The Popular Magazine/Volume 35/Number 5/In the Lonesome Land

by Vingie E. Roe

 

In the Lonesome Land

By Vingie E. Roe
Author of "When the Red Hills Threaten," "The Steeds of Summit Pass," Etc.

A job for the warden in the forests of the Trinity Range—a job which peeved him at first because of its seeming impossibility of accomplishment, but which eventually was to be reckoned among his finest memories

A rifle spat on a hillside, the clean, sharp snap of a thirty-thirty. Kenset, sitting his powerful red horse on a slant so steep that his left toe braced on the earth, lifted his head. A scowl drew deep between his eyes.

"At it again, darn him!" he said aloud.

Mister, the big red horse, flipped an inquiring ear backward. An amazing understanding existed between these two, a sympathy so fine that Mister took his cues from Kenset's evidence of mood—the fiddling with his mane, say when the master was puzzled. Mister felt that a few wisps directly under the bridle hand must have become ragged these last few weeks, so persistently had Kenset twisted and pulled them.

For some one was defying the law of the forest that Kenset stood for, and, keen as the ranger was, he had failed to discover one small clew to the vandal.

It was late in November, and the season had closed over a month back, yet three times in the past two weeks he had heard that clean, sharp snap yapping on the slopes.

It was glorious in the Trinity Range. No railroad screamed its challenge nearer than forty miles, no town worthy of the name marred the wildness. Here and there in the deep creases of the tumbled hills tiny clusters of houses huddled above the leaping, white-water streams, relics of the days of '49. Prospectors still panned on the bars, and down below a huge dredge worked methodically in the river bed.

There had been a rain or two, and the nights were sharp with frost.

Here and there a bush or a tree flamed with the scarlet flag of autumn, but for the most part the land looked like summer. All the mighty slopes were clothed in pine and fir, with here and there a cedar.

"Buck grass" still hung in great, feathery bunches along the rocky edge of the river. A cool, high sun bathed this wild world in brilliant light, while far off the peaks of other ranges swam in a soft blue haze.

It was good to be in the hills in fall, and Kenset was alive to every pulse of his lonely land. He had a cabin high up on a shoulder of Pappoose Mountain, and he could hear and see for miles along the dropping slopes. It was there, in his own dooryard, as he sat smoking an evening pipe and watching the red veils creep over the blue haze as the sun went down, that he had heard that first shot a fortnight back—and he knew some one was after a buck. Once again he had caught the faint, far snap a few days later and here it was again.

He gathered his rein and put Mister softly down along the hill toward it. For ten minutes he rode. Then he drew the horse into a thicket and dismounted, hanging the rein over the pommel. Mister was trained to stand at attention—for hours if need be—and to come at a whistle, and he wanted no dragging straps to hinder.

Kenset, a sturdy figure in his khakis, puttees, and wide-brimmed ranger's hat, went forward as gently as an Indian.

The woods were thick with fern and hazelbrush, and slippery with dry needles, and, try as he would, he could not help a sound now and then. The slant was rugged, with a bold jut pushing a brazen front of seamed and splintered rock out to command the valley far below. As he approached this vantage point, he raised his eyes and looked up along its face. Into his line of vision a head was coming, a bold, black head, running with short curls. It wriggled up on the crest of the rock, and an arm came into view reaching for holds here and there, and in a moment a figure lifted itself out on the rock's top with the strength and grace of a cat.

Kenset remained where he was, absolutely still, for it was the figure of a woman. She gathered herself together, tucked a foot beneath her, and leaned back comfortably against a convenient shelf of the bowlder behind.

And she was as startling a figure as one would come across in a lifetime. She wore what had once been a good khaki climbing skirt. Now it was thin with long wear, faded with washing, and it was ragged from contact with rock and thorn and bush. A man's blue flannel shirt, in the same state of decline, covered her shoulders and lay open at the throat, while upon her feet were the most disreputable pair of knee-laced boots Kenset had ever beheld. But if he appraised her raiment keenly, he did it swiftly, for no one could look long at her garments who saw her face above. It was in profile to him, but even so it was magnetic as the north pole, a spirited, boyish face, with a sturdy, small chin, a full mouth of ravishing sweetness, and a straight nose a bit tip-tilted.

One hand hung out with the arm on her raised knee, the other trifled idly with the ragged sole of her boot.

Kenset was young, and he hadn't seen a woman for four months—he said to himself even in that amazed first moment that he had never seen one like this girl. Therefore he stepped softly out beside the rock and took off his hat.

"Good afternoon," he said.

The girl jumped, as if his deep voice had been a rattler's whiz. She was on her feet in an instant, ready to fly; and then, seeing him, she dropped quietly down again and smiled.

"Scared me," she said shortly.

But that smile had sent the blood hot in Kenset's cheeks, for he had looked full into two eyes as black as the curls on her forehead, as slow and sleepy and mysterious as he had always fancied Cleopatra's to have been. For such eyes men have lost "jobs" and wrecked kingdoms.

"I'm Kenset," he said, "ranger and warden. Did you hear a shot a few moments ago over here somewhere?"

The girl nodded.

"Yes. Over in that wash."

She pointed with a long, shapely arm, the index finger out, the others curled under, the ancient, efficient way.

Kenset hesitated.

"Did you see who fired it?"

"No."

She looked down at him quietly, taking him in from head to foot with a deliberation that was almost insolence.

The interview was ended, it seemed, and there was nothing on earth for Kenset to do but raise his hat to her, set it firmly on his head, and depart, which he did, feeling that he had blundered somehow.

Of course there was nothing and nobody "over in that wash." He did find tracks of a big buck, made but a few moments back in the soft loam, but that was all.

He went home to his high cabin with more food for thought than he had had for months.

Who was she? Where did she live? Where had she come from?

He thought he knew every cabin in the hills. Ah, that was it! The old tumble-down house at the deserted Outlook Mine! He'd bet she lived there. It was the nearest place possible, and he hadn't been by there for six weeks—no, it was two months and more since he had ridden that way.

All that evening, while he smoked in his lonely dooryard, he conjured her vital face and listened again to her low-pitched, throaty voice.

He had never seen any such pretty, bold, black head as hers before; no forehead under shining curls like that. And her mouth! He felt his blood stir pleasantly at memory of it, a spirited, reckless mouth, yet full and soft. Oh, she was wholly adorable! And she seemed in the barest poverty, though Kenset knew that the mountain people were a careless lot.

He had known mine owners, worth more money than he ever hoped to have, to wear such clothes as any hodcarrier in a city wouldn't be caught out in.

He shook his head, knocked the dottle out of his pipe, and went to bed.

Once in the week that followed he heard that defiant shot. He pulled Mister's mane savagely, for he knew he was being baited, and he rode the hills continually.

On the Thursday after that first meeting, he came sharply on the girl again. She was coming down a faint, small trail that led from the high brush meadows to a stream below, a deer trail, cut and hollowed by light, sharp feet that traveled it nightly.

"Ho!" cried the ranger, startled. "You scared me this time."

"Yes?" she said. "In that case you oughtn't to be out in these hills alone. They're full of scares."

"So?" laughed Kenset. "Then how about yourself?"

She shrugged her shoulders expressively and spread out her hands. They were strong-looking hands, fine-skinned and brown.

"I'm not afraid of much," she said succinctly.

"You're a stranger hereabouts?" asked Kenset.

"Well, no—hardly. I've been here some time."

"Would you mind telling me where you live? I thought I knew every habitation in here."

"With my father," she said calmly.

Kenset blushed, feeling like an over-inquisitive child that has been rebuked.

"I beg your pardon," he said, but the girl looked up at him and smiled.

"You needn't. These hill billies are all inquisitive."

"For the love of—— Look here—do you take me for a hill billy?"

The ranger, halfway off his horse, hung arrested in his stirrup, and gazed with angry eyes over his shoulder. He was suddenly and thoroughly "mad."

"Well," she said slowly, "I can only judge by manners."

Kenset got down, stepped close to her, put deliberate hands on his hips, and searched her smiling face with an insolence to match her own.

"Do you know what I think?" he said at last, too angry to be cautious. "Do you?"

The black eyes returned his gaze without a quiver, first looking into one of his own, then into the other, as if she found the color interesting.

"No," she answered, "and I don't care a cent."

"Well," said Kenset, "I think you're a badly spoiled child that thinks impudence smartness."

"Yes?"

She flipped a clinging brier from her soiled khaki skirt, ran her fingers through her beautiful black curls, and shook her shoulders.

The little play was as insolent as anything could be—and it set the man's heart to jumping with sheer joy in her daring.

"And also," he said swiftly—the temper was fast ebbing out of him—"I think you are a darling."

"Yes?" she drawled. "Well, I can't return the compliment. And, what's more, you're proving what I said about manners."

And without another word she turned back up the faint trail, slipped around a thick growth of young pine, and disappeared.

Kenset went home with more diversified feelings stirring inside him than he knew what to do with. He was humiliated, still a bit ruffled, ashamed of his temper, and decidedly interested in this wild Juno of the mountains.

But however much of new interest had sprung up for him in his autumn solitude, he was still keen on the trail of the poacher. Last year he had had no end of trouble with illicit slaughter of the deer, had made an enemy or two, and heard a bold boast that went about among the old-timers that they "had never been without meat no winter sence '54, an' no young snipe o' a forest ranger'd change the custom."

But this year Kenset had decided that there would be a shining example of the nation's punishment if he caught them at it.

So he was out early and late about his business.

He saw the black-haired girl no more for a week. At the end of that time, he determined to go to the old house at the abandoned Outlook.

It was a morning so crisp with frost in the shadowed places that every light foot left its telltale mark. The dry needles slipped and slid under Mister's careful hoofs, and the forest hung still and glorious.

As they were going gently down a long, shallow slant of the hills, there suddenly cut on the living air that clean snap that Kenset was beginning to know. Mister halted so sharply that he sat back upon his tail, and, thundering out of the ferns ahead, a great buck came leaping up along the slope. It was a magnificent animal carrying eight prongs laid well back on its shoulders, and Kenset thrilled to his toes as it went by in such high, long leaps as only a frightened buck can make. But with its disappearance the ranger's lips came together in a grim line and he slid off Mister. That shot had been very near. The one who fired it must be on this same hill. He would have small chance to get away, for Kenset could see both ways, and anything moving among the underbrush must attract attention. Therefore he drew the blue gun that hung always at his hip, and went forward.

He went boldly, though cautiously, for he well knew that he took his life in his hand. Many a man was found in the deer season, and always the verdict was "accidentally shot by hunters."

One ranger the less would be slight catastrophe to the region.

Keeping first a tree, then a bowlder, then a tree again between him and the point from which he had heard the shot, he covered the hillside from end to end. He even found the spot where the buck had been feeding, saw the scattered frosty needles disturbed by its first startled bound, but, search as he would—and he wasted two hours—there was neither trace nor trail of the vandal.

He would have been hugely surprised had he known that two eyes sharp as a ferret's watched him from under a big rock while a cramped hand held an old rifle along its owner's back pressed up against the sheltering stone.

It was ten o'clock when he gave over his search, mounted Mister, and rode away. He was vexed and at outs with himself.

But he let himself think of the girl and whether or not he would find her at the Outlook. Once, in the "olden golden days," the Outlook had made millionaires in a night, had seen its blood and buried its dead on the slope below, had sent its name into the great world, and had "lost its lead" in a day, therefore going the way of all the world when its heyday is over. Now it was but a gloomy tunnel high on a mountain, a worn and ancient shack, a monumental pile of rust which had been a forty-stamp, mill, and a long blue "dump" trailing down the hill face like a soiled and ragged ribbon.

It was solitude, and unspeakable loneliness and desolation materialized, and Kenset hoped devoutly that he would not find her there.

The doors of the house were open. Beside the spring, which lay sweet and clear in the trail, there hung a tin can with the top melted off. And the trail bore evidence of use.

Out on the rickety porch a man sat in a shabby wheeled chair, his limbs covered by a faded plush lap robe. White hair hung in soft rings about a fine brow, and blue eyes looked eagerly down at the stranger as he dismounted and came up.

"Come right up, sir!" he cried, in a beautiful old voice. "Glad to see you! Unspeakably glad to meet you!"

He held out a thin left hand, which Kenset took. The other lay, with the curious seeming of finality that always accompanies paralysis, in his lap.

He searched the young man's face with the eagerness of those whose ways of the outside world have been sharply shut upon them.

"I'm Kenset, sir," said the ranger. "Ranger and warden, and, coming by this way, I thought I'd stop. We have so few neighbors in the hills that we must make the most of each other."

"You are right, indeed! My name is Clarendon—Colonel Clarendon, Ninth Kentucky Volunteers. Sit down, sir! There is another chair inside, I believe, if you will kindly fetch it. You see I am not worth much these days. My daughter went out for a little climb around the hill. It is lonely for a young person. But she will soon be back."

Kenset flushed a bit as he stepped inside the crazy doorway.

So! She did live here, and—— Holy smoke! What utter poverty! It was right, then—that first suggestion of the ragged shoes, the frayed old skirt.

Inside, there was the very atmosphere of bygone days, that most unspeakable sort of loneliness, the wistful air of decay and nonuse.

And there was little else. The wide boards of the floor had been scrubbed to painful cleanliness. There was nothing on the walls but rotting paper, and here and there, pasted flat, ancient and ridiculous wood cuts taken from papers. One of these bore the date 1856.

There was a table made of a goods box, two smaller boxes nailed to the wall with a thin white curtain strung before them, and in the room beyond Kenset could see a pair of springs set up on small sawed sections of a young pine tree, while in one corner another narrower bed was made high on an abundance of fir boughs. Whoever had arranged this interior had made the best of nature's gifts with an aptitude and quickness that spoke well for life in these wilds where one had to forego luxuries.

One uncertain kitchen chair stood beside the table, which was covered with a clean white cloth. Kenset carried it out, and for a long, quiet hour he forgot his vexations in a delightful conversation. His host had no need to tell of the "old days in the South, sir." His every motion, attitude, and inflection was a dignified delineation of that better time. The morning slipped away, and the still shadows of the pines crept under them, heralding the noon. And presently there came a step on the steep trail by the spring and the girl swung up to the crazy porch. She looked weary, and she carried a battered tin lard' pail full of ripe manzanita berries.

"So you found' me out?" she said to Kenset, in a tone that nettled him instantly, though he smiled at her with the inevitable sympathy of youth.

"Come, now, Miss Clarendon, there isn't a reason in the world why we should quarrel."

He turned to the older man,

"I met your daughter on the hill the other day, and she accused me of bad manners."

"Daughter! Daughter!" said the colonel, though his old eyes softened with affection. "I'm afraid she is a bit spoiled, sir."

She set down the pail and leaned against the high porch floor.

Kenset offered the rickety chair, but she shook her head. All the soft black curls fluffed and fell back again with the motion, and he thought he had never seen anything so entirely entrancing.

And she suddenly looked up at him, a wistful, tired look, wholly at variance with the usual expression of those imperious eyes.

Kenset felt his head go round, and he stooped and picked a berry from her pail.

"What will you do with these?" he asked, turning the hard, dark, red little sphere in his fingers, breaking the thin, flaky, dry outside from the thick seed.

The girl glanced swiftly at her father, and then down.

"The Indians used to make a certain flour from them," she said, "and I thought I'd try it. You see, one can't get fruit in here."

"No," broke in the colonel, "and as we have been here nearly two months now, our stores of such things are—ah—running low, so to speak."

"Why," began Kenset eagerly, "there is a stage running from Conniston down below. One can order. Will you let me——"

"No," said the girl sharply, "we have plenty for the present."

It was high noon when Kenset rose to leave, and, though no one in the big hills allowed a guest to leave at meal-time, neither father nor daughter asked him to stay, though the eagerness in the old man's voice as he begged him to come back again caused him to promise.

The girl said nothing, sitting insolently against the porch post, but when the ranger had ridden jauntily away down the precipitous trail, she flung herself face down on the worn boards and wept hard.

"Darn him!" she sobbed. "Oh, darn him! I wish he'd die! I do!"

"Child! Child!" quavered the old man, his thin left hand working on the lap robe. "Let us go out. There is still the money for the journey——"

The girl sat up.

"Never!" she cried defiantly. "Aren't you better? Can't you move both feet now? You'll walk by spring. Never!"

 

And Kenset, riding in a brown study along a wash far down, came abruptly upon a man—a slouch-hatted, booted individual, tall, handsome in a wild way, and grinning.

"Out fer game, warden?" he asked. "Thought I heerd a shot somewhere hereabouts this mornin'."

The ranger knew this youth for one of the reckless spirits of the region—G. C. MacLaw.

He looked at him keenly.

"Yes, and I shall get him, G. C," he said. "Sooner or later I'll get him, and he'll pay well to the law for his indiscretion."

Kenset rode on, but from that moment a light seemed to fall upon things. "I wonder," he mused. "I wonder. Is it G. C., and could she care—— Well, if she does, that explains her venom toward me."

But, try as he would, he could not accept that version, perhaps because of her beauty and the fact that it gave him a savage hurt to think of her as being against him because of another man—any other man.

A few days later he came upon a piece of evidence. He was going over the hillside where he had seen the big buck tearing away from danger, and he was searching it, every inch. Something seemed to tell him that he must do this. For an hour he hunted. Then, standing by the big rock from which those two sharp eyes had watched him that other day, he suddenly stooped and looked beneath it.

There, in a shallow cave, lay a gun. He pulled it out and examined it. It was a thirty-thirty, and it gave evidence of long use, a worn, brown weapon, efficient as only a long-used, true gun can be. It worked in the hand as softly and truly as the hand itself. Its forward sight was handmade, a tiny, sharp wedge; its rear sight was a late, improved peep, bored out a bit for rapid work. He who owned this gun was a hunter, and no mistake.

Kenset mused a bit on that bored-out sight. Old hunters, good hunters, sometimes did this, knowing that the eye would automatically find the true center of the hole from the fact that it was the brightest point therein, the outer rim being darker.

He recalled its voice yapping on the slopes, its keen, clean voice.

And yet, with all this evidence of skill, he who had fired it had missed the big buck—had missed at other times he had reason to believe.

Who owned it? And why did he leave it here?

Kenset looked it over from butt to muzzle. Ah, ha! Just under the foresight, on the right side, were scrawled, as with a penknife, two crude initials— and they were a "G" and a "C."

Triumphantly the ranger put the rifle back where he had found it, but in the next moment the triumph had wilted from him like frost in sunlight.

So it was MacLaw, all right, and the girl knew it and hated him—Kenset—for being so hot on his trail. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, and he was suddenly tired of the chase.

But, good heavens! It wasn't right to let her waste herself on a man like G. .C. He lived at Brandt's saloon up at the Forks—he drank and gambled, and Kenset recalled his ugly tongue, his boasts about women.

For ten minutes the ranger stared down the silent green slopes, and, when he turned back to where he had left Mister, there was resolve and determination in his gray eyes.

He rode toward the abandoned Outlook.

But he had no need to hurry, for halfway there he heard her coming, light-footed, through the ferns. He stopped and waited, and when she came suddenly upon him he did not lift his hat.

Perhaps she liked the "rough-and-ready" sort.

"Hello, kid!" he said.

He almost quailed at the flash of her eyes, but laughed quietly at her and let the admiration he felt for her show plainly through his half-closed lids.

She had stopped close, both hands holding back the ferns. Her little, bold, black head was up, and the red lips were parted over her pretty teeth.

"Kid!" she said slowly. "Did—you—call—me—kid?"

"Sure!" said Kenset easily. "Didn't you call me a hill billy?"

"Get out of my way!" she said, and, passing insolently around Mister's heels, she raised a hand and struck him on the flank.

But Kenset, his heart leaping hard against his ribs, his breath fast in his throat, turned as swiftly, and, reaching down, caught her shoulders in the curve of his arm. He was strong, and he drew her to him, hard against his breast.

"Beauty!" he said softly. "Oh, you little wild cat!"

He wore on his right hand a heavy Masonic ring, the crest of its double-headed eagles joined by a low-set diamond, and a shaft of the brilliant sunlight coming through the pine tops far above struck full upon the stone. In its opulent glory it cried to Heaven its contrast with the old blue shirt whose frayed fringe stopped at the girl's elbow.

Kenset caught that contrast, and the next instant he was hot with shame and sorrow.

Poor? She was pitiful in her rags! And she was alone, and what business, was it of his if she liked G. C.?

In two seconds he was off his horse, his hat was on the ground, and he was holding her hands.

"Forgive me!" he cried. "Say what you will, Miss Clarendon. I deserve it all. I can't apologize enough! I—!——"

But there he floundered, stopped, at perfect loss, for the girl, her face white as chalk, her somber eyes flaming, had opened her mouth with a gasp to flay him with rage, and then the eyes had suddenly dimmed with tears, the lips quivered pitifully, and, snatching her hands away, she covered her face and cried.

She turned her back to him and wept, and Kenset felt like a condemned criminal. He put a diffident hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off.

"Miss Clarendon!" he begged. "I can't tell you how sorry I am——"

"Prove it, then!" she cried, from the shelter of her hands. "Go away, quick!"

And without a word he obeyed.

 

For two weeks Kenset kept clear of the Outlook. He was after MacLaw, and the handsome youth grinned at him and baited him openly at the Forks.

Try as he would, he failed at everything he touched, it seemed, and he was torn on the rack beside. And then, at the end of that second week, he came upon a circumstance that put him far at sea.

He heard that MacLaw was going to be married—to a girl at Conniston!

What did it mean? What did——

Say! He sat up in his bed that night and cold chills went over him. He slept no more, and he was out on the hills at dawn, restless, driven, waiting until he could decently go to the Outlook.

What might not have happened in those two weeks? Fool! Fool that he had been! Why had he not investigated?

He rode to the Outlook, and his heart was in his throat. He had not waited for good day, so eager had he been. Cold blue shadows, huge as the hills themselves, lay mysteriously in the hollows. White frost sparkled on rock and drooping fern. Snakes, the wicked rattlers of the peaks and rocks, were safely holed for the winter—and the deer were taking their handsome winter coats. It was a glorious country, a big, wild country, scarce fit for a girl to roam at will; and he fell to thinking of her as Mister picked his way up along the faint old trail.

The sun was just lifting above the range when he came around the spring and saw the shack. There was no sign of life about it. The door was a bit ajar, and Kenset felt cold fear at his heart.

Had they gone—disappeared like the mists of the night, a mysterious pair in a mysterious setting?

He slipped off Mister, hid him in a thicket off the trail, and went softly up on the rickety porch, pushed the door wider, and entered. The blue light of early morning revealed the pitiful poverty of the place without mercy. Kenset stood a moment, searching. Then he stopped, quiet as a cat, and looked into the other room.

On the springs set on the pine sections the old man lay asleep, his white hair spread on the folded coat that served as a pillow. A candle and a worn old Bible lay on a box beside him, its unsightliness hidden by a clean white cloth. The narrow bed on the fir boughs in the corner was empty.

Long the ranger looked, conscious of an aching pity and wholly oblivious to the fact that he was rude beyond apology.

Then he deliberately went to the tumble-down kitchen beyond and searched it from top to bottom.

And a great light grew with his investigations.

It was spotlessly clean, that wistful place of a forgotten day, its old shelves covered with newspapers, its rough floor scrubbed and polished, but it was bare as a man's palm newly washed.

Kenset looked in all the few pots and pails, and there was nothing there. On the bottom shelf there lay the last of a piece of bacon as big as a boot's sole, while beside it stood a shallow dish half full of a grayish-white mixture which looked like some kind of batter.

Kenset dipped a finger in it and tasted it.

"Manzanita!" he whispered. "So this is what she meant! And this is all! All!"

He straightened up and stared at the empty shelves, and he saw again that day when he had meant to kiss her—saw the ragged sleeve of her old blue shirt against his diamond and the tears in her black eyes.

He struck a doubled fist softly in his palm and writhed in real pain. Was it possible that one could starve like this in an abundant land?

Ah, yes. He knew the lonely pockets of the hills, and how, if one had not the price and the way, it could easily be done.

And he—he had persecuted her, had suggested that she order—had tried to kiss her! Oh, he——

But there he lost his abasing thought, for some one was coming up the trail, some one who stumbled and panted with whistling breath. He could hear it where he stood, and a sweat prickled out upon him, it was so strange a sound. Presently a foot struck the steps, slipped off, and tried again, and then came up, heavy, dragging, a burdened step that stumbled and all but failed. And then a voice cried amid its panting, and he knew it for her voice, that sweet, deep voice which had thrilled him that first day.

"Father!" it cried. "Father!" And the exultation in it was beyond description. It waited, then it called again, between the heavy breaths:

"Father, dear! Come out! Come quick! Come quick!"

Kenset heard the slow, heavy movements of one who "could move both feet" getting himself slowly into the old wheel chair, and he waited, tense in every limb, until the crazy vehicle crossed the empty room beyond and passed through the door.

"Why, daughter! Why, daughter!"

There was pride ineffable, and joy and relief in the old voice.

"Why, what a girl you are! Now let us thank God for His bounty, my dear. This is indeed famous, famous!"

And the colonel raised his left hand and sent up to that One who watches over "His loved and His own" the quaintest thanksgiving in the world.

At its close Kenset stepped softly from his hiding place and deliberately stood in the doorway behind the chair. He looked across the colonel's white head into a pair of eyes startled to the point of panic, filled with such fear as he had never beheld.

The girl stood on the top step, a picture in the sharp gold light of the risen sun. She was wet to her knees with wading some mountain stream, and she was flushed and sweating with great labor.

In her right hand, held by the muzzle, its butt upon the floor, there trailed the old brown gun that Kenset had found beneath the rock, while, hanging on her shoulders, feet tied across her breast with one of the laces from her ragged boots, a young spike buck shone blue in its winter coat.

Kenset had a wild desire to paint her at that tense moment, this Diana of the hills with her game upon her and the panic in her eyes.

All the triumph went out of her, and she swayed upon her feet.

The gun slipped from her hand and clattered down the steps.

The red lips, ashen now, opened and closed without sound, and Kenset, springing past the wheel chair, caught her just in time.

"I—I——" she said thickly, and closed her eyes, standing slim and weary in the circle of his arm.

"Why—why, sir——" quavered the old man wonderingly. "How——" And as the magnitude of Kenset's presence dawned upon him, he picked at the faded robe across his knees.

He bowed his head, and for a long moment there was no sound save a wild hawk screaming in the gorge. Then the old man looked up, the dignity of his years and his simplicity upon him.

"You have caught us, sir," he said gently, "and you will do your duty. But first we must explain so that you will know it was necessity, not wanton lawlessness, that drove my daughter to break the law. We——"

"Stop, sir! Stop, I beg you!" cried the ranger hoarsely, but the colonel shook his head.

"We came in here in the late summer because a doctor at—at the soldiers' home told my daughter—— She did realize, sir, when she went in the desperation of poverty, that I had fought on what is now the wrong side—that I might improve in the high mountains. A neighbor told us of these deserted habitations in the old mining sites, and so we came, with our last resources, because my daughter—my daughter so loves and guards me, sir, that she must needs take any risk that I may walk again."

He stopped and looked at the girl with tragic old blue eyes, and Kenset's arm tightened about her—and the little spike buck.

"But we found our provisions were—were inadequate, and so my daughter, who never held a gun in her life, must rent this blunderbuss from a youth who comes this way sometimes—I must not divulge his name, for, though he did wrong in the eyes of the law in this arrangement, he would have helped us greatly. She has tried and tried and ever she missed the pretty creatures that it wrung her heart to try to kill; for, you see, sir, she had no skill—and these cartridges cost too much for practice. We—we were—low, I might say, on foodstuffs, and so—so we were elated this morning, you see——"

Kenset groaned aloud, and, gently loosing his arm, he cut the thongs and took the little buck from her shoulders.

"Hush!" he said, as the old man would have added yet more to his dignified justification.

"As this brave little girl has hunted the deer, colonel," he said, "so I have hunted her; for, in my blundering, I thought I had my man spotted, and I intended making an example of him to——"

"As you still will, sir, if you do your duty," said the old warrior gravely.

"As I will certainly, when I catch the vandals who shoot for daring. But"—he turned to the girl and lifted the pretty black head, no longer bold and imperious but drooping against the post of the dilapidated porch—"but more than all my duty, all my desire to uphold the law I stand for, is your welfare to me. Can you love, ever so little, a hill billy like me, my young wild cat? Look at me! Can you?"

He held her away and forced the long black eyes to lift themselves to his.

"Answer me fairly, curly head," he said softly, "for I have loved you from that first moment when you climbed out on the big bowlder that day and I scared you so."

Af his words the red came running back into the ashen lips and the adorable lips curled, albeit somewhat tremulously.

"Scared me!" she said, a bit trembly. "I knew you were there when I climbed up. It was I who fired that shot."

"Well, of all—— But answer me: What of a hill billy like me?"

She turned the little buck with a ragged toe and glanced at her father from the corners of her eyes.

"I—I think I like the breed," she said.

Kenset reached for her, and as his arm went round her the diamond sparkled triumphantly against the faded flannel shirt.

He held out the other hand to the colonel.

"Sir," he said, with so much joy that he could not keep his voice quite steady, "I have a dandy cabin high up where the air is A1. There is room for us all—and I have but your consent to gain before I ride for a preacher down at Conniston."

"Why—why——" said the colonel blankly. "This—this is sudden! But youth—ah, youth! I mind, sir, when I rode a wild way once for a girl who had my daughter's eyes. Ah, yes! Ride, sir! I know a man when I meet him—and so does my daughter. Ride!"

Kenset bowed and kissed the adorable lips for the first sweet time. "As her mother did before her," he said, as he dashed down to where he had hidden Mister—and Mister knew that all was well, for the wisp of mane beneath the bridle hand lay with its waving mates; and they went a swift journey down amid the flaming autumn flags.