again ... and then we rode until six, and had supper and went to bed—to bed!” She groaned aloud, pausing with a bit of buttered biscuit half-way to her mouth. “He picked out the steepest hillside in the entire Santa Lucia Range, and the one with the most rocks on it ... all those rocks couldn’t have been born on it; he must have lugged some of them there! Then he blew up that sleeping bag; sleeping bag! I’d like to know the village wag that invented it. It was like trying to rest on a school of hot-water bags; first I rolled off one side of it and then off the other, and then it slid down the grade—it was as slippery as if it had been buttered! It slid down five times and I guess I’d have gone straight down to the ocean and I wouldn’t have cared much, either, if the doctor hadn’t caught me as I went past, every time; he was ’way below that girl and me. Finally, he tied it to a tree.... I never closed my eyes all night, and that Dr. Rawdon never closed his mouth all night. I give you my word it sounded as if he was doing it on purpose; I should think his wife would poison him. And when I dozed off at four o’clock—I was so weak and exhausted I just lost myself for a moment—the doctor began calling people to get up! Ginger, I swear to you, if I’d had a weapon within reach I’d have murdered him. That’s all he’s done on this trip—call people to get up—up in the morning, up from a nap, up on the horses again. If he ever gets to Heaven they’ll retire Gabriel on pension and give him the trump!” She stopped, gasping a little, and ate earnestly for a moment. “Can you imagine me, making my toilet at quarter after four in the morning on a glassy hillside, Ginger McVeagh? I’d lost most of my hairpins and my lip stick and my powder in those slides, and I had to borrow from that canary-headed paper doll that’s vamping Dean Wolcott till he doesn’t know whether he’s afoot or horseback. The doctor started us off again before it was light, and we rode and we rode and we rode—”

“I know, Aunt Fan. I know,” said Ginger, soothingly. “Now if you’ll just get to bed—”

“Will you wait till I finish my supper? I tell you I’m weak for the want of food. And when we got to Slate’s, late yesterday afternoon, the doctor said I must take the hot sulphur bath or whatever it is, and I thought I would; I might be finished with him as a friend, but I could still take his advice as a physician. Well....”

“I know what it’s like, Aunt Fan; I’ve been there, you know,” said Ginger, turning back the covers of the bed.

But nothing could stem the tide of her monologue. “It’s about seven miles from the house, to begin with—”

“Oh, Aunt Fan—half a mile!”

“—seven miles down a horrible trail above the ocean, and that paper doll went with me, and there was no bathhouse; there was no bathhouse but a flag; you put the flag up or down at the top of the trail and that shows whether there’s anybody bathing, and if you’ve got the signal right, perhaps nobody comes down.... There were simply two tubs right out in the landscape; it’s the most indecent thing I ever——”

“But, Aunt Fan, it’s under the side of the hill; no one could possibly see you, and the flag was——”

“What about the ocean?” her aunt wanted indignantly to know. “What about the Pacific Ocean? A steamer and a tug and two fishing boats went by; I felt like a mermaid without even the privacy of a tail. But I didn’t mind the ocean and the boats as much as I did that girl; I detested her the first minute I laid eyes on her, and now she’s my most intimate friend!”

“Aunt Fan, you must try to rest! Just try lying down and see if you don’t—”

“I suppose I can lie on my face,” said Mrs. Featherstone, staggering weakly to the bed. “I shall faint away and die if I don’t get off my feet; they’ve ulcerated.” She eased herself with sharp groans, to a kneeling posture upon the bed. “I wish you could have heard the way the doctor spoke to me, coming down that ghastly trail, just above camp. The way he——”

“Now, Aunt Fan,” said Ginger, loyally, “the doctor may have been a little impatient, and no doubt he was anxious about you, but——”

“That’s right,” said her aunt, heavily. “Turn against your own! It was a hideously dangerous piece of trail, and I said I was going to get off and walk—I was being shaken right up between the horse’s ears—and I wish you could have heard the tone in which he told me to stay on. I give you my sacred word of honor, no man has ever spoken to me in a tone like that—not even Jim Featherstone at his worst, and as for Henry—Henry would have died before— Well, I’ve made up my mind, all right. Dr. Gurney Mayfield could never make a woman happy; I suppose he might make her healthy, if he got her young enough, but not”—she stopped suddenly—“where are you going?”

“I thought I’d go up to the Lodge for a few minutes, Aunt Fan, after I take this tray back,” said Ginger. “I think you’ll relax and rest if you are quiet.”

“Oh, very well,” said Mrs. Featherstone, letting herself down, inch by inch, “go on and leave me! I came here for you, and suffered and endured all of this for you, but never mind that. Go on and dance! Dance!” She writhed at the thought. “But I suppose it would be easier”—the words came muffled from the pillow—“for me to dance a dance than to—sit it out....”

Ginger put the tray down again and ran to draw the covers up over the plump shoulders. “I’ll come back very soon, Aunt Fan, and please try to sleep!”

“Sleep!” said her aunt, sniffing angrily and burrowing into the feathery depths. “I’ll probably smother, but I guess there won’t be much mourning,” and just as Ginger stepped outside she heard her murmuring—“suppose I’ll have to sleep this way for a month ... thank the Lord I didn’t waste a fortune getting my face lifted—a lot of good it’d do now! I should have had my head examined instead!”

Ginger carried the tray to the kitchen and the kind little waitress said she was glad to see the poor lady’d kept her appetite, and then she walked out into the soft dusk and stood looking about the doctor’s beloved camp. It was not quite dark, but the circling hills were closing in, somber in silhouette, and the stars were very remote and cold and bright; the tall redwoods seemed to stand guard over the little cuddling cabins, and the trim little paths showed up whitely against the darker earth surrounding them. It was a night of brisk weather and there was no camp fire; they were all gathered in the Lodge, and there were leaping flames on the hearth and a teasing tune going on the phonograph, and the sound of rhythmic feet. Ginger stood irresolute; she hadn’t thought she wanted the Lodge’s robust gayety to-night, but she didn’t want to go back to the cabin until her poor aunt had fallen asleep. While she was hesitating the doctor came to the door and called her in.

“I’m might sorry about Miss Fanny,” he said remorsefully. “There won’t be any serious consequences, of course, but I see now—as I should have seen before—that she wasn’t equal to it.” He sighed a little. “I expect my enthusiasm carries me away, sometimes.”

Ginger wondered if the doctor, too, had been making up his mind to make up his mind—and had made it up. He was looking rather pensive, and a good deal relieved.

The Lodge, save where the bridge players sat, was only dimly lighted by Chinese lanterns and it was several minutes before Ginger saw that Dean Wolcott was among the slow-moving dancers. The doctor went back to the card table and she sat down in a dusky corner and hoped no one would see her and ask her to dance. They were all very gay to-night; the whole camp seemed vibrating with the laughing, lazy tune the machine was grinding out; she decided to take her Aunt Fan back to San Francisco as soon as she could stand the trip, and to go home to Dos Pozos. She wanted work. And in December she would go on to visit Mary Wiley.

The dance was finished and another one started, and Dean Wolcott bent over her, suddenly. “Will you dance with me, Ginger?”

“I don’t think—I shall have to go back to Aunt Fan—” she began uncertainly.

“Please,” he said, very low, and she got to her feet. The music was a slow, throbbing thing, built on an old slave melody; there was longing in it, and recklessness, and a little recurrent strain of poignant pathos. They danced twice the length of the Lodge without speaking. Then, without warning, when they were near the door, his arms tightened about her. “Come out,” he said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will you come, Ginger? You must come.” Still dancing, her feet were guided almost over the threshold, and Dean thrust out his arm to open the screen door.

But he stood still, staring, and his other arm fell away from her, for a horseman was galloping furiously up the inviolate Main Street of the tidy camp. “It’s the Scout!”

“Fire!” shouted Elmer Bunty, loping the Mabel horse to the very door of the Lodge and making a spectacular stop. “Forest fire, Ranger!”

“Where?”

Some one had turned off the phonograph and the dancers were crowding out and the card players were pushing back their chairs.

“Lost Valley, coming this way with a high wind and coming fast!” This was the moment Elmer Bunty had been living for; there were thirty people looking at him and listening to him now, and Ginger saw with a little clutch at her heart that Dean Wolcott was not unmindful of it.

“Good work, Scout!” he said roundly. “Doctor, my Scout brings big news and bad news—fire in Lost Valley, coming this way with a high wind.” It was the new Ranger’s first fire, every one knew.

“And coming fast!” said Elmer Bunty, importantly.

Gayety fell from the camp, slipping from its shoulders like a bright cape. The doctor, veteran fire fighter himself, mobilized his forces to join the regulars of the vicinity—seasoned soldiers at Pfeiffer’s, at Post’s; it was said that Mateo Golinda moved on the creeping flames like a wave rolling up from the sea. The women put away their pretty needlework and made stacks of hearty sandwiches and gallons of coffee, and the boys and Ginger rode up to the first fire line and carried them to the men.

Ginger’s Aunt Fan thought the most sensible thing for them to do was to take the stage back to Monterey—agony as the trip would be for her—but she found her niece adamant. “I can help the doctor,” she said. “I’m not going to leave, Aunt Fan.”

She knew that the doctor had a double anxiety; beside and beyond the red terror that menaced his camp and the country he loved, there was his concern for Dean Wolcott. He had stood sponsor for him to these people, persuading their own tried Ranger to go away on leave and give his friend a chance, and now they were waiting and watching to see him make good.

“Doctor,” said Ginger to him on the third day, riding up to meet him with supplies, “I wish you would let me help you! I know how—I’ve fought fire at home a dozen times with Aleck and Estrada.”

“You are helping me, Ginger, bringing up our food, looking after things at camp— It’s a great comfort for me to know that you are in charge there.”

“But I’m not really needed there, doctor. In case of danger they could all walk over to Pfeiffer’s—even Aunt Fan”—she smiled a little—“and be taken in to Monterey. And I am needed here; you’re terribly short-handed.”

“I know we are, just now, Ginger, but Dean has telephoned in to King City to the Chief; he’ll be coming in to-morrow himself, with twenty men, bringing their own supplies.”

“Yes, but to-day, and to-night?”

“We’ll manage; we’ll manage.” His eyes were bloodshot and his face was lined with weariness and grimed with smoke, but he pulsed with energy. He was dedicating himself gladly to the wild land which had been, quite literally, his recreation; it had given him endless joy and content, and now he was fighting in its service.

“Please let me stay?” Ginger put a hand on his arm. “I thought you might; that’s why I came alone to-day, without the boys, and I left word for them not to be anxious at camp if I didn’t come back—that I’d be with you.”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t think of it, Ginger. Miss Fanny would never forgive me; I expect she never will, as it is! No, you must go back to camp.”

Ginger swung into the saddle. She flushed, but her gaze was very steady. “Doctor, how is Dean doing? Are you satisfied?”

The taut lines of his face loosened and his tired eyes warmed. “Ginger, that boy’s doing splendidly—remarkably! I’m no end pleased with him. Fighting like an old campaigner, but he’s trying to swing too much alone. He’s handling all the Marble Peak slope by himself—just the youngster with him. Insisted on it, but it’s too much; he has all the theory, but he hasn’t had the practice. Still, he’s doing great work, Ginger, great work! If I had a man to spare, I’d send him over to him, but we’re short ourselves, and we’ve got a nasty stretch. Well, I must be getting back to work, and you must be getting back to camp. Tell the folks not to worry—we’re getting it under.”

“I wish you’d let me stay,” said the girl, mutinously, but she turned her horse and started down, and waved back at him just before she rounded the bend. He was a gallant figure as he stood there, swinging his old wide hat, fighting guardian of the hills and the trees he loved.

Ginger rode very slowly down the trail, and when she came to the forks she drew rein. The right-hand trail led down to camp, and the other wound back by a rising and circuitous route to the Marble Peak territory. The air was heavily sultry and there was a brooding and ominous feeling in it; flakes of ashes and bits of charred leaves and now and then a spark fell to the ground; the sky was obscured by a low-hanging curtain of smoke. There was a sense of menace and foreboding, of the relentless advance of an implacable foe.

She sat there for a long moment and she was so still that a gray squirrel, anxiously sniffing the sinister breeze, came close to her before he was aware of her presence. She took swift account of her equipment—two large canteens freshly filled with water, a compact little case of sandwiches, a sharp hatchet in its leather case, three sacks tied to the back of her saddle. Then, with her Scotch chin thrust a little forward and her Spanish mouth smiling and tender, she turned her horse and set swiftly forth on the red trail that led to Marble Peak.

CHAPTER XV

THE new Forest Ranger for the Big Sur District and Elmer Bunty, his Scout, rode rapidly away from the doctor’s camp on the night of the fire alarm. They spoke sharply and concisely to each other and were immensely cool and collected about it all, but each of them was high keyed with excitement. To the boy, it was a vivid drama, staged for his especial benefit, and to Dean Wolcott it was the final stage of his proving. Hotly as he had exulted when Ginger yielded for that instant and keenly as he had wanted that moment with her by the creek, away from the gay and strident music and the gay and friendly people, he was glad, now, for its postponement. When he had conquered his first fire he would go to her with another decoration, another evidence of his citizenship in her vigorous world: he smiled at his heroics but he continued to be satisfied that things had worked out as they had.

Snort was making for the cottage at Post’s at an eager pace and the Mabel horse galloped earnestly and clumsily after them, and sometimes the rhythm of the hurrying hoofs was like the lilt and swing of the music, back at the Lodge ... when Ginger was in his arms.

There was an hour of swift and sure preparation and then a snatch of sleep; and at the first graying light of dawn they were on their way. Rusty, the Airedale, was left at Post’s, but before they had ridden an hour he had overtaken them, panting with a violence which seemed almost to rend him asunder, a bit of torn rope hanging to his collar.

“He has to be with me,” said Elmer Bunty, proudly. “I’ll take care of him, Ranger.” So the shabby little dog went on with them, and rested thankfully while they made a brief stop at the Golinda ranch; Mateo Golinda had left an hour earlier for the fire, and his wife would ride after them with food and coffee late in the afternoon.

“It’s your first fire, isn’t it?” she said, regarding him thoughtfully with her bright and friendly eyes. “It’s hard, heart-breaking work, but I think you’ll enjoy fighting—and winning. Mateo is wonderful; he will be at your right hand.”

She had cleverly calculated the time they would be passing and had stirrup cups of hot chocolate for them; she set them off as blithely as if they had been going to a barbecue. A heartening person, Margaret Golinda; across a continent and an ocean, down the long corridor of the years, her house would always be “King’s X!” to Dean Wolcott.

They rode on together, the Ranger and the Scout on Snort and the Mabel horse with the Airedale plodding sturdily behind, and soon there was tangible evidence of the red demon in the distance. The boy was stout-heartedly ready for action and the young man considered him with warm and possessive pride. Air and exercise and good food had nourished his meager little body and comradely appreciation had fed his starved soul. A very different creature, this, from the one who had come into Pfeiffer’s on the stage that day, clinging and timid, and yet the old wise women of the ranches told Dean Wolcott—“that boy’ll never make old bones,” and the doctor shook his head. “If you’d gotten hold of him two years ago—” he said once.

But the Ranger refused to accept these dark forebodings; young Elmer Bunty had wriggled his way deep into his reserved affections and he had no intention of leaving a stone unturned to save him, body and brain. For a week, now, he had been revolving schemes in his mind. His San Francisco friend had written him, acknowledging receipt of the Scout’s salary for delivery to the aunt.

Your Scout’s relative appeared to-day with her usual punctuality to collect the reckless wage which you are lavishing upon him, but after bestowing it in what I think she would call her safety pocket she remarked that it would be her last collecting call; she was, she stated, taking Edna and going “back east to her husband’s folks.” She has long contemplated such a step, it appears, but has been deterred by her tender consideration for the son of her sister, deceased—said Scout above mentioned. Now, however, that he is self-supporting and has found a protector—my impression is that she thinks you are not quite all there, old son—she is about to fold her tents like the Arabs. Elmer may in future keep his entire wage, she says, and saying which, departs—so thoroughly that the places which knew her, know her no more. The Edna must have been waiting for her outside my office, I gather, booted and spurred and ready to ride. Thus, in a word, you are now the only known human being to whom my measliest Scout can turn, and I earnestly urge that you continue to be as human as is Bostonly possible!

Dean Wolcott had made up his mind to leave Elmer Bunty in the best California outdoor school he could find—somewhere near Santa Barbara, perhaps, or in the Santa Cruz mountains—whichever climate was best for him, and at holiday time—but his mind refused to function coolly on plans for the future. That instant’s yielding of Ginger to his insistent arms—who could say where he would be himself at holiday time? He dragged his thoughts resolutely back to the subject of his Scout. The time had come, he thought, to tell the youngster that he was going to be his guardian—he would go thoroughly into the matter with his San Francisco friend, of course.

But Elmer Bunty broke the silence, before he had formulated his plan of announcement. “Ranger—say, I don’t guess Edna could call me ’Fraid-Cat now, could she?— Riding to a forest fire’n everything?”

“She could not, Scout,” said Dean, cordially. This was an excellent opening. “And speaking of Edna——”

The boy appeared not to have heard him. “Ranger,” he said shyly, “do you think I—oh, not yet, but sometime—do you think I’ll be—not just a good Scout, but—but like men call each other—‘a good scout’? You know how they say, ‘He’s a good scout’? Do you guess I ever will, Ranger?”

“I guess you will,” said Dean Wolcott, roundly. “I consider you a ‘good scout’ now.”

“Honest-to-goodness, Ranger?” He flushed so riotously that even his flanging ears grew rosy. “Cross-your-heart-hope-never-to-see-the-back-of-your-neck?”

The Ranger nodded gravely. “In speaking of you to a friend I feel I should be certain to use that term. ‘Who is this fellow Bunty you’re always talking about?’ some one might say to me, and I would say, ‘Oh, he’s a great friend of mine,’ and then if the other fellow said, ‘What sort of a person is he?’— I should without hesitation reply, ‘He’s a good scout; he’s—a good scout!’”

Elmer Bunty was silent from pure pleasure; it fairly pulsated from him. He leaned forward and put his arms warmly about the neck of the lady horse, and then he leaned down out of the saddle (much as the Indians did, he firmly believed) and petted Rusty.

“And, feeling that way,” said Dean Wolcott, “it’s going to be pretty hard for me just to shake hands with you and let you go, when your vacation is over, and my time here in the Big Sur.”

“I know,” said the boy, soberly. “But we can write each other postcards and maybe letters, can’t we, Ranger? And maybe, next summer——”

“How would you like to—well, belong to me, Scout? If it can be arranged— I mean, not go back to your aunt and cousin, but stay with me, and go to one of those mountain schools and have a horse to ride—all that sort of thing? Take a trip east with me, and see the Grand Cañon on the way, and perhaps Niagara”—he turned to look at him.

Elmer Bunty’s face was white under its hasty coat of tan, and his eyes were wide. “Oh, gee!” he breathed, “Oh, gee—golly!” Then the light went swiftly out of him. “It would be great, Ranger, but I don’t guess I could. I don’t guess I could leave my Aunt Lizzie and Edna.”

“But if they—”

He shook his head. He was very regretful, but very firm about it. “You see, I’m the only male person there is in the family, and they depend on me an awful lot. Even if we asked them, and they said they would let me go with you, I don’t guess I could; I’d know they were just pretending they didn’t need me!” His flat chest swelled visibly at the thought. Then he thought hungrily of the glories that might be his. “Do they honest-to-goodness let you have a horse at those schools, Ranger?”

“They honest-to-goodness do, Scout.”

“Oh, gee—golly....” His pale eyes visioned it for a dreaming instant, and then he squared his narrow shoulders. “But it isn’t as if I didn’t have my fam’ly, Ranger. Of course, I’ll be with you just as much as I can, and we’ll write each other shads of letters, won’t we? But—”

And Dean Wolcott perceived that there was before him a task of extreme delicacy which must wait for a less crowded hour. It was going to be a difficult thing to save his Scout’s self-esteem alive for him, and to make his joy in the new world opening up before him outweigh his bleak sense of uselessness; the Ranger’s rage rose in him at the thought of Aunt Lizzie and Edna ... crossing the continent smugly in a tourist sleeper with food in a greasy shoebox and complacency in their hearts.

But presently they arrived at the fire’s first trench and found Mateo Golinda already at work, and all lesser concerns gave way. The Spaniard was cool and capable and tireless, and almost at once he paid Dean Wolcott the supreme compliment of leaving him to work alone with the boy while he took charge of another spur of the mountain.

Long before noon the heat was almost unbearable; the August sun bored down through the canopy of smoke and the smoke folded the heat about them, close and stifling, and their eyes stung and watered and their throats were parched in spite of frequent sips at the canteens. They chopped; they beat the creeping fire with wet sacks; they chopped again; then, for a while, they worked with spades; then it was time to chop once more, and then the wet sacks. They settled down into a steady, unhurried routine—digging, chopping, beating, resting for a moment or two, snatching a gulp of water; digging, chopping, beating. The boy worked gamely and the shabby Airedale stayed at his heels, yelping now and then when a spark fell on his thinly upholstered hide. He kept his tail between his legs and at intervals he put his nose in the air and howled dismally but he refused to stay behind with the horses; Dean Wolcott sent the Scout back from time to time to make sure they were safely tethered and more especially to give him a breathing space, and the dog went thankfully with him, and disapprovingly back again to the battle line.

A party of deer hunters had promised to come before twelve o’clock but they did not appear. Mateo thought some one might come up from Tassajara the next day, and Dean had gotten a message through to the Chief Ranger at King’s City, but there were other bad fires in the vicinity; he might not be able to send help to them at once.

They stopped at dark for a short night’s sleep, Mateo Golinda and the Ranger standing watch, turn about, and at dawn they were fighting again—digging, chopping, beating at the red tongues with their wet sacks. The fire was not getting away from them, but they were not getting it under; it was an even break between them and the red demon. By a miracle of mercy the spring, an eighth of a mile below, was on the untouched side, and the men took turns in carrying water for their sacks, and in filling the canteens.

Margaret Golinda had ridden up to them, late on the first day, with coffee and food, and they had sent the Scout far down the trail to meet her.

Dr. Mayfield came on the afternoon of the second day, tired and dauntless and full of optimism: he admitted that it was a nasty fire—the way the wind kept veering about—harder to fight than as if it had been concentrated; too bad those deer hunters had failed them, but they were holding their own in every section; a good, stiff fight (the doctor clearly liked a good, stiff fight whether it was to save a man or a forest of shining madroña) but they were going to win.

His own crowd from the camp had come across nobly and the women were working like beavers to keep them fed; the boys and Ginger were constantly in the saddle.

“But—look here, Dean—you ought to have somebody with you beside your boy. Mateo’s almost too far away in case of anything sudden, I’ve told you how fast it travels when it starts in the bottom of a cañon; it’s as if it were sucked through a funnel—simply races up—up, roaring.”

“I think I can swing it,” said Dean Wolcott. He looked uncommonly fit and eager and fresh.

“It means working like two men instead of one,” said the doctor, doubtfully.

“Well, can’t you figure the satisfaction it is to me to be able—at last—to work like two men?” He swung his arms and pulled in a deep contented breath. “I’m enormously happy, Doctor. Please don’t give me a thought.”

The doctor gave him a great many thoughts and they were singularly proud and pleasant ones. He stayed an hour with them so that his Ted might have a little rest, tethered down the trail by Snort and Mabel with his saddle and bridle off, but he himself did not require any rest, apparently, for he used a shovel and a hatchet and swung a sack all the time he was with them.

They allowed themselves more sleep that night, and at dawn Mateo Golinda decided to leave them. “I think you will not have more trouble,” he said in his careful English, warmed still with accent and intonation. “I go home for a day; I return to-morrow to make sure all is finished.”

The Scout sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was intensely sleepy and very tired but a little loath to have the adventure ended. He made a tour of inspection while Dean Wolcott heated their coffee, and came importantly back to report that everything was quiet—a sullen smoldering here and there in the charred blackness, that was all.

“Fine, Scout. But”—he consulted him gravely—“I don’t believe we ought to leave yet, do you?”

“No; I don’t guess we ought to leave, Ranger. We ought to stay on the job to-day and to-night; you never can tell.” He wagged his head owlishly.

“That’s the way I feel about it, Scout.” This would be a good time, he thought—the long and lazy day of patroling—to tell Elmer Bunty of his aunt’s defection and to spread before him the happy plans he had made. Directly they had eaten their scanty breakfast they walked down the trail to the horses and saddled them and rode two miles to a place where there was lush and lavish feed for them—they had been on short rations for three days now. It was a gently sloping hillside covered with white pines and carpeted with fresh and hardy green. The Mabel horse whinnied with pleasure at sight of it. They removed the saddles and bridles and Snort was staked out with a generous length of rope; the lady horse would be canny enough to remain without being tied.

Dean Wolcott meant to have his talk with Elmer Bunty as they walked back up the trail but they found themselves a little spent and languid; the mere business of climbing, afoot, was sufficiently engrossing. They would rest, when they got back to their station, and talk in the warm, still afternoon.

But there was to be no rest for the Ranger and his Scout that day. A slim snake of fire had crawled over from the floor of one cañon to another, coaxed on by a treacherous wind, whispering close to the ground; by seven in the morning it had grown to be a dragon in size and strength and it was roaring up the side of the mountain which had been inviolate before; in half an hour it would be upon the spot which harbored the spring.

Their tired bodies and their weary wills grew taut again. “Water, first,” said Dean Wolcott, curtly. They filled their canteens and soaked their sacks and staggered up the slope three times with slopping buckets, and then they worked fast and furiously on their firebreak. Almost without pause birds flew past them, coming up from below, uttering strange cries, and presently small, shy beasts began to run up to them and past them.

“Look, Scout,” said Dean, softly. “I’ve heard about it and read of it, but I’ve never seen it before—wild things fleeing before a forest fire. Let’s stand aside here and watch for a moment. Come over here, where you can see down.”

They came swiftly and silently, panting with haste, their soft eyes wild—squirrels and little bush rabbits scurrying by the dozen; now a pair of small foxes running low; a wildcat, crouching, slinking, belly to the ground; coyotes, gaunt and gray and furtive; does and fawns, and four or five great bucks driven out of cover at last, and at the end of the hurrying horde a mountain lion and his mate. There was something primeval about it; something simple, and far away; Dean Wolcott held his breath.

“Oh, gee—golly, Ranger,” the boy whispered, pressing against him, “get your gun! Get your gun! Get your gun!”

“No, Scout,” he whispered back. “It’s against the law—written and unwritten; wild things fleeing from a forest fire are protected. Look at their eyes as they go past. Could you?—”

“No, I don’t guess I could, Ranger.” His chin quivered a little.

“What does it make you think of, Scout?”

“A circus?” His face fell. “I saw a moving picture once—”

“It’s like creation; it’s the first chapter of Genesis.... Boy, it isn’t given to many to see a thing like this; we must remember it all the days of our life. We are watching the earth bring forth the living creature ... cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth....”

“Yes, sir,” said the Scout, earnestly.

All the animals for miles about must have been congregated in that cañon; it had been, until now, scatheless, and there was water, but their sanctuary had betrayed them and they were fleeing for their lives from the red terror, passing the lesser enemy with hardly a conscious look. They came on for an incredible time but there was an end of them at last. Small stragglers came gasping at the heels of the procession and scurried by; then the slope was empty of movement.

Dean Wolcott drew a long breath. “Now, we’ll get to work, Scout; plenty of time to stop it.”

But the boy pointed excitedly. “Look—there’s one more lion, all alone!”

It was far below them, standing still, a beautiful great beast, and it lifted its head and called, a long, seeking, mournful cry.

“It’s lost its mate, Scout; it doesn’t want to go without it. That’s pretty fine, isn’t it, with the fire just three jumps behind?”

Elmer Bunty nodded solemnly and they set to work. They already had a firebreak of sorts in that direction and now they widened it as fast as they could, plying hatchets and shovels. The fire came up the mountainside just as the doctor had said it did, as if sucked through a funnel, roaring, unbearably hot. The lone lion fled before it at last, loping forlornly and calling as it came; it passed between the two human beings heedlessly, engulfed in its private woe.

Their break held; the fire stopped when it came up to it, hissing and snarling; burning twigs snapped with a sharp, incisive sound. “We’ve got it,” said the Ranger, exulting. “It’s just like a football game, Scout!—” He chanted hoarsely a slogan of old gridiron days—“‘Hold that line! Hold that line! Hold that line—hard!’” But it appeared immediately that they would have to hold a great deal harder yet and in a great many more places, for a whirling dervish of a wind sprang up, whisked here, whisked there, twisted and turned unexpectedly, caught up a flaming leaf and carried it carefully to a distant patch of dried grass, ran impishly back and forth, whistling, whining, making hot havoc.

Again they went about their dogged routine; they chopped with their hatchets, they spaded, they beat upon the fire with their wet sacks—until there was no water left to make the sacks wet with. Dean Wolcott thought with worshipful longing of summer rains in the east; why did they never come to this parched land of summer? A downpour now ... the sound of rushing rain....

They worked, the young man and the thin Boy Scout, until it seemed certain that they could not work any longer, and then they worked on. They dug frantically into the sun-baked earth; they chopped frantically with their hatchets into the singeing chaparral; they slapped frantically at the flames with their dry sacks; and sometimes the sacks caught on fire. Then the witch-wind went away as suddenly as it had come, and up from the ocean—as if impelled by the Ranger’s rain-prayer—rose a dense gray fog, blessédly cool, blessédly wet, blessédly enveloping.

At the end of another hour they were able to stop; a charred world was smudging sullenly into a soft, gray curtain. They went a few yards back on the trail and dropped thankfully to the ground. They were utterly spent; their hair was singed, and their eyebrows, and they could hardly see out of their bleared and smarting eyes, and they had both burned their hands again and again. They were too weary to speak, but somewhere in the great gray space they heard the lone lion, calling ... calling....

CHAPTER XVI

AT first, when she set out on the trail for Marble Peak, Ginger hurried a little. She had a guilty fear that the doctor might have read her mutinous purpose in her face and ridden after her to make sure, but when ten minutes had passed she knew she was not being followed, and she ceased to urge her mount. The fire fighters had exhausted the camp’s supply of good horses and this was an old and spiritless beast, hardly more than adequate for the daily trip with supplies.

“Easy, now, Pedro,” she patted the lean neck. “We’ll take it easy, old boy.” She saw she would have to nurse him along very carefully to make the ride, but once they came up with Dean he could rest, and she felt rather ruthless. Her only real concern was getting to Dean, and she felt as she had felt that day in Boston, waiting in the hushed little hotel for an answer to her note. Yet there was a great and shining difference. That had been undertaken as a duty of decent reparation; beyond the fact that she was going to ask his pardon or at least to state her regret for her crude and callous behavior at Dos Pozos, she had not mentally set the stage.

This was no penitential pilgrimage but a glad and glorious journey, ending, as journeys should, in lovers’ meeting, and this time she had indeed set the stage; she had been doing it ever since she had felt the sudden tightening of his arms about her as they danced in the Lodge to the wheedling, coaxing music of the old slave tune. “Come out!” he had said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will you come, Ginger? You must come!” She remembered every commonplace syllable and invested it with poesy and ardor, and she planned rosily for the scene of their reunion and reconciliation. She wished a little that she might have worn her riding suit of deep cream linen with the scarlet tie and hat band instead of her seasoned corduroy, but corduroy was the only wear for work of this sort, and Dean Wolcott himself, the new Dean Wolcott, wore corduroy now; he had put on the official uniform of the outdoor working west. And besides, she told herself contentedly, she was bringing him other adornments; she took stock, with a proud humility which was new and strange to Ginger McVeagh, of her more careful speech, her gentler judgments, the clever choosing of her clothes, her honest appreciation of the things of his world. Her heart warmed at the memory of Dean Wolcott’s sympathy with Elmer Bunty’s great moment, the other night, riding madly up on the lady horse to bring the news of the forest fire, of the way in which he had kept his Scout in the limelight for an instant. Dr. Mayfield had told her that the child would never live to grow up; he gave him, in fact, hardly more than a year, but Ginger, riding the high wave of happiness, told herself that she would prove her friend wrong for once in his wise life. Elmer Bunty should go to Dos Pozos to be cuddled by old Manuela and fed by Ling, to drink golden milk and sleep out in the tonic air all through the calendar; death on a pale horse riding should be routed—she felt strong and victorious as she thought of it. Great surges of joy went over her as they had done when she sat in her perch at Carnegie Hall, hearing her first symphonies.

But no surges of joy of any size whatever were going over Pedro; the wretched animal was plodding miserably, his head hanging, and the girl drew rein, dismounted, and pulled off the saddle with guilty haste. She would give him a half hour of rest while she ate her supper, and then go on at a very moderate pace, walking where the grade was steepest.

The horse managed a precarious roll where the trail widened a trifle and stayed level for a brief space, and then he cropped without enthusiasm at the sere grass. Ginger ate her substantial sandwich with hearty young hunger and regarded the rest of her supply somewhat wistfully: she could have finished it, to the last crumb, but she was sure Dean Wolcott would need extra rations. It was an amazing thing: at Dos Pozos, when he had been weak and wasted, she had been hard; now that he was as fit as she was herself, she yearned over him. She had met his weakness with scornful strength, and now she met his strength with a rich and mothering tenderness.

Dusk was creeping up the cañon when she flung the saddle on Pedro again. “We’ll do it in two hours,” she told herself, “taking it slowly.” It was hard to be hobbled by a stumbling, tired, old horse when she wanted a Pegasus, a steed who could—

She halted sharply, the bridle in her hand. A horse was coming down the trail, running, plunging, the stones scattering before his flying feet, and it sounded like disaster of some sort. People did not ride down the Marble Peak trail at a pace like that. An instant later Snort came into view and with him came reassurance, for he was without saddle and bridle and a long grazing rope swung behind him. One never tied Snort securely, the girl remembered, because of his dangerous habit of pulling back, and he had evidently become terrorized at the approach of the fire, discovered that his rope was merely wound in and out of a stout bush, and taken to his heels.

He halted now, at sight of her, trumpeting as wildly as ever in the days of ’Rome Ojeda, clearly considered the inadvisability of trying to pass her and her mount, wheeled, started up the trail again in the direction from which he had come, remembered the thing that had frightened him, turned again and plunged down the steep incline which led to the cañon’s floor. She could hear him crashing, fighting his way through the tangle of brush and low-growing shrubs and tripping vines, snorting as he went.

He was down at last, but hysterical with nerves; he could be heard dashing forward, dashing back, stumbling, plunging into traps and fighting his way out again; shrilly sounding his fear.

Ginger nodded with satisfaction. Here was a task; here was a thing to do for Dean. There would be a tremendous satisfaction in bringing Snort back to him.... The stage for their meeting was hastily reset. Not on the tired and stumbling Pedro, after all, but mounted on the historic steed who had parted them and was to bring them together again.

“I’ve brought Snort back to you!”

It made good imagining, the look on his face when he should see the two of them.

She tied the uninterested Pedro securely and hung her saddle with the canteens and sacks and the packet of sandwiches over a limb, took her little hatchet in hand and climbed carefully down into the cañon. It was too dimly lighted to make out the animal at the bottom, but he was clearly to be heard, and she called to him, soothingly, coaxingly, cajolingly, and he stopped plunging to listen for an instant.

“Good old boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy!” The velvet voice steadied him. She could hear his great gasping breaths but he was not trumpeting; it was going to be easy, after all, and she was conscious, tolerantly amused at herself, of a little regret. The longer the chase, the harder the struggle, the more she was doing; the handsomer her service, the more dramatic her entrance. Dusk was coming rapidly up above and the green depths were in dark shadow; she should have brought her flash light. If the pixie steed refused to be taken in hand at once, if there ensued even a slight delay, they would be in darkness. With a sigh of impatience at her heedlessness, Ginger turned and scrambled up the steep incline again, slipping, pulling herself up by vines and roots, reached the trail, dug out the flash, and started down again.

This time, a little breathless, hurrying, careless of the failing light, she did not watch her footholds and a large and permanent looking stone turned under her, almost tripping her, and went hurtling down.

“It won’t—it won’t—it won’t hit him!” she told herself vehemently, in prayerful assertion, but, if it did not, it grazed him closely enough to have the same result, for she could hear him rearing and crashing in a way that made his former panic seem like composure by comparison. Presently, the sounds warned her, he had headed back toward Marble Peak and the conflagration.

And now the episode left off being an amusing little adventure and assumed the outlines of a grim task. Ginger shook off her temper and her disgust at her own carelessness, and looked intently about her. It would be half an hour, and perhaps more, before she brought Snort up, and she must make sure of finding her station on the trail, and Pedro. She mentally catalogued an oddly square rock, a grotesquely twisted root, took off her scarlet bandanna and tied it to a low limb, before she made her cautious descent.

Two hours, dark and difficult ones, were to pass before she found her landmarks again. Her little wish to do her lover a service had come largely true: she had toiled in his cause as she had never toiled before in all her vigorous young life.

Snort had reverted swiftly to type; he was ’Rome Ojeda’s horse, and not Dean Wolcott’s. Memories of remorseless punishments for misdemeanors like this came back to him; clearly he weighed in his mind the relative tragedies of proceeding into the heart of the burning district and of permitting himself to be caught. He would turn, snorting with fear as a gust of wind brought hot smoke and stinging sparks, and start backward, yet when Ginger, edging and inching craftily closer, the velvet of her voice roughening with huskiness—“Steady, boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy ...”—put out her hand to take his rope he would wheel again, choosing the red danger ahead.

Ginger’s hat went in the first quarter of an hour and her hair was dragged down and filled with leaves and bits of broken vines and there was a red scratch on her cheek; she was hot, breathless, dripping. The easy and comfortable thing which she would have called her religion was a quaint quilting of Alexander McVeagh’s rugged Scotch Presbyterianism and old Manuela’s handy and available santos, Aleck’s sane and hearty creed of playing the game, and her own childishly cherished habit of wishing on white horses and red-headed girls, on loads of hay and shooting stars, and she brought it out now and aired it and shook it into service and kept up her courage, for there was a brief period when it seemed that she would not only fail in bringing the wild horse to her lover but would inevitably lose herself.

“Steady, Snort, old boy ... good ... old ... boy!” she would croon, adding, between tight shut teeth—“Devil—demon—fiend! Oh, if I only knew what it was that Balaam did to the horse in The Virginian I’d do it to you—when I catch you—only harder!—No, I wouldn’t, Snort, poor old boy, dear old boy.... Good ... old ... boy....”

The climax came suddenly, after all. Snort twisted his rope round a tree, went three times round himself, and was prisoned, pulling back, snorting shrilly, throwing himself twice, but standing still at last, showing the whites of his eyes in the moonlight which now poured down into the cañon in a silver flood, his heaving sides lathered with sweat.

Ginger sat limply down close by and leaned her head back against a cool rock. “I tried just as hard as that, to get away from him—and stay away from him—” she said, grimly. “But I’m going back, and you’re going with me.” She sighed, utterly tired and utterly content. “It sure does look,” she spoke as ’Rome Ojeda would have spoken, “it sure does look like he’s gentled us both!”

Presently, when girl and beast were breathing normally again, she led him back to the point where she had left the trail, and Pedro made his one valuable contribution to the expedition by whinnying loudly and guiding them up.

Ginger flung the saddle blanket over Snort’s steaming back, turned up her collar, and sat down, the runaway’s rope in her hand, to wait for the first graying of the dawn.

“I have brought Snort back to you.”

After all, she was going to be able to say it. She folded her arms across her knees and laid her throbbing head on them, and slept a little in snatches, dreaming high-colored, stirring dreams.

CHAPTER XVII

DEAN WOLCOTT and his Scout slept soddenly for hours and woke, aching and hungry, in the early dusk.

“Well, this is a bone-headed business, Scout,” said the Ranger, disgustedly. “We should have got back to the horses by daylight. Tumble out! We’ll have to shake a leg!”

The boy pulled himself gallantly together but he was clearly exhausted. “Oh, we’ve got our flash light, Ranger. We’ll be all right!”

“We’ll be all right as long as the flash holds out, but it needs a new battery, and the new battery is in the saddlebags at White Pines.” He shook off the mantling fatigue. “We’ll be all right anyway, of course. It won’t be pitch dark for an hour yet, and we’ll save the light till we absolutely need it. Wait—let’s see how we’re fixed for water!” He picked up the canteens and investigated. “Water’s your best friend, old son, and we’re going to have prize thirsts for days to come. What?— Yes, of course, there’s the spring at White Pines, but it’s beastly hard to locate after dark.”

He found that they had less than a canteen between them so he made the boy rest again while he clambered down the charred and fog-drenched slope to the spring. It was trampled and muddied by the fleeing animals and choked with burnt leaves and twigs; it was a slow job to fill the two canteens and make his way back to the trail, and he found the Scout asleep.

“Tumble, out, old boy!” he said, rousing him reluctantly, for he looked white and spent and very childish in the half light. “But we want to get back to Snort and Mabel, don’t we?”

“You betcher!” said Elmer Bunty, stoutly.

“All set? Right! Hike along behind me; we can see for almost an hour, and it won’t take us long to get there.”

“Say, Ranger, why don’t we go the short cut over the hill—the one Mr. Golinda showed me? It saves a mile.”

“I’m not sure enough of it in the dusk, Scout; we might waste more time fooling about looking for it than in keeping to the main trail.”

“No, we wouldn’t! I know it, sure as shooting, Ranger. He showed me that first day when I went down to meet Mrs. Golinda and I came back all alone! I can find it, Ranger!”

It didn’t matter particularly, Dean thought, if they did poke about in the twilight for an extra half hour; if the youngster could dramatize the dreary stumble through the damp dusk, let him. He had a surprisingly good sense of direction.

“That’s a Scout’s business, scouting,” said the boy, contentedly.

“Right. Lead off, old top.”

The Scout with Rusty at heel set forward with amazing briskness. “I remembered this funny shaped madroña tree right here. And a little ways ahead there’s a big rock, hanging right over us....” He trudged sturdily. “I don’t guess we’ll have much to eat to-night, will we, Ranger?”

“Well, not what you’d call a banquet, Scout. But we’ll munch a few raisins and a cracker and do a Rip Van Winkle, and dream about the breakfast Mrs. Golinda’s going to give us in the morning. We’ll be up with the lark and pop in on her and meanwhile we can feed our fancies on the thought of her coffee and golden muffins and broiled ham and scrambled——”

“Ow,” said the Scout, ruefully. “I wisht you wouldn’t.... I betcher she’ll give Rusty a bone, too. I like that lady an awful lot, don’t you, Ranger?”

“Best in the world, Scout.”

“And I like that girl that the doctor lets ride Ted, don’t you, Ranger?”

“Yes,” said Dean Wolcott, “yes, son, I like that girl.” He threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Oh, boy, I like that girl!”

“Me, too,” said Elmer Bunty.

He was making good progress considering the fast fading light but the dark was coming down on them like a released curtain. Dean experimented with his flash and found that it gave out only the palest possible gleam; it must be kept for emergencies.

“Oh, gee—golly!” said the boy, suddenly. “It’s still burning down there, Ranger! Look!”

Some of the territory which Mateo Golinda had considered out of danger had relapsed again; it was not a dangerous burning—a low, smudging, stubborn fire which could not make great headway against the fog.

“I don’t think it can do any harm, Scout. Mateo Golinda will be back in the morning to look things over.”

“Oh, gee ...” said the Scout, “this way seems most as long as the regular trail, doesn’t it? But we’re nearly there, I guess.” Then he quite evidently revived his fainting spirits with stimulant. “Say, Ranger, we might be trappers or pioneers or—anything, mightn’t we?—sneaking along like this? Or Pontiac, Chief of the Ottawas! Say, I betcher it was slick to be an Indian chief ... or even an Indian brave.... Gee, golly, but it’s getting dark, isn’t it, Ranger?”

“Shut your eyes for a minute, Scout, and then open them; it will seem lighter.”

“Say, it does, doesn’t it?” He plodded sturdily on.

“I’d keep away from the edge, Scout; it’s wet and slippery, and a misstep would mean a bad tumble.”

“All right, Ranger; only, we have to keep pretty near the edge because that’s where the trail is.... Yes, sir, I betcher it was fine to be an Indian brave—hunting and fishing and having the squaws to do all the messy things; and battles ... hanging down on your horse and shooting under his neck—Ow!” He stumbled and caught himself. “Gee, I nearly did fall that time, Ranger.”

“Look here, Scout,” said Dean sharply, “I believe we’d better stretch right out here and wait till daylight. Let me go ahead, at any rate. My turn to lead, now!”

“I want to get back to Mabel,” said the boy, doggedly. “It must be pretty near, now, Ranger.... And when a brave died in battle they tied him on his faithful horse and brought him back to camp, didn’t they? Gee ... I betcher all the squaws cried like anything.... Tied on his faithful horse.... Say, Ranger, you know I think that’s lot more exciting than just hearses and hacks, don’t you?”

“Much more exciting, old son!” His heart warmed within him—the game little sport, plodding through the damp darkness, aching-tired, hungry.

“When my uncle died, Aunt Lizzie, she had an awful stylish hearse and there was eleven hacks; she hated to pay out such a lot of money but she said nobody could never say she didn’t give him a stylish funeral.... It was a grand hearse, all right, but I think ‘tied on his faithful horse....’” He was silent then, for he had to stop and peer owlishly through the darkness and take hold of trees and get down on his hands and knees and feel for the path. “It’s all right, Ranger! We’re keeping on the trail, all right!” He got up and went forward again, inching his way. “Say, I don’t guess Edna could ever—” he broke off at a disturbing thought. “Say, Ranger, you know, Edna’s an awful funny girl ... she just won’t believe a person. If I tell her about riding Mabel and fighting fires and finding trails in the dark, she’ll just laugh and say ‘Uh-huh! Uh-huh! Yes, you did! Yes, you did not!’ I was just wondering ... if you should ever come to see my Aunt Lizzie and me and my cousin Edna, maybe you could kind of—drop a word—”

“I could tell that Edna girl things that would make her hair grow upside down,” said Dean Wolcott, heartily. “I could tell her things I’ve seen you do, and dangers I’ve seen you experiencing that would keep her awake nights! I could—and I would, with pleasure.” (As long as he said could and would instead of can and will, he wasn’t lying to the child; when they were fed and bathed and rested he would tell him about his Aunt Lizzie and his cousin.) “Scout, let me go ahead, now. You walk behind me and hang on to my belt. It’s too dark for you to—”

But the boy gave a little chuckle of delighted satisfaction. “Well, if you told her....” Although they could not see each other, he turned his head and spoke to him over his shoulder. His voice was hoarse and he choked a little. “Oh, gee—golly, Ranger, I do like you! I do—” He slipped, and struggled to catch himself, battled for an instant while Dean Wolcott sprang toward him, toppled over the edge of the slippery trail into the black cañon.

He screamed as he fell. It seemed to the young man that the long, thin scream of terror would never stop, but when it stopped suddenly, utterly, as if it had been turned off by machinery, it was worse.

“Scout! Oh, Scout! Are you all right? I’ll come after you, Scout! Scout! Can you call, so I can find you? Oh, Scout!”

The Airedale, whining, terrified, flung himself against him. “Find, Rusty! Find!” he said. “Find Scout! Find, Rusty, find!” The dog went swiftly over the edge and down, and Dean could hear his sharp staccato barks; it was much as if he were trailing a rabbit.

The Ranger leaned over and turned his feeble spot light into the blackness, but it made a little mocking circle—a tiny tunnel into the dark which led nowhere. He started down; he could hear the dog and follow him, and the dog would find the boy. “Scout!” he called. “Oh, Scout! I’m coming, old son! I’m coming!”

Then his feet shot from under him and he fell. He clutched frantically at the chaparral and at the ground as he slid over it, and he had a clear instant of horrified realization that it was hot ... hot. Then some one seemed to rise up out of the night and fell him with a blow upon his head, and he stopped realizing altogether.

The thing that disturbed him and brought him back to consciousness, that made him struggle back from pleasant peacefulness to pain and bewilderment was a prolonged and bitter howling.... He thought at first that it was the mountain lion which had lost its mate; then he recognized the voice as that of Rusty, the Airedale, and everything that had happened came back to him.

He found that he was lying with his head against a tree; no one would ever know why he hadn’t broken his neck. He got his arms around the tree and dragged himself to his feet, and collapsed again, giddy and faint, but the howling kept up, unbearably, and this time he pulled himself to his hands and knees and started at a snail’s progress in the direction of the sound.

They were not very far away from him, the Airedale and the Scout, though it took him some time to reach them. The dog was circling about, varying his lament now and then with a yelp of pain for the ground was almost covered with smudging embers, but the boy was wholly still.

The young man laid shaking hands upon him and found to his horror that the Scout’s uniform was on fire in several places, and he pulled off his coat and wrapped it about the inert body and beat out the little blazes with his bare hands, and still Elmer Bunty made no sound. It was necessary, first of all, Dean told himself, forcing himself to think collectedly in spite of the wild throbbing of his head, of the sense of nightmare unreality about it, to get him away from this particular spot where there was so much smoldering fire. Back there by the tree, where he had struck, there had been no fire; therefore, he would take him over there—he was sure he could locate it. Besides, the moon was coming up; the radium face of his wrist watch said that it was time for the moon to come up; he counted childishly upon its coming. Now he got his hands under the boy’s armpits and began to drag him, cautiously, for fear of slipping, along the ground, and at the first movement the Scout came out of his swoon and screamed as he had screamed when he fell.

“It’s all right, old son,” said the Ranger, soothingly, “it’s all right! You had a nasty fall, but Rusty found you, and then I found you, and now we’re all——”

But the boy cried out again in agony. “Don’t—move me! Don’t touch me!”

“I know, Scout—those burns hurt horribly, but as soon as I get you up on the trail—” he began gently to drag him again, but Elmer Bunty beat at him with one feeble hand.

“Oh—Ranger—don’t! I can’t—breathe—I’m all—broken—to pieces—” he was sobbing, gasping.

Then the young man stopped dragging him and laid him gently down on the ground and began to feel of his legs and his arms and his back with slow, probing fingers, and the Scout bore it with what heroism he could muster until Dean reached his back, and then he screamed again, more terribly than before, and mercifully fainted. This time the Ranger was able with infinite pains and unbelievable exertion to get him back up the slope to the trail before he recovered consciousness and began the dreadful sobbing again. He could move one arm and hand and he touched the back of his head.

“My head is ... leaking,” he said. “I don’t guess it’s ... blood, do you ... Ranger?”

“It is bleeding, a little, Scout.” He was stripping off his own shirt and tearing it into bandages. “I expect you struck it on a rock; I whanged into a tree myself, you know, or I’d have been over there with you sooner.” He wound the khaki strips about the head, covering the great jagged cut; the blood spurted warmly over his fingers while he worked.

“Now, Scout,” he said, kneeling over him, “this is the stiffest job we ever had to do together; it’s worse than ten forest fires. Are you game for it? Are you going to stand by me? Rusty found you, and I’ve brought you up, and Mabel is waiting for you, but you’ve got the hardest part of all; you’ve got to let me carry you.” He bent closer. “There’s a good Scout!”

“No, Ranger, no! I can’t—please—”

“I know how those burns are smarting, and I know there’s something for the doctor to mend, but we’ve got to get out of here—that fire is coming up again, Scout; we’ve got to go; we’ve got to go as the animals went yesterday—remember? Now I’m going to carry you just as gently and easily as I can, but—I’m going to carry you. We’re going to Golindas’, and Mrs. Golinda will help us till Mateo can bring the doctor—there’ll be a soft bed, Scout, and warm food, and dressing for the burns—” His own emergency case—he cursed his heedlessness—was in the saddlebag at White Pines.

Once Dean Wolcott had seen a small bedraggled kitten defending itself against a terrier. He had broken its back, apparently, for it could not rise, but it lay there, embattled, fending him off with its tiny, futile claws. Before he could rush downstairs and out into the yard—it was over. It was like that now, he thought, sickened, the way the child beat him off with his one hand ... the way he must close in on him.... “I don’t dare let you wait, Scout; I don’t dare—not to do this!”

He got him up at last, face downward, over his shoulder, steadying him and holding him with both hands, talking to him, crooning to him, soothing him, walking slowly for fear of falling, walking faster for fear of the galloping moments. Every atom of his will, every cell of his brain, every nerve of his body was mobilized; he felt curiously light and free and strong; he could carry his burden like this for hours if need be.

Then the moon came up, just as he had calculated that it must, the waning moon, lopsided and sagging, pouring its clear effulgence down on the somber hills, on the black mountain peaks, spilling it down into the depths of cañons—into his cañon there, and into Ginger’s cañon, miles away on the home trail.

“Ah,” he said, joyfully, “now we’re all right, aren’t we, Scout? Now we can make speed! But first I’m going to put you down and have another look, and see if I can’t make you a little more comfortable.” He eased him to the ground with passionate care but the child never ceased his low sobbing.

The moon illumined him whitely; it showed the Ranger everything there was to see; it played over Elmer Bunty like a searchlight of radium; it seemed to pierce through and through his broken little body.

Dean Wolcott got up from his inspection and walked away a few paces and stood looking blindly down into the silvered ravine. When he came back and sat down beside the boy his voice sounded ragged and uneven. “I think we’ll rest here awhile, Scout,” he said. “We won’t try to go on, just now.”

“No,” said the Scout, gasping, grateful, “we won’t—go on—” The Airedale snuggled close to him and lapped his hand and wrist without ceasing. “Rus-ty ...” said the boy with difficulty, and then—“... wisht that Mabel was ...”

“What is it, Scout?” Dean bent his head low to listen.

“I don’t guess Edna ...”—the words trailed away, feeble, uncertain—“’Fraid-Cat ... all burnt’n everything ... not crying ... much....”

And then, in spite of what he had said, the Scout left his friend and his dog and went on, alone.

Now it was hideously easy to carry him. It seemed to Dean Wolcott as if he must walk on without pausing, past Golindas’, through the doctor’s camp, to Monterey, to San Francisco, bearing the small, broken body in his arms until he found the Scout Master, and said—“See, I have brought him back to you, Elmer Bunty, the boy you sent me, the one I ordered especially—to whom I could boast and brag of my woodcraft and wisdom. I said I would make a man of him. You see what I have made of him.”

It was almost grotesque to find how near they had been to White Pines all along, and it was another world, clean and green and fresh. He laid the Scout down on a bed of bending brakes and went methodically to look after the horses.

Snort was gone. The Mabel horse greeted him thankfully, but his own mount, the wild red roan who had betrayed him at Dos Pozos, had deserted him now in his dark hour.

He offered a cracker to Rusty but the dog refused it in bitter preoccupation. The lone lion was calling his mate quite close to them now, but the Airedale paid no heed.

Dean Wolcott sat down beside the body of his Scout, his head bare, his heart heavy, his face hidden in his hands. The sound of the mourning beast’s lament fitted blackly into his mood. The world was a bleak place of loss. The quaint, engaging little creature who had established himself so snugly in his heart was dead; Snort was gone; he had only imagined that Ginger yielded to his arms that night, that far-away night of laughing and music at the Lodge. Ginger would go back to her cattle ranch and marry ’Rome Ojeda: she had spent a whole winter in the east and never made him a sign. It would not be necessary, now that he had seen her, and demonstrated his brilliant ability to sit a horse, to go to Dos Pozos. He would telegraph the regular Ranger to come back and release him: then he would return to Boston, to the Wolcott connection, to cool, correct, comfortable people who lived upstairs in their minds—who did not harry body and heart like this.

And then his aching and rebellious grief for his good Scout came over him and shook him like a harsh wind, and he gave way to it unashamed, thankful for solitude.

But Rusty, the Airedale, rose at the strange sound and left his deathwatch to come padding softly over to him. He pressed hard against him with his shabby little body; he put his forefeet on the young man’s knees and reached upward, lapping the cold, clenched hands with his warm tongue.

CHAPTER XVIII

GINGER came to him in the morning, riding over the crest of the hill with the sunrise. It was as if she had found the new day, somewhere in the black misery of the night, and given it to him.

He was saddling Mabel and he stopped and stared at her, bewildered, unbelieving.

“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.

It was just as the Scout would have wished it to be; just as he had envisaged it. “Tied on his faithful horse”; not Pontiac, Chief of the Ottawas, could have come with greater dignity back to sorrowing followers. Mabel, the lady horse, submitted docilely to the strange burden, seeming to understand and to have a solemn pride in the undertaking; there was a statelier carriage of the homely old head. Rusty, the Airedale, heeled steadily; sometimes he lifted his nose and gave a thin and mournful howl, but in the main he padded down the long trail in silence.

Margaret Golinda was waiting for them with hot coffee and with serene and steady cheer; she was as sure, as strong as the hills.

Her bright and friendly eyes grew dim when she looked at the burden the lady horse was carrying. “But it was a glorious way for him to go,” she said. “The doctor told me what was coming; if he had lived.”

“I wouldn’t believe it,” said Dean Wolcott. “I wouldn’t have let it come! I would have fought it!”

She smiled. “This was a better fight. And you must remember this: you gave him all the life he ever had.” Then she turned to Ginger and held out her hands to her. “And you are—the girl?”

“Yes,” said Ginger, gladly, meeting the brown hard grip.

“I knew you were—somewhere. I’m glad he has you, now.” She stood in the doorway of her wise, little gray house and watched them riding away, the small solemn cavalcade.

They talked but little, Ginger and her lover. There was too much grief in the air—and too much quiet and believing joy, but she told him about Mary Wiley.

“And this winter,” she said, “I will be with Mary Wiley again.”

“This winter,” he said quietly, “you will be with me.”

There was something in the brief sentence that made her heart turn over; it was the authority, the conviction; it was all that the small group of words meant, all that it stood for. This winter she would be with him. East or west, going to symphonies and settlements and seeing new plays, or riding the range and bringing in the cattle; it didn’t in the least matter where they would be or what they would be doing: this winter—and all the winters in the world and all the summers—she would be with him.

So they came at length to the doctor’s camp, riding in single file, the Ranger, and the girl, and the Scout, “tied on his faithful horse,” and the shabby, tired, little dog trotting behind, and the gay, kindly people came out to meet them with sober faces and with tears.... “Betcher all the squaws cried like anything”—he had said, dramatizing the last hour of his life, and it was indeed “much more exciting than just hearses and hacks.”

At last he was filling the stage, Elmer Bunty, of whom the Scout Master had said that a really determined daddy longlegs could put him to flight—Elmer Bunty, the ’Fraid-Cat; Elmer Bunty, who had fought the good fight; the good scout. All the prosperous, poised people stood about him sorry and grave, to do him homage.

Ginger forgot her grief and her gladness for an instant when she saw her Aunt Fan coming toward her. She was limping painfully still and her short chugging steps were unsteady, and there was no sea-shell tint on her round face, and her eyes were red with weeping. “Oh, Aunt Fan,” she said remorsefully, “I’m sorry you worried so! I thought you’d know I was going to find Dean, and that you wouldn’t——”

“I haven’t been crying about you,” said Mrs. Featherstone, with asperity. “I worried, of course, but I knew you could take care of yourself, and I had other things to think about. It’s—” she gulped back a sob—“it’s Jim!”

“Aunt Fan—I’m sorry! What is it? What has happened?”

“It hasn’t happened yet; it’s going to happen, just as soon as I get there.” She pulled out one of her flippant, little sport handkerchiefs of pink linen embroidered in blue and dabbed at her eyes. “I had a telegram, a night letter, telephoned down to Pfeiffer’s. He’s sick—terribly sick, and the doctor wants to operate, and there’s a chance—a big chance—that he won’t—come through.” Her chin quivered uncontrollably. “His heart—his heart—” She had to stop.

They stood looking at her and listening to her in deep-eyed sympathy, the Ranger and the girl. Ginger took one of her hands and kept patting it softly.

“He thinks he won’t come through it,” Mrs. Featherstone went on, after an instant. “And he wants me to come—as quick as the Limited’ll bring me, for he won’t let them operate till I get there. And he wants me to marry him again. He says if he doesn’t come through—” she choked on it—“he wants to go knowing I’m his wife; he wants me to have—what he’s got.” She gave a sudden decisive sniff and threw up her head. “And I guess it might just as well come to me as to those two sisters of his that are rolling—simply rolling—already, and always treated me like the dirt under their feet!” She came out of her personal preoccupation for a moment and considered her niece and her lover. “Well!—So you’ve made it up, have you? You’ve come to your senses?”

They told her, without resentment, that they had come to their senses.

“Well, I’m sure I’ve done what I could. I certainly haven’t left a stone unturned— Look here—” she addressed herself exclusively to the young man—“you’ll transplant her from that ranch, the very first thing you do, won’t you? You’ll take her east, won’t you? I won’t have to—”

“I’ll take her east, yes,” said Dean Wolcott. “I’ll take her east with me as soon as I’ve finished here, but I’ll bring her west again whenever she says the word.”

“Oh, Lord!” said Ginger’s Aunt Fan in exasperation. “If you’re going to be as soft as that she’d better have married ’Rome Ojeda. Well, if ever you want to see me, you can stop off in San Francisco!”

Then she grew tender and her very blue eyes looked as they did when she was thinking about food and making mental menus for herself, and she laid hold of them both with her plump, pretty hands. “My dears, I’m glad for you; I am glad. I think you’ve got something to hold to, and see that you hold on to it! Henry and I had it, once, and Jim and I thought”—her face contracted swiftly. “I must fly and pack. The doctor’s driving me in to Monterey to catch the train so I can start east in the morning. I don’t know what I’m going to do; I won’t know till I get there.” She shook her head. “The minute I get into New York I’ll have a good, straight talk with that surgeon and see if things are really as desperate— Of course, the idea of marrying Jim again never entered my head. But if I don’t, and he does die, I suppose I’ll never forgive myself. And if I do—and he doesn’t”—her eyes snapped blue fire—“I’ll never forgive him!”

Elmer Bunty, the Scout, lay in state in a vacant cabin and the Airedale charged outside the door. The very blond girl went in with an armful of wild flowers and tall ferns, and when she came out again her eyes were red-rimmed. She saw Dean and Ginger and nodded to them, smiling mistily, and when the young man was not looking she held up two fingers to Ginger’s gaze, uncrossed.

Dean Wolcott had to go back to his headquarters at Post’s; there were reports to be made, telephones to the Chief Ranger at King City, to the Scout Master in San Francisco. He would come to her again in the evening.

The doctor was unsaddling Mabel, the lady horse, and he had warm words for his Ranger; Mateo Golinda had told him things which would make an eastern name long remembered in that wild county of the west. He had warm and hearty words for the two of them, his tired eyes kindling. He remembered Rosalía Valdés McVeagh and her tearful old song, but he believed that “the coming of wintry weather” would find them ready and strong. He went away from them smiling to himself, and not looking back.

They were alone, then, save for the grave and tolerant horses, and Ginger went swiftly into his arms. “I don’t want to say good-by even for three hours,” she said, rebelliously. “But you’ll be coming back; always you’ll be coming back, and always it will be as it was on Aleck’s bridge.”

Snort came nearer and nosed jealously at Dean Wolcott’s shoulder, and he spared a hand for him. Then he looked down and kissed the red scratch on Ginger’s cheek where it rested against his dull sleeve. It was dust-colored, dust-covered. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed aloud, gladly, triumphantly. Accolade of victory; sign and symbol of battles and beatitudes. “Corduroy,” he said, touching the fabric of his coat and of hers, “corde du roi!”

“Of course,” Ginger said, wondering a little, but too deeply content to wonder very much, “corduroy.”

THE END

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Table of Contents

- CORDUROY
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE