Bill, lumbering down over the wheel, took a bag of mail from the boot and dragged it into the cabin. The girl rose, stretched herself, and said: "This stagin" is slow business. I"m cramped. I"m going to walk on ahead."
"May I go with you?" asked Norcross.
"Sure thing! Come along."
As they crossed the little pole bridge which spanned the flood, the tourist exclaimed: "What exquisite water! It"s like melted opals."
"Comes right down from the snow," she answered, impressed by the poetry of his simile.
He would gladly have lingered, listening to the song of the water, but as she pa.s.sed on, he followed. The opposite hill was sharp and the road stony, but as they reached the top the young Easterner called out, "See the savins!"
Before them stood a grove of cedars, old, gray, and drear, as weirdly impressive as the cacti in a Mexican desert. Torn by winds, scarred by lightnings, deeply rooted, tenacious as tradition, unlovely as Egyptian mummies, fantastic, dwarfed and blackened, these unaccountable creatures clung to the ledges. The dead mingled horribly with the living, and when the wind arose--the wind that was robustly cheerful on the high hills--these hags cried out with low moans of infinite despair. It was as if they pleaded for water or for deliverance from a life that was a kind of death.
The pale young man shuddered. "What a ghostly place!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "It seems the burial-place of a vanished race."
Something in his face, some note in his voice profoundly moved the girl.
For the first time her face showed something other than childish good nature and a sense of humor. "I don"t like these trees myself," she answered. "They look too much like poor old squaws."
For a few moments the man and the maid studied the forest of immemorial, gaunt, and withered trees--bright, impermanent youth confronting time-defaced and wind-torn age. Then the girl spoke: "Let"s get out of here. I shall cry if we don"t."
In a few moments the dolorous voices were left behind, and the cheerful light of the plain rea.s.serted itself. Norcross, looking back down upon the cedars, which at a distance resembled a tufted, bronze-green carpet, musingly asked: "What do you suppose planted those trees there?"
The girl was deeply impressed by the novelty of this query. "I never thought to ask. I reckon they just grew."
"No, there"s a reason for all these plantings," he insisted.
"We don"t worry ourselves much about such things out here," she replied, with charming humor. "We don"t even worry about the weather. We just take things as they come."
They walked on talking with new intimacy. "Where is your home?" he asked.
"A few miles out of Bear Tooth. You"re from the East, Bill says--"the far East," we call it."
"From New Haven. I"ve just finished at Yale. Have you ever been to New York?"
"Oh, good Lord, no!" she answered, as though he had named the ends of the earth. "My mother came from the South--she was born in Kentucky--that accounts for my name, and my father is a Missourian. Let"s see, Yale is in the state of Connecticut, isn"t it?"
"Connecticut is no longer a state; it is only a suburb of New York City."
"Is that so? My geography calls it "The Nutmeg State.""
"Your geography is behind the times. New York has absorbed all of Connecticut and part of Jersey."
"Well, it"s all the same to us out here. Your whole country looks like the small end of a slice of pie to us."
"Have you ever been in a city?"
"Oh yes, I go to Denver once in a while, and I saw St. Louis once; but I was only a yearling, and don"t remember much about it. What are you doing out here, if it"s a fair question?"
He looked away at the mountains. "I got rather used up last spring, and my doctor said I"d better come out here for a while and build up. I"m going up to Meeker"s Mill. Do you know where that is?"
"I know every stove-pipe in this park," she answered. "Joe Meeker is kind o" related to me--uncle by marriage. He lives about fifteen miles over the hill from Bear Tooth."
This fact seemed to bring them still closer together. "I"m glad of that,"
he said, pointedly. "Perhaps I shall be permitted to see you now and again? I"m going to be lonesome for a while, I"m afraid."
"Don"t you believe it! Joe Meeker"s boys will keep you interested," she a.s.sured him.
The stage overtook them at this point, and Bill surlily remarked: "If you"d been alone, young feller, I"d "a" give you a chase." His resentment of the outsider"s growing favor with the girl was ludicrously evident.
As they rose into the higher levels the aspen shook its yellowish leaves in the breeze, and the purple foot-hills gained in majesty. Great new peaks came into view on the right, and the lofty cliffs of the Bear Tooth range loomed in naked grandeur high above the blue-green of the pines which clothed their sloping eastern sides.
At intervals the road pa.s.sed small log ranches crouching low on the banks of creeks; but aside from these--and the spa.r.s.e animal life around them--no sign of settlement could be seen. The valley lay as it had lain for thousands of years, repeating its forests as the meadows of the lower levels send forth their annual gra.s.ses. Norcross said to himself: "I have circled the track of progress and have re-entered the border America, where the stage-coach is still the one stirring thing beneath the sun."
At last the driver, with a note of exultation, called out: "Grab a root, everybody, it"s all the way down-hill and time to feed."
And so, as the dusk came over the mighty spread of the hills to the east, and the peaks to the west darkened from violet to purple-black, the stage rumbled and rattled and rushed down the winding road through thickening signs of civilization, and just at nightfall rolled into the little town of Bear Tooth, which is the eastern gateway of the Ute Plateau.
Norcross had given a great deal of thought to the young girl behind him, and thought had deepened her charm. Her frankness, her humor, her superb physical strength and her calm self-reliance appealed to him, and the more dangerously, because he was so well aware of his own weakness and loneliness, and as the stage drew up before the hotel, he fervently said: "I hope I shall see you again?"
Before she could reply a man"s voice called: "h.e.l.lo, there!" and a tall fellow stepped up to her with confident mien.
Norcross awkwardly shrank away. This was her cowboy lover, of course. It was impossible that so attractive a girl should be unattached, and the knowledge produced in him a faint but very definite pang of envy and regret.
The happy girl, even in the excitement of meeting her lover, did not forget the stranger. She gave him her hand in parting, and again he thrilled to its amazing power. It was small, but it was like a steel clamp. "Stop in on your way to Meeker"s," she said, as a kindly man would have done. "You pa.s.s our gate. My father is Joseph McFarlane, the Forest Supervisor. Good night."
"Good night," he returned, with sincere liking.
"Who is that?" Norcross heard her companion ask.
She replied in a low voice, but he overheard her answer, "A poor "lunger," bound for Meeker"s--and Kingdom Come, I"m afraid. He seems a nice young feller, too."
"They always wait till the last minute," remarked the rancher, with indifferent tone.
II
A RIDE IN THE RAIN
There are two Colorados within the boundaries of the state of that name, distinct, almost irreconcilable. One is a plain (smooth, dry, monotonous), gently declining to the east, a land of sage-brush, wheat-fields, and alfalfa meadows--a rather commonplace region now, given over to humdrum folk intent on digging a living from the soil; but the other is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly filling the Gulf of California.
If you stand on one of the great naked crests which form the dividing wall, the rampart of the plains, you can see the Colorado of tradition to the west, still rolling in wave after wave of stupendous alt.i.tudes, each range cutting into the sky with a purple saw-tooth edge. The landscape seems to contain nothing but rocks and towering crags, a treasure-house for those who mine. But this is illusive. Between these purple heights charming valleys wind and meadows lie in which rich gra.s.ses grow and cattle feed.
On certain slopes--where the devastating miners have not yet played their relentless game--dark forests rise to the high, bold summits of the chiefest mountains, and it is to guard these timbered tracts, growing each year more valuable, that the government has established its Forest Service to protect and develop the wealth-producing power of the watersheds.
Chief among the wooded areas of this mighty inland empire of crag and stream is the Bear Tooth Forest, containing nearly eight hundred thousand acres of rock and trees, whose seat of administration is Bear Tooth Springs, the small town in which our young traveler found himself.