*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76514 ***



                              TIMBER LINE

                          BY ALIDA SIMS MALKUS

                AUTHOR OF “RAQUEL OF THE RANCH COUNTRY”
                      AND “THE DRAGON FLY OF ZUÑI”

                        Illustrated by Ruth King

                      HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
                                NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                          COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
                   HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
             BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                TO SIBYL

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                              TIMBER LINE


CHAPTER I

A CABIN ON THE CASCADA


Capped in snow, their flanks of felspar rock robed in glistening drifts,
the Coronado Peaks swept to towering altitudes above the dark green of
the forests. Keen, fresh, heady as wine, was the air in those high
places, and each minute crevasse, each ridge, was etched clearly in the
sparkling winter sunlight.

But there was no eye to see the glories outspread before these sister
queens of the Rockies. The eagles which soared above them through the
blue of summer had departed to lower altitudes with the first icy breath
of winter, and even now were nesting in canyon crags, where as early as
March their Spartan young would hatch. The grizzly of the Holy Ghost
would not stir from his deep cave and still deeper lethargy for another
month, and it was too far above timber line for the lobo and his
followers to find food.

The sun was sinking rapidly. Over the ridges a sharp light wind
whistled. But below in the forests there was a hush, deeper than the
hush of summer, for now there was no scurrying about of small creatures,
the hum of insect life was lacking, and even the trees slept.

Yet beneath the low branches of a cluster of fir trees a life-and-death
struggle was going on. A large wolf, gaunt beneath a splendid, tawny
coat, strove in silent agony, his lips twisted back from his white
tusks, to free himself from the icy steel thing that had held him all
day. He made not a sound to break the stillness. This was instinctive
caution, for so dulled with pain had his hearing become that he did not
even notice the approach of a human being.

On a ridge above the fir and spruce stand a figure had appeared, and now
stood outlined against the turquoise sky and snowy peaks; a girl,
dressed in furry woolens of white and green, snowshoes in hand. She
looked across the rim of the world and in a moment, as though a master
stage director had so managed, her figure was bathed in a rosy light
that changed the glacier-like heights above to flame-colored damask.

The lobo gnawed with concentrated fury at his imprisoned foot. The girl
had turned, poising a moment on the ridge before starting downward. A
long blue shadow was cast before her. With a wrench the wolf tore away
from the trap and without delay limped off on three feet, disappearing
among the boles of pine and fir. In the jaws of the trap dangled a large
bloody paw.

Now the sun sank behind the great peaks. It would be dark all too soon.
The girl stooped quickly to fasten on her snowshoes, then made toward
the darkening shelter of the spruce. A snowy ptarmigan, sole dweller on
those arctic heights since the red fox had captured his mate, fluttered
before her. Now she saw the gleam of the trap and the dark trickle of
blood staining the snow. She clasped her hands and caught her breath
with a gasp.

“Oh, oh! _Damn_, curse them! I knew it, I knew it!”

Kneeling down, the girl pulled at the trap’s trophy. The paw was caught
fast. She tried to open the formidable jaws of the thing, but it was
impossible. Only a steel bar wielded by a man’s strength could open it.
She rose to her feet, tears springing, and started off rapidly down the
mountain, making her way easily through the open forest and over meadows
where within a few weeks she would be picking alpine flowers.

For half a mile the girl sped lightly over the snow, her snowshoes
barely breaking the crust. Coming to a spot that was evidently familiar
she cast about for a moment, then in the dimming light pounced upon
another trap. It was cleverly concealed on the far side of a log and set
with a frozen hare for bait. With her forest staff she struck the trap
spring smartly. It clicked with an ugly snap which made her jump back.
Then she came close and stooped over it. Yes, it was sprung all right.

“There,” said she softly to herself and to the forest, “there’ll be
nothing more caught in _that_ trap.” A moment later she was again
darting through the trees. The increasing darkness urged her to greater
speed, but as she emerged from the gloom of the forest into a barren
open space the air was once more filled with rosy light. The afterglow
of the setting sun had commenced at the foot of the mountain and was
slowly creeping upward. The world seemed to palpitate electrically with
delicate colors, mauve, green, orchid, and the spotless snow reflected
and radiated the light.

The girl sped along the white crest, avoiding those stretches where
barren rock thrust forth. Her flying figure could scarcely have been
seen against the snow, but now and again it was silhouetted against a
background of somber pine, flashing from one point to another, scarf
whipping out behind.

A quarter of a mile away, on a hog’s-back running parallel to but lower
than the height which the girl was traveling, a man was scanning the far
slopes through a field glass. The figure darted across the radius of his
fixed gaze. With an exclamation he swept the slope until he caught the
moving object again. For a moment only he focused on the flashing
figure, for it disappeared over the crest and down toward the Santo
Spirito canyon. The man rubbed his lens impatiently and looked again.

“Am I seeing things?” he grumbled, half amused. “A flying wraith of the
mountains? Is it an ice maiden, or what?”

After all, who could it be, all alone, way up here in this wilderness?
He’d inquire down below. Garen Shepherd, a young irrigation engineer,
dug his spiked walking-stick into the treacherous surface and started
down the trail—an hour or so, and even the prolonged afterglow, the
amazing snow-light, would be gone. He had barely time to get back to the
canyon of the Amarillo and Benty’s Lodge, where he was staying.

Below, in the canyon of the Santo Spirito, it lacked but three minutes
of nightfall. When the dying afterglow reached a certain point the
canyon would be suddenly submerged in darkness. Damon O’Neill, the
forest ranger of the Coronado slopes, led his mare into the log stable
back of his cabin. He blanketed her against a bitter night, so bitter
that even the chatter of the Cascada, the noisy stream that flowed at
the bottom of the canyon, was sealed up and silenced in a prison of ice.
He buckled the straps deftly, patted the sorrel mare’s nose, and went
out, closing the door carefully behind him.

As he stood on the cabin steps, peering nervously about and gazing where
the upper mountain still glowed with light, the white figure for which
he was looking emerged from the spruce. With a shout and a few sliding
steps the girl reached the cabin just as the canyon was slipping into
night.

“Dawn! You just made it. Where’ve you been so late?”

“Snowshoeing up on the divide, Dad. It was glorious. Don’t worry. I keep
my eye on the time.” She was unstrapping her snowshoes, while her father
gathered an armful of wood from the pile beside the door. She hung the
shoes on a nail against the cabin, opened the door for her father, and
followed him inside. In a moment squares of light twinkled out from the
cabin windows. All about the little log house fir and pine rose like
clustered cathedral spires. All the universe was dark except for the far
stars—and for pairs of shining eyes that came and went through the
forest.

Inside the cabin it was warm and close. Damon kicked the logs smoldering
in the wide stone fireplace and threw on light fuel till they blazed
high. In a small kitchen adjoining the one big living-room a little
cook-stove gave out waves of warmth and the smell of supper, of spruce
pitch and resin burning, of wet woolen things drying.

Dawn had taken off her outer wraps and her heavy boots. She slipped into
felt house shoes and an old green sweater and skirt. She hurried about
laying the table, filling the coffee pot, and handing her father a fresh
towel after his noisy ablutions. The cabin was very pleasant, the main
room long, and eighteen or twenty feet wide. Against the log walls hung
heavy Indian rugs, but so snug and well built was Damon O’Neill’s cabin
that the rugs never swelled with drafts, no matter how the wind might
howl outside. The floors too were strewn with well-worn Navajo blankets.
The furniture was rough, made by hand—before the fire a rustic seat, a
long table with two benches at one side, some chairs, a chest, a wood
box at the other, and five shelves of worn books.

Dawn turned the wick lower in the kerosene lamp and they sat down to
supper; beans and chili, brown bread and steaming canned tomatoes,
stewed apricots deluged with canned cream. They ate in silence. Damon
O’Neill seemed tired, but Dawn appeared not to notice it, though she
cast him covert glances. When he took his place before the fire she came
as usual and sat on a little hassock at his knee. He drew her head down
and puffed at his briar pipe in contentment, putting his stockinged feet
on top of Shep, the white collie that slept before the fire.

“You tired, Damon?”

“No. Just sleepy from the cold. Thinkin’ about a young lady I know,
too.” He patted the girl’s tousled auburn hair, his brows knitting.
“What’s troublin’ you, Dawn? Lonesome? Well, I guess it’ll be school for
you next year, Missie.”

“School! Who should I be lonesome for when I’ve got you for company! I
tell you, I’m mad. Daddy, if you must know. You’d find it out anyway;
you always do. I found another lobo’s paw in a trap this afternoon. Up
on the divide. Not very far below timber line.”

Damon O’Neill shook his head in annoyance. He did not answer for a few
moments.

“Too bad. Hate to see it. It’s all wrong,” he said. “But these predatory
animal fellows’ve got their orders. It’s been a hard winter for the
stockmen, and it’s going to be a harder summer down below. They think
they had it bad last year, but,” he predicted, “it was nothing compared
to what they’re going to get.”

“You think there’s going to be another drouth, Damon?” queried Dawn
anxiously.

“Drouth? No. And that would never affect us up here to amount to
anything. The forest will always draw its own water, Dawn, never forget
that. But down below it’s different. Yet as a matter of fact,” he went
on, “for the past seven years they’ve had more rainfall in this country
than for a quarter century past.

“But there’ll be little grass just the same. Dust will fly in their
pastures and the folks down below will be bleating, ‘Drouth, drouth.’
They’ve not sowed; so they can’t reap. They’re greedy, those fellows,
but can’t see it. Overstocked, that’s the trouble; the range eaten up,
and cattle dying for lack of food. And what with losses from the wolves
and lions—” Damon puffed for a while silently.

“And so they’re killing off all the wild things that interfere with
cattle or eat anything cattle might eat.” Dawn shuddered. “I’d feel
awful if they ever caught the old Custer wolf. They’d never get him to
take poison bait, would they, Damon? He’s too smart, isn’t he? He
wouldn’t even let one of his pack touch poison bait, would he? If they
were starving he wouldn’t take a chance.”

“I guess that’s right,” agreed her father. “He knows about traps too.
Can smell one under a snow drift. He’s got almost human reasoning, that
lobo.”

“I reckon that couldn’t have been his paw in the trap this afternoon
then?”

“Not likely. And old Grizzly”—Damon leaned his head contentedly against
the balsam pillow on the chair’s back—“that bear can spring a trap
easier than a man. Hinray Dorsay claims he crept up on the bear one
time. It was traveling along through light feathery snow and its foot
struck the outer rim of a trap. It stopped, then dainty and cunning as
if he’d thought it out, struck straight at the spring—”

“And?” Dawn prompted breathlessly, although she had heard the tale
twenty times before from old Hinray himself.

“And sprung the teeth of the trap, click!”

The white collie whimpered and yelped softly in his sleep before the
fire, wrapped in primeval visions of the chase. Outside a far, lone wail
came up the canyon.

“But, Dad,” Dawn pressed, “can’t the Government see that the big animals
wouldn’t kill hardly any stock if they had enough of the small game
they’re used to?”

“The scheme of Nature is all upset,” Damon replied slowly, “and it’s
going to take some time to straighten it out again. They never can get
back to where they were. But that’s to be expected to a certain extent
when man enters into the scheme.—It’s hard for us of the forest to stick
up for the animals when they pile up such records as the Magdalena
wolf’s a few summers ago. Remember?”

Dawn nodded. “Seventy-two sheep killed in two weeks. A hundred and fifty
head of cattle in six months.”

“Yet we need the animals.” Damon shook his head. “We need them all here
in the forest, and in the end only harm can come, I believe, from this
business of killing off all one kind of creature and favoring another.
They never learned a thing from the slaughter of the passenger pigeon,
though when they’d wiped ’em clean out there came a hemlock blight that
near destroyed hundreds of miles of forests.

“We kill off vultures, eagles, hawks and goshawks, cat, wolf, and lion,
and leave the range free for rabbits to breed, and gophers, and prairie
dogs to gnaw at roots, and all the grain-eatin’ creatures to fill their
craws with seed for next year’s range.—That’s not going to better
Nature’s scheme of things. No, sir, not yet awhile.” Damon O’Neill was
off on his favorite topic, but Dawn remembered something that she had
been saving up to tell him.

“Damon, what do you think? I’ve found the great pine of the Silverstake.
No, let me tell you about it. You know that forty where McGuire’s
homestead stops? Follow that ridge up about a mile to where it faults;
it drops there maybe twenty-five feet. But the same vein shows up in a
ledge that rises several hundred feet away.” Dawn had turned round on
her hassock to face her father, her eyes round with excitement. “The
ledge is broad, tilted—and the same stratum runs right through it, all
right. It’s the mother vein, a part of the main mountain, I’m sure.”

“Vein of granite?” Damon reached out to tweak Dawn’s ear. She paid no
heed, brushing him off.

“And it’s on a corner of the spot you always said was the old survey
boundary of the Indian Reservation grant. The Little Falls of the Holy
Ghost come out of the mountain not far above it and a little inside the
line. And, Father, _I_ know where it comes from! I’ve seen the source!”
She sat back solemnly to note the effect on her father.

Damon opened his eyes wide, but it was only to mock her. He laughed for
the first time that week. “I might have known you’d get up to the source
some day. Oh, last summer, was it? Why didn’t you tell me then? I guess
there’s not half a dozen rangers, including myself, ever made the climb;
and no one else except the Pueblo Indians from down below fifteen or
twenty miles.

“But what has that to do with the Silverstake, and what makes you think
you’ve located the old tree?”

“Because, Daddy, it was when I was standing by the pool where the water
seems to gush out of the mountain that I first saw the white quartz of
the faulted vein where it cropped up along the mountain side. I thought
to myself then, ‘Here’s where the Indians must have stood and seen that
vein beneath them, and then found silver.’ I was trying to fix it in my
mind so that I could find that ledge with the quartz vein again when I
came down. That was a hard job.” Damon nodded sympathetically. “But I
couldn’t fix on any landmark.

“Then today it just came to me. I was standing on the end of that ridge
where it faults, looking away over the mountain side, following the
ridge along, because the snow sticking to it outlined it almost like the
quartz had from above—though I hadn’t thought much about it since
summer—and suddenly my eyes picked out a great tree, higher than all the
rest, a pine among fir and hemlock. It stood out from the rest, it was
so green. _They_ were covered with snow, but the top branches of this
big pine didn’t hold any. It was an old tree, Damon. Could it be the
Silverstake?”

“Might be,” replied Damon. “It’s been sixty, seventy-five years, since
that pine was blazed, according to the old survey report. They say it
bore a ‘witness’ of the old Indian grant, and of the location of an old
claim on the Silverstake, beneath. There’s a record in the archives of
the state that speaks of the Reservation witness too.

“But no one thought of it for fifty years. Then this business came up
about the water rights of the Pueblos, and their Reservation boundaries.
The attorney representing them was a damn clever scoundrel that was at
the same time representin’ a political gang. This gang wanted to take
over the Reservation for themselves, ‘throw it open for the use of the
citizens of the state,’ meanin’ themselves. The attorney got a resurvey
made. He got a measure introduced openin’ up the Indian Reservation to
the public; but the new boundaries never were accepted, so fortunately
that held them up for a while.

“It’s bein’ contested now. The Indians didn’t know about it at first,
nor did the Forest Service. You remember, dear. They couldn’t find any
witness stake or tree that marked the survey of the original grant. No
trace. And how could they? It might have been struck by lightnin’, or
blown over, or possibly cut down.

“Anyway, it’s always remained a mystery, that old blaze. It’s a pity,
too”—Damon knocked the ashes out of his pipe preparatory to turning in
for the night—“because I staked me a claim up there. You were a little
thing not more than four or five years old. You never heard me speak of
it? Well, no one else has either. Scotch enough in me for that!” Damon
chuckled.

“Well, that’s it. Right inside the forty, in the National Forest
Reservation, that being open to any one. I was looking to verify the
Indians’ original grant, and I found me a silver mine. Much good is it
likely to do me!

“But to this day I’d swear there was silver ore in that quartz. I got a
fair sample out of the bed of the stream below the falls a way. Must
have washed down from an outcropping of the vein above. But there was no
use doing anything with it; I hadn’t the money or the time for
prospecting, and then the uncertainty as to the claim came up, and I
knew if I turned it over to the Pueblos it would likely be grabbed from
them.

“I had the sample assayed and dreamed about it awhile—what we’d do when
you got to be a big girl, with the proceeds from our mine.” He laughed a
bit wryly. “I never told any one about it. Thought I might as well get
the _right_ location myself. I couldn’t even find the outcropping on the
exposed vein, though. I’m no miner. I’m a forester.”

“What would we do if we had a mine?” Dawn mused. “I’d get Whitey Shep a
silver-studded collar, and Piñon a silver-mounted Cordoba leather
saddle, and you that set of books you’ve never got and would have time
to read.” Dawn laughed happily. “And we’d go to the Canadian woods, and
to—”

“To bed, girl, to bed. It’s all of nine o’clock.” Damon rose abruptly
and turned toward the door. He lifted his hand awkwardly to brush a
sudden mist from his eyes. At times vague but nevertheless poignant
misgivings about his girl wrung him.

“We didn’t mount the blue columbine tonight, Damon.” Dawn reminded him
sleepily of her neglected studies. She still lolled before the fire, her
cheeks flushed, her eyes dreamy, her strong young body relaxed in the
heat. “I’ve three hundred specimens to mount. The alpine blossoms will
soon be coming; it will be spring before we know it.”

“That’s right,” Damon agreed in a cheerful tone. He was fumbling on the
shelf for his flashlight. “We got talking, and no lessons. To tell the
truth I was tired. I was down at Benty’s cabin all day. One of the
Government trappers was there. He’s going the rounds of his traps in the
morning. And two of the engineers from the Irrigation Service. They’re
up looking over water sources, calculating snow depth, and how much
rainshed and snow water are likely to come down in the spring. The young
chap went up the mountain alone.”

“Oh, Damon—” Dawn sat up quickly—“why didn’t he stay here? Did you tell
him about me? Oh, Dad, it’s such fun to see some one once in a while! I
like those Irrigation men. They understand about forests and trees.”

“She wants company,” Damon thought. “Trees and animals, they’ve had to
take the place of folks to her.”

Out of the silence that surrounded the warm little cabin above the
Cascada sounded a sharp, eerie yapping. It was answered by a far and
mournful howling, a full-throated wolf song that rose and swelled. There
was a moment of utter quiet, broken only by the ticking of Damon’s wrist
watch. Then, just outside the cabin apparently, there came a sudden
barking.

“The coyotes are growing worse every winter, spite of everything,” Damon
said. “They’ve had to come up into the mountains for food. I’d better
get out to Little Sorrel. I should have put a new fastening on that
door. She might kick it down.” He took a burning stick from the
fireplace, and stepped outside, pulling his fur cap over his ears, but
not stopping for a blazer.

Dawn reluctantly pulled herself up from before the fire. She pushed
aside a thick Indian rug curtaining a doorway which led into her little
bedroom and looped it over a nail. In the cold room she undressed
quickly, knelt in her nightgown and bare feet a moment, then opened her
window a crack, fastened it by a stout iron hook, and sprang into bed.

Tomorrow she would look again for the Silverstake Pine. If her chestnut
pony’s foot was healed she would ride him. Perhaps they would meet the
engineer. In less than a minute she was asleep, deep in the long
dreamless slumber of mountain nights.

Damon O’Neill sat long before the fire. He came in from securing the
stable door, looked into his daughter’s room, saw that she was asleep,
and sank into his chair again.

A fine girl. What a puny little thing she’d been when he brought her to
the mountains. “Take her out west,” the clinic specialist had said.
“Sunshine, altitude.” This was the way he’d found. Study, a year of
practical training, and Damon O’Neill emerged a forest ranger.

Before he could get the baby up here into the sunshine she had been
starving herself, clenching her tiny teeth on the spoon forced between
her lips. It was the thought of all that, everything that had happened
before and after his wife’s death, that had kept him up here. Two
wretched years in the east, while his wife was dying of tuberculosis,
had filled him with a hatred of cities. Poverty and want had left him
with a deep-seated fear of ever being without money in the bank. The
mountains had given him a life that was worth living, and security.

“I’ll stick by the mountain,” he swore. “It saved Dawn for me, and a
forest full of trees is better company than most cities full o’ humans.
Folks may say I’m not doing right by her, but she’s to go to school a
year on the money in the bank, some of it, an’ the rest shall be saved
for her.”

Damon reached deep into his pocket and pulled out a chunk of white
quartz. A bright silvery vein ran through it; a pretty thing.

“By Golly, if Dawn ever _did_ find the Silverstake witness tree!”



CHAPTER II

THE NYMPH AND THE SHEPHERDS


Two veterans of the Cordilleran slopes could have borne witness to the
changes that the coming of white men had wrought in a century. One was a
great yellow pine whose growth-rings would have shown that it had been a
sapling long before the first Spaniards came. The pine was blasted now,
its once towering crown leveled almost to the height of the trees about
it. Only its girth was evidence of what a mighty tree the yellow pine
had been.

The other veteran was a golden eagle whose years were close to the
century mark. In his youth he had soared above endless plains that were
as green and undulating as the far-off ocean. Now they were a desert all
the year. As the green retreated the eagle too retreated farther and
farther into the mountains. Yet even here food had grown somewhat scarce
of late. And the eagle’s pinions were becoming less powerful with every
season. He could no longer soar for hours at a time hundreds of feet
above the peaks, poising almost motionless in the sky, sailing without a
wing-beat down over blue abysses.

Now he often perched upon the great blasted tree. It stood near falling
water on a sunny slope that looked up to the Coronado Peaks, unchanging,
familiar.

Time and again Dawn had passed within a few hundred feet of the great
tree without knowing it. Time and again the golden eagle had cast a
fleeting shadow over Dawn’s trail and more often than not she had
thought it a cloud.

As spring thawed the slopes she tried again to find the Silverstake pine
and again she visited the source above the waterfall. Dawn could never
have explained how much the spot meant to her. Nor could any one who had
not her love for the mountain have understood. This spot, unconquered
for so long! It was hers by right of discovery. She shared old secrets
long guarded by the Indians.

But now the spring ranges were opening up, and Dawn was very busy
helping Damon. She came in one day after a long morning’s ride to
far-lying western pastures to find old Hinray Dorsay, their friend, and
one of the most faithful of the rangers, seated on the steps of the
aspen log cabin, combing his long mustaches. There was trouble on the
range—trespassing before the pastures were in condition. Hinray’s
knowledge was wide and infinitely practical, drawn from Bible and
almanac, experience and government bulletins.

Goats had eaten the bark off the young trees on a whole hillside, Dawn
told him. “The Rocky Mountain sheep never did that, did they, Hinray?”
she asked. “But then they were native dwellers in the mountains.”

“No,” Hinray pronounced as he moved from the cabin steps to a place in
the sun, “no, goats ain’t indignant to these mount’ns, and trees is.
Consequence, the two don’t git along.”

Dawn’s ready laughter melted the wrath with which she had been
complaining to the old ranger of the invasion of the forest. “Well,” she
gasped, “we’re indignant, if the goats aren’t, I guess! Oh, Hinray,
you’re funny, and smart.”

Hinray appeared gratified. “Take stock,” he went on; “cattle stock, I
mean. They trim the grass and let the young trees alone. I told
Superintendent what would happen iffen he gave a permit to Gonzales to
graze them goats and sheep on the range. Well, I guess you’ve saw Bald
Mountain meadow this spring?”

Dawn nodded. “Daddy’s furious. But that isn’t the worst. Gonzales and
his herders simply will not keep in their own pasture. They roam all
over the mountain. If I find ’em outside that fence again—” She struck
her quirt through the air with sudden fury at the desecration.

Hinray nodded and pointed a horny forefinger over her shoulder. Dawn
sprang to her feet and looked up. On the trail above them a rider
appeared. He waved before he was hidden by the trees.

“It’s Daddy!” Eagerness and pleasure erased her momentary passion. She
stood in the sun, her thick short hair touched with golden light. Hinray
looked fondly and admiringly at the robust young figure. “Soople as a
mountain cat,” he thought; “sinewy, yet purty as a tiger lily.”

“A big gal for fifteen,” he said aloud. “Seems like yestiddy, Dawn, that
your father brought you up to the Santo Spirito. Never thought you’d
take hold. Sickly as a spruce seedlin’ transplanted in August. Used to
lay out in the sun right where yore paw’d set you; never seemed to want
to move. All eyes, yore teeny hands as trassparent.” He reminisced, not
thinking whether Dawn heard him or not. But she came and sat down on the
log beside the grizzled ranger.

“I don’t even remember, Hinray. I don’t seem to remember anything ever
but being up here. Yet I was three years old when we came. Tell me about
Dad. Is he just the same?” She looked up to where the trail, which lost
itself for a way through an aspen grove, reappeared on the last stretch
down to the cabin.

“Just the same?” Hinray pulled out his pipe and stuffed it critically.
“Don’t know as he’s any different really. He’s easier in the heart,
that’s plain. He was awful silent and seemed like he had a grouch
against some one in those days. But then, no wonder.

“He had a old Mexican señora to mind you all day while he was away; but
he found the old woman wanted to chew up yore food herself for you, like
a pigeon does for its young. He had a hard time dissuadin’ her. After
that he tried to tend to feedin’ you hisself—out o’ a book. Howsoever
that might ’a’ been, you started to thrive with the old señora and grew
so fat you useter hammer with a spoon on the little table I made you,
for more food.

“I recollect comin’ in one day when you was about six years old and
findin’ you keepin’ house for yore paw. Dryin’ dishes with an apron on,
stirrin’ the oatmeal so’s it wouldn’t scorch.”

“Yo-ho, yo-hoo,” Damon O’Neill’s greeting rang out as he came at a trot
down the little clearing toward the cabin on the Rio Cascada. Dawn
shouted and ran to meet him, catching a stirrup and running along beside
the sorrel mare. Damon swung down, pulled Dawn to him, and kissed her.

“Dinner ready?” He was unsaddling the mare and would turn her loose to
graze.

“Yes,” Dawn said as they went into the cabin, whither Hinray had
preceded them. “Hinray got it, that’s why. He came just in time to make
the biscuits. I was making them, honestly, Damon. But Hinray said he’d
rather make ’em himself than eat mine!”

“Dawn sot the table, though,” Hinray testified, coming in from the
kitchen with a plate of smoking biscuits and a pan of steaming potatoes.
“And it sure does a rough-and-ready ranger good to set to a decent
civilized table once in a while. Specially after bein’ out cruisin’ or
reconnoitrin’. I like a femin-ine touch,“ he complimented.

As a matter of fact the cabin was wholly masculine. Boots, spurs, lay
around the floor; yet it was Damon, not Dawn, who made Shep gnaw his
bones outside. Pipes and bags of tobacco were laid where convenient, but
coats and sweaters were hung neatly against the wall, and on a wide
space above a large desk hung a map of the Reservation, a map colored in
sections and studded with many pegs.

Hinray could be heard busy with the wash-basin, after which he carefully
combed his long, sandy mustaches and the one upstanding lock on the top
of his bald head. Then they sat down. Spring had come, and there were
Mariposa lilies in the center of the table. It was covered with a pale
yellow oilcloth much admired by Hinray, who speared his boiled potatoes
reverently after Dawn had served herself.

“Glad it ain’t beans. Beans, beans, is all I get. I’ll take my starch in
potatoes and corn. By the way, Chief”—he turned toward Damon while he
rapidly halved and buttered half a dozen biscuits—“you seen how they’re
producin’ paper from corn stalks? That ought to go a long ways toward
easin’ up on the spruce and hemlock, eh?”

Damon nodded. He had been eating silently.

“It’s not cutting the timber that’s worrying me,” he said at length;
“it’s the damn range and grazing privilege. I don’t know what’s come
over these fellows. There’s a new bunch of cattle over on the Corona.
Heard about it this morning from one of the campers down below and rode
over, but they’d moved to the other side of the canyon.

“I’ve had no word from headquarters nor from the owners. Not a sign of a
grazing permit. I’m going over in the morning and demand the name of the
owners. I’ll probably have to put them off.

“McGuire is the right kind of homesteader,” Damon pursued. “His land is
his home, and we can give him as much rented winter range, and free
grazing too, as his stock calls for. He keeps his stock supplied with a
part of their winter feed, but Gonzales tries to get practically all his
range off the forest preserves. I’m convinced he’s not operating
entirely for himself.

“He can’t understand yet why he shouldn’t put a hundred head of cattle
on a pasture that’s got only enough range for twenty-five. Then he tried
to run in two hundred head early this spring while the little trout lily
and the bladderpod were still in bloom and before any of the wheat
grasses were more than an inch high, and what happened?”

“He lost fifteen head from young larkspur,” Dawn supplied significantly,
“and the foothill death-camas, which are worse poison of course,
especially in the early spring. And they cropped down the sprouting
mountain brome, the blue grass, and all the forage that should have come
to seed in June and July, and ground it into the earth before we
discovered them, so that there’ll be little or no crop this summer.

“Dad, did you ever find out what the plant was that poisoned that lower
range late last autumn?” Dawn had finished her dinner and was sitting on
a bench by the door, mending a hole in the toe of the stocking she had
on, holding her foot up conveniently as she talked. “Nothing like that
ever happened on that range before.”

“It was a late season,” Damon mused, “and frost had something to do with
altering the plant chemically. The plant simply produced something that
didn’t agree with the cattle. I took those poor Picuris Indians off that
range and gave them good pasture up above, free. They’re dependent
mainly on forest range, and on the water and drainage of the northwest
slopes, and if any homesteader has a right to what the forest has to
offer surely those Pueblos have. Though Gonzales raised an awful kick at
their getting free firewood and a few hundred feet of new roof-poles.

“They were certainly grateful; they are a fine lot, the Jemez and
Picuris fellows.”

“Mebbe some letter about that new stock might ’a’ bin in the mail this
morning,” said Hinray. “I heard that the little Mexican feller who’s
been carryin’ it up couldn’t get past the lower Cascada. It’s higher
even than usual.”

“That might be,” Damon assented, “but until I get orders over my head
I’m going after them. Dawn, you like to ride over to Gonzales’ pasture
after dinner and see how he’s behavin’? I can’t go this afternoon. I
hear there’s goats coming up sometime this week.”

“Sure.” Dawn nodded emphatically, the light of battle in her eye. This
was a great game. “Goats! Piñon can smell ’em a mile.”

“How come you call that horse o’ yours ‘Little Nut,’ Piñon?” asked
Hinray. “He’s as well growed as any mountain horse I ever see.”

“Because when we first saw him, down in Benty’s corral,” Dawn explained,
“he was as little and sweet as a pine nut. The prettiest little colt I
ever saw—wasn’t he, Damon?—frisking around. I wanted him so badly I was
afraid to speak of it for fear Dad wouldn’t say yes, or that Benty had
already sold him to some one else, or that maybe he would not want to
part with him himself. I couldn’t sleep all that night thinking,
‘Benty’ll never, never sell him, never in this world. I wouldn’t if he
was mine.’

“But the next day we went back, and I rid him—yes, I know, Dad; ‘rode,’
then. He was less’n a year old. And Benty said yes. Then Dad gave him to
me for my tenth birthday. So we grew up together. He taught me how to
swim, didn’t you, honey?” The sound of hoofs daintily placed came from
the doorway. A chestnut pony put his head, a surprisingly shapely and
beautiful head, in through the door.

Dawn swept the dinner dishes to the kitchen table, covered them with a
cloth. She seized her old brown felt hat and was outside in a moment,
saddling Piñon. She vaulted into the saddle from the stoop, the motion
seeming to sweep both horse and rider around and up the trail.

Damon grinned. “Quick work. She’s been a wonderful help to me this
spring and summer. Deserves an assistant’s billet. This range trespass
business is getting my goat—but not the other fellow’s!” O’Neill smiled
feebly at the jest. “Seriously, Hinray, there’s something queer about
it.

“There’s so much work to be done this spring. There’s a bad fire-trap in
that half-dead timber on Rocky Canyon Point. And orders last month to
verify that survey of last summer that cuts into the Indian Reservation.
Do you know, Hinray, I’ve gone over that forty half a dozen times and
always come out the same. I come within two feet of the old survey of
the original Reservation grant.”

“Tree there?” Hinray asked with raised eyebrows.

“Blazed witness, you mean? No,” Damon O’Neill replied slowly. “No, that
secret, and one of my own, are hidden in the forest, Hinray. In the
heart of one tree on the whole mountain.”

“And it’s a shame,” Hinray nodded, “because I heard when I came up from
the city that politics was surely going to open up these mount’ins an’
their perquisites to one gang, ’stead of what’s lawful to whosoever
applies first for homestead, timber or range. Iffen we could only find
the old blazed tree!”

“Dawn thought she had found it last winter,” Damon answered quietly,
“and when I went out with her a few days later the snow had melted in a
sudden thaw and we couldn’t pick it out; everything was green. Last
month I went over the ground and thought I located it—a great yellow
pine. Cut into her?” Damon shrugged. “We’ve orders not to touch a stick
of timber on the entire slope there till the boundary matter’s decided.”

“And the spruce beetle is got into the west slope too,” was Hinray’s
doleful rejoinder by way of commiseration. “First time I’ve saw it up
here.” He puffed a moment, then took out his pipe, shook it carefully,
and remarked with embarrassment, “But it ain’t about the spruce beetle’s
I’m worrying. I reckon I ought to tell you, Chief, that the animal
fellers, Predit’ry Bureau, you know, are hintin’ that we’re causin’ them
some trouble up here. ‘Stead of coöperatin’.”

Damon noted that Hinray loyally said “we.” “What do you mean, Hinray?”
he asked. “That’s either a serious charge or it’s nothing.”

“Claims he don’t get results trappin’ and exterminatin’ like he should,”
Hinray explained apologetically. In his embarrassment he took out his
pocket comb and began combing his mustaches. “Says his poison baits is
somehow removed and his traps is sprung.”

“Nonsense!” Damon disposed of the charge briskly. “Impossible! I’ll
consider such a thing when we hear about it officially, Hinray.” Then
fearing that Hinray might feel his information had been too lightly
received, he added, “I’ve known bear to drag bait off before eating it,
and this may be one of the cases where some remarkable lobo has sprung a
trap.

“Those fellows take themselves very seriously, Hinray. Of course we
coöperate loyally. Though the Creator alone knows I hate to see the
animals go! They’ve had to annihilate all the little beasties that used
to feed the wolf and coyote and bear, and have you noticed, Hinray, what
a pest those little fellows, the prairie dogs, the squirrels, gophers,
all seed-eaters, got to be when they weren’t kept down naturally? Seed
destroyed, bark eaten.”

“Sure,” assented Hinray gloomily, “and now they’re gone, some other
pest’ll follow. They’s an awful lot of life in the forest that the
laboratory ain’t taken account of yet, but Nature knew how to keep ’em
down.”

“Well, so long, Hinray. I have to get back and complete my map tonight;
timber estimate, fire hazards, burned-over areas, the best site for an
auto camp on the lower branch of the Amarillo.”

“Them’s more’n ranger’s duties, Damon,” said Hinray warmly; “you’ll be
gettin’ a supervisor’s diploma.”

Damon flushed and shook his head. “I don’t seek any office work, Hinray.
I’m not aiming to get away from the forest. I wouldn’t change a saddle
for a swivel chair or a throne.”

Hinray nodded. “I’ll be off.” He picked up pack and saddle bags, got his
horse that grazed near, and rode away.

Dawn was riding up the trail to the Corona meadows. Piñon stepped
jauntily. Whitey bounded ahead, to one side, and around them. Now and
again the collie would leap to the chestnut pony’s back and balance on
the saddle before his mistress.

Dawn was singing lustily, with a sweet boyish voice. It was spring,
early June in the Rockies, just three months since she had floundered
through the drifts, or swept over the frozen summits on her snowshoes.
The forest still bore the bright, varnished look of new buds, and shiny
baby leaves, unsullied, untouched by bug or blight. The spruce wore two
ravishing shades of green—the silvered bluish color that distinguishes
it from the other trees of the forest, and the light leaf-green of its
new tips.

The trail that Dawn followed was steep but unusually smooth, a well-made
path built by her father and Hinray Dorsay. She was on a mission that
suited her: to guard the mountain meadows. She came to the top of the
trail and reached a level path winding through an aspen glade, where
brilliant bits of darting color proved to be hummingbirds, and the
mountain bluebirds flitted like detached bits of sky. The spotted twin
fawns of the rare white-tailed doe held motionless within their laurel
covert. In a cave’s mouth a pair of lion cubs tussled in the sun,
noiselessly; but the cave where each year two grizzly cubs had rolled
was still more silent. Scraps of hide and a few bones near the entrance
where the cubs had whined for two days and nights, growing hungrier and
hungrier, told Dawn their fate.

The brilliant Rocky Mountain woodpecker and the golden-crowned kinglet
flashed through the trees. Delicate fern uncurled in the little copses
and meadows which Piñon’s feet threaded daintily. Bluets and bloodroot,
late anemone, jeweled the fine grass and the brink of the torrential
streamlet. It was a fairy land uplifted to the sky. The tips of its
pointed firs were often in the clouds.

Dawn greeted each old acquaintance joyfully. The young leaves danced and
trembled on the trees, so that the air seemed in an ecstasy of movement.
From the berry bushes the warbling vireo lifted his voice, the
bright-throated scarlet tanager dallied with his golden-breasted mate.
Soon they would be on the wing to lower climes, but for this brief
season the enchantment of the aspen grove was theirs.

Now the copse was behind Dawn and she had still higher to climb. She was
above the heavy forest, and the barren mountain thrust through before
her. The trail dropped to a narrow shelf which skirted the mountain.
Above her the shallow-rooted hemlock found precarious hold in the
fissures of rock and on the thinly covered surfaces. Below, the mountain
fell away into a vast valley which was only a cup in the system of the
great range.

The trail wound up through a dark and heavy rim of trees that stopped
abruptly: timber line. Dawn, Piñon, and the collie traversed the flat
rocky height silently, solemnly, and it was not till they dropped down
and down, over rough going for even a mountain pony, and emerged on a
sunny crest, that Whitey’s tail again wagged and Piñon frisked. Below
them lay the meadow of the Corona. Dawn gasped. It was crowded with
white stock.

“Goats!”

Who had put goats up here? This was what Dad had heard of. Could such a
permit have been allowed over his head? He himself would never hear of
opening up this part of the range, so far outside the Gonzales’ pasture,
with its new and tender growth, so carefully guarded since the terrible
fire six years ago.

“It can’t be Gonzales. He hasn’t that many goats, and we would have
heard if he had bought goats. It must be some newcomer. Well, here’s
where they move on! Come on, Piñon, Whitey, go get ’em!”

With a shout she was racing down the slopes, her knees pressing close
Piñon’s warm, shiny sides. The horse took the steeps superbly. When a
fissure yawned suddenly in the earth before them he took that too
without hesitation, as readily as a bird the air, sailing across a
ten-foot jump all in his stride.

Below them the goats were beginning already to run, baa-ing nervously,
trampling one another, climbing into trees, up on rocks. There were
perhaps two hundred of them, and no shepherd was about. Dawn rode back
and forth around their flanks, trying to turn their heads, get them
started in the other direction. Whitey was barking back and forth,
nipping heels here and there.

“Herd them, Whitey, herd them! Chase ’em out, Whitey! Attaboy!”

The collie was delighted and raced forward and back across one end while
Dawn and Piñon herded the other. In five minutes the goats had turned
their beards and were persuaded to advance down the mountain in the
opposite direction, amidst a bleating and ma-aaa-ing that filled the
air.

As they fled they left the sloping meadow a pulp behind them. The
mountain grass that remained uneaten was ground into the soft rich
earth; not a flower starred the once lovely lawn; the young trees were
almost stripped of leaves and even of bark as high as a grown goat could
reach. A swarm of locust might have swept it, save that then the earth
would not have been plowed up by the hundreds of sharp little hoofs.

Last autumn Dawn had come upon this meadow full of piles of poisoned
prairie dogs and gophers, their soft, limp little bodies heaped five and
six feet high. This devastation was even worse. What would happen now
was that the rainfalls would furrow through this soil and tear their way
down the eastern slopes to cut old Johnny Marston’s homestead crops to
ribbons and then dry up in the desert. Dad had described it all too
often. And hadn’t they _seen_?

She rode full tilt after the routed flocks. The slopes over which they
retreated were as bad as the meadow. There was no shepherd about. The
flocks had been turned loose to go where they would. Steadily,
persistently, Piñon and the white collie pressed back and forth behind
the bleating trespassers. Up over a slope, where the vegetation changed
to a sparse undergrowth of cedar, down through tall pine, they retreated
at least a mile, when they came to a fence, the pasture. The gate was
down. Outrage! The bearded old billy and the bellwethers went scurrying
through, assisted by Shep, while Dawn pelted the stragglers, still
snatching at distracting leaves, with the stones which she had loaded
into her saddle pouch.

When the last goat had passed through the gate she rode in, dismounted,
and was pushing it to when two herders, a Mexican man and boy, came
riding through the pines from the west end of the pasture.

“What you do?” the man demanded angrily. “What business herding the
goats?”

“They’re out of pasture, and you know it. You work for Gonzales? No? For
whom then? _Quien?_ Well, you’d better know!” Dawn grew more and more
defiant. “That pasture above is ruined. Little you care, though. It is
_not open for grazing. Sabe?_”

She had drawn near to Piñon and now mounted quickly. The Mexican herders
sat on their horses facing her, silently, inimically. Suddenly the man
dismounted and walked quickly toward the gate. Quick as a flash Dawn
wheeled Piñon and reached the gate with a bound. She stooped and passed
about the posts the stout chain that dangled there, endeavoring to
fasten it with a padlock. Her fingers trembled so that she could not
adjust the lock.

The Mexican broke into a run, yelling. He was cursing and threatening
her. Dawn struggled to slip the padlock through the links and snapped it
to just as the Mexican reached out to it. Digging her heels into Piñon’s
belly Dawn tore down the slope with Whitey a lap ahead. The two herders
regained their horses and were close upon her heels.

The enclosure was fenced right down to the shores of a little mountain
lake. There was no way of getting out of the pasture except to jump the
fence, which the herders might also do. As there were two of them they
might cut off her retreat. That wouldn’t be exactly disastrous—she could
throw away the key to the padlock, which she still carried; but it would
be ignominious, and the possibility did not enter into Dawn’s plans.

Piñon had outdistanced the other horses and now emerged from a fringe of
underbrush that skirted Snow Lake on its eastern shore. The bank was so
steep that the chestnut pony was sliding on all fours. Dawn pulled up
his head and held him in for a moment while she examined the shore. Just
as the goat herders broke through the bushes, scrambling afoot and
flinging imprecation ahead of them, she pressed her heels into the
pony’s flanks and gave him his head.

Without a moment’s hesitation he plunged into the cold water, swimming
easily, head and neck outstretched. There was nothing but silence from
the shore they left behind them. The icy little lake, fed by melting
snows, the natives regarded with superstition and fear. Dawn could feel
the sharp cold of the water even through her oiled boots. The collie had
lingered a moment on the shelving shore. Now, with a look of
resignation, he plunged in after them.

To a young man sitting on the far side of the lake this drama presented
a striking picture. The dark green of the forests had parted for a nymph
in fawn color, astride a sleek dark horse, and a bounding white shepherd
dog, whose sharp barking came startlingly over the water.

The young man watched them emerge from the shadow cast by forest and
peak upon the mirroring lake, and move silently through placid sapphire
waters, disturbing them only with the ribbon-like ripples that flowed
from Piñon’s neck.

Garen Shepherd was fascinated. Now he remembered the white figure flying
over the snow last winter! The pony and rider were already near the
bank. The chestnut rose up out of the water suddenly as his feet touched
bottom. He lost the treacherous footing, submerged, and rose again.
Emerging on a tiny, white-pebbled beach, he stood politely while his
rider slipped from his dripping neck. Her laughter echoed with a thin
clarity across the tiny lake and back again, to the discomfiture of the
outrun, outwitted men on the other shore.

Dog and horse were shaking themselves efficiently, and the girl
retreated to the rock. She almost stumbled over Garen Shepherd, who had
risen, hat in hand, pipe removed from his mouth, smiling broadly. She
had not seen him, and was more taken aback by this encounter than she
had been by that with the trespassing herders.

“Who are you?” Dawn demanded, almost panic-stricken.




CHAPTER III

AN OREAD OF THE ROCKIES


“Another Shepherd, by the name of Garen, at your service,” the stranger
replied. “And may I inquire who are you?”

Dawn merely stared at him, overcome by shyness.

“I’d have thought you just the spirit of the lake,” the young man
continued whimsically, “except that I saw you come down through the
forest. You must be the guardian of the whole mountain, eh? An oread.”

He stopped, for the girl began to shiver. She was wet to the waist, for
Piñon had fumbled for a footing before he found the little beach. The
stranger snatched up the woolen blazer on which he had been sitting and
offered it to her. Dawn managed a “Thank you” and took the wrap, still
shyly. She sat down with Shepherd on the hot rock in the sun.

Had she called the sheep herders any bad names? Had she jeered when they
threw stones and missed? At remembrance of the fight her indignation
mounted again. She burst warmly into explanation.

“It’s the goats. They’re the worst! I like them all right, only they do
so much damage. I’ll teach those fellows to break pasture. They’re
always letting the bars down and leaving gates open. Folks aren’t
satisfied with the range we give them; want to crowd the pastures with
cattle, and sheep and goats that cut the cover all up. Ruin the
Reservation, that’s what!”

The man noticed that she spoke possessively of the mountain—“the range
_we_ give them.”

“You belong to the mountain?” he queried superfluously.

“Damon O’Neill’s daughter,” Dawn said proudly. “But I guess you don’t
know either why it makes a forester so mad to see mountain meadows all
cut up.”

“I’ve an idea,” the man replied, “but suppose you tell me. I’ve heard
that Damon O’Neill and his daughter know more about the mountain than
God does.”

He was studying the girl’s profile; strong straight nose, a trifle
short; a full-lipped mouth, a full, rebellious chin. A student of
natural things, this Shepherd, and Dawn O’Neill was as natural and
unspoiled as the mountain itself. And unlike the wild creatures of the
forest, she had no fear.

Her golden skin deepened to vivid color below gray eyes that were wide
apart and accustomed to looking, and seeing, far away; very clear eyes,
rested with looking into green depths, protected with lashes made thick
by the sun, and with serious straight brows. Her hair was cropped in
rough locks, short at the back and wind-blown about her face. It came to
a point on her forehead and silky down grew over her temples.

Garen noted the high, wide cheek-bones, the firm, full jaw, the
well-modeled nose that just escaped being too wide; they meant balance,
physical endurance and strength, he decided. Her mouth was generously
wide, and lovely; as lovely as her laugh. He wondered if she had a mind
as naturally fine and strong as the body of which she was so
unconscious. She had begun to answer the question which he had already
forgotten in his absorption.

“You see, these are the only forests in this dry country; up here on the
mountain reservations. And all the streams and rivers are fed from the
mountains, so if the slopes are destroyed and the grass and sod all cut
up, why, then the run-off of water is something terrible and tears down
all at once. Then there’s floods below and hell to pay. And no water
left up here to keep feeding the streams till the next rain.
Besides”—Dawn had scarcely drawn breath—“it ruins the new forests we’re
buildin’ up.” She stopped, conclusively, and Garen Shepherd was
impressed with the clarity and brevity of her explanation. She’d been
brought up on this.

“So you’re the guardian of the plain as well as of the mountain,” he
replied. “I think after all you are a naiad instead of an oread. You are
surely my patron deity then, for water is what we pray for, we
Irrigation fellows. That should make us friends.”

Dawn turned to face him and for the first time looked directly at her
companion. She had been perfectly aware of him, however, had taken him
in the moment she accepted his blazer. Now she thrust out her hand
suddenly,

“Shake!”

Garen Shepherd got as strong a pressure as any land-office commissioner
from a homesteader. His fingers tingled. A pleasant warmth that was not
from the sun pervaded him.

“Yes, I guess you fellows understand,” Dawn was saying. “But those men
in Washington, they put us up here to take care of the forests and then
they let people try to steal ’em right out from under our noses! Forest
isn’t just forest,” she explained condescendingly; “it’s streams, and
holding spring floods back, and well-water and range for stockmen too.”

“When we get through down below,” Garen Shepherd’s gaze was afar over
the mountain top, “there’ll be room for ’most every one, and water for
them too. We’ll catch and hold all you spare us from your mountains and
fill the desert with the perfume of alfalfa blossoms and the buzz of
honey-bees. Millions of tons of water will be behind that giant dam when
it is finished. Think of that!”

The light of a vision was in the engineer’s eyes. Already he could see
the desert blossoming with meadows where white-faced cattle stood
knee-deep in grama grass. Dawn’s eyes widened. “I would sure admire to
see it,” she answered generously.

“You shall.” Shepherd turned eagerly. “Surely you shall. I’ll show you
over myself if you will come down sometime. Senator Grange, his
daughter, and their party were there last week, and we’re having
visitors from different spots in the world all the time.”

“I’ve got to be starting,” Dawn remembered. “My father will be worried
if he gets back before I do. And I’ve my lessons.”

“Your lessons?” Garen Shepherd was loth to leave the sun-warmed rock,
the talk.

“Yes, I haven’t finished my studies for this spring. You see, I’m going
to college next year, and I study every morning after I’ve done my work
round the cabin. Damon hears me at night, when he’s not too tired. He’s
been my teacher always. Oh, yes, I _have_ been to school. I went a
couple of times, but I couldn’t bear it.

“Dad took me the first time when I was six, to a convent. He got as far
as the door!” She laughed joyously. “He turned around and saw my face. I
didn’t cry, mind you. But I guess I was a coony little thing just the
same. I reached out my arms and he stooped down and held out his.”

“And didn’t you stay?”

“I never let go of him, nor he of me. And he’d paid the money down, mind
you. But he didn’t stop for that. We started and never stopped till we
got up to the Cascada. Next time I didn’t go till I was twelve. That was
three years ago last fall; I’ll be sixteen next month. I _hated_ sitting
on a hard bench shut up in a room all the time!” She shuddered at the
remembrance, but in a moment her laughter came bubbling forth again.

Shepherd thought it the most refreshing laughter he had ever heard,
spontaneous and naturally musical.

“That is wonderful. Yet you are going to college next year,” he said,
impressed. “How have you managed?”

“Damon knows a great deal of book-learning,” Dawn replied, “and he’s got
a notion that it’s books, not schoolrooms, that teach us. So he’s taught
me after his own ideas, and we’re nearly ready to pass the examinations.
I have to do that to study under some great teachers that Damon has
heard about. I’ll be having to take a special course, of course, because
there’s only certain studies I’m good in. I’m not interested in the
others. Dad started me on geometry last fall, but I burned the book up.”
She shrugged defiantly. “So we didn’t get ahead much!”

Shepherd, having caught the infection of Dawn’s spontaneous merriment,
laughed till the tears rolled out of his eyes.

Suddenly she leaped to her feet, whistling to Piñon who browsed near.
The sorrel came trotting up. Shep leaped to the front of the saddle, and
Dawn swung into the seat without putting foot to the stirrup and was
clambering away over the rocks without farewell or ceremony. In the
mountains one goes when he is ready.

“Here! Hold on,” shouted Shepherd. “I’m coming too. Can’t I ride with
you? I go almost all the way.”

“Sure,” she called back. “The trail’s free.” He had to catch his pony,
tighten the saddle, grab up his duffle, and hurry to overtake her.

Never had spring seemed more lovely. Never had the mountain been half so
beautiful. The aspen groves were like a thousand shining arrows shot
into the ground from the sun, each bole a shaft of light held by the
gleaming surface of silver bark.

“Some old bear has made its own blaze here.” Shepherd pointed to an
unusually large aspen, the satiny bark of which was scarred with the
fresh rips of a grizzly’s great claws.

Dawn reined Piñon up sharply. The pony stopped, sniffed the air with
widening nostrils, snorted and trembled.

“The grizzly’s been here not long ago,” Dawn said in a low voice. “Piñon
smells it.”

The white collie was dashing about in the underbrush, beating this way
and that, to pick up the scent.

“A grizzly will sharpen its claws like that,” Dawn murmured, “and when
it’s hurt it will sometimes tear the bark to ribbons.”

Suddenly she wheeled Piñon, and cutting through the grove, disappeared
into a glade below. Shepherd looked after her in surprise and followed
slowly. The glade was blocked at the upper end by a wall of rock, once a
waterfall’s course, at the foot of which Dawn stood beside a pile of
stones. In the center, Shepherd saw, lay the remains of an old ram’s
carcass, half of which had been devoured.

Dawn’s look was one of acute distress. “The bear has eaten poison bait,”
she said.

“How do you know it was poisoned?” Shepherd asked.

“I know it was. I—I dragged it down here just two days ago and covered
it myself so’s nothing would get it.” She began to weep. “The bear was
suffering when it tore the tree and has gone away to die.”

Shepherd took her arm and tried to pull her away from the gruesome
sight, but she began to cover the ram with rocks again; so together they
piled up a cairn that even another grizzly could not tear down. He did
not ask any questions, and when they went back to their horses they
mounted silently and trotted quickly away, out of the shimmering beauty
of the grove. They emerged into a stand of high yellow pine and cantered
over the springing russet carpet, a foot deep in pine needles, for a
mile or more. At length, as they breathed their groaning ponies at the
top of a sharp hill, Dawn spoke:

“You’re not going to tell, are you?”

“Tell? Tell what? You know, Miss Dawn, you can trust me.”

She nodded, and pointing down through a clearing in the trees, showed
him a mountain homesteader’s tidy place. “That’s old McGuire’s
homestead. Follow me and I’ll show you something.”

She was off at a wild run, following the ridge above the homestead. When
they drew together again, horses and riders were both panting.

“Do you see a big pine through that gap?” Dawn pointed across a canyon
to a ridge on the opposite side. A heavy stand of spruce and pine
covered the slope, through which patches of white quartz gleamed here
and there. “A great big pine that stands out above the others?” She hung
breathless on his answer.

“Why, yes,” Shepherd replied. “I seem to see a big one on a crest there.
Of course. Now it stands out quite plainly.”

“I knew you would be able to see it,” Dawn said with satisfaction. “Some
day I’m going to chop that tree down. It’s a very old tree, and I want
you to be there to witness it. Will you?”

“Delighted,” Shepherd grinned. “What has the tree done to you?”

“You don’t believe me, do you? You’re making fun of me?”

“Certainly I believe you. I’ll even help chop the tree!”

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” Dawn asked solemnly. “I’ll help you, and you
help me. I’ve promised some other friends of mine to help them. It’s the
Pueblo Indians of Picuris. They come up here every spring to the source
of their waters. It’s sacred to them, you know, and now it’s all to be
taken away from them. It’s on a part of their Reservation, but now a new
survey’s been made, ’way this side.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about that.” Shepherd nodded.

“I’m going to prove the old survey,” said Dawn with determination, “and
I’ll need a witness when I chop into the Silverstake Pine—that’s what
they called the old boundary pine—for we can’t take the tree into court,
and who can tell what may happen to our witness when we are not there?
It’s an overgrown blaze we’ll be finding, you see, if I’m right.”

They took the trail again, dropping down into the canyon. Piñon chose
his own path without any direction from Dawn, who had tossed the reins
loose upon the pony’s neck and sat half turned in the saddle, calling
back to Shepherd. He followed as close as his pony could travel upon
Piñon’s heels. The sorrel chose the best trails with sure knowledge, but
when it came to a choice of direction and Dawn did not at once lay rein
to right or left of his neck, Piñon would bob his head like a circus
horse, impatiently demanding his mistress’s wishes.

“You must know every foot of the mountain,” Shepherd called. “I wish I
knew it as well. I spent all morning trying to find the source of the
water in that lake where we were. I wish I knew where it all comes
from.”

“We’re right under the source of some of it, Mister,” said Dawn. “It
rises up above the pine I just pointed to, and iffen—there, I get that
from listening to Hinray so much—_if_ you’re sound of wind and limb I’ll
take you up. No wonder you couldn’t find it. No one can. And the water
that enters the head of the lake comes over a falls and above that must
gush from the mountain itself. No one’s ever found where. It springs
from the living rock, Dad says, cold as ice. And I know two places where
streams flow underground and disappear!” She offered this as very choice
information. She was not disappointed.

“I’d love to see it,” Shepherd exclaimed eagerly. “Will you show me?
When can we do it?”

“Reckon maybe we could now,” Dawn replied, glancing at her wrist watch,
which she verified by the sun. “We came right smart there for a space.
This short cut has brought us right beneath it. It won’t take more than
a half hour.”

A quarter of an hour later they stood panting upon a summit that seemed
the top of the world; yet it was a good deal below timber line, for far
opposite they could see at a much higher elevation on the slopes of the
Truchas the dark border where the tall timber was halted by the hand of
Creation. Above them a lacy fall of water hurled itself musically over
rocks so beautiful that they seemed painted. The water fell some thirty
feet into a great natural basin fringed with maidenhair fern. It
trickled gently over the mossy edge and down the mountain side in a
diminutive stream.

“That isn’t all of it?” Garen Shepherd pointed to the tiny trickle.

Dawn was smiling with delight. “Look.” She led the way up to the face of
the rock, caught Shepherd’s hand, and ducked beneath the lacy whispering
veil of water. The Irrigation Engineer found himself in a cavern of
shimmering green light, exquisitely, strangely lovely. Above the
tinkling of the waterfall a rumbling murmur became apparent. The murmur
grew on the ears until it became a roar. Dawn was pointing.

At their feet a stream, the greater part of the water that came over the
falls above, flowed backward into a cavern and disappeared, back into
the living rock of the mountain, to flow below the surface on its way to
the sea, at what depth no engineer could guess, to water the
deep-searching roots of what desert bush, to well to the surface from
depths of a hundred, a thousand, feet, at the bidding of man.

Shortly afterward they stood again in the yellow light of the outer day.
Dawn was beaded with drops of spray like moonstones.

“No one knows where it goes,” Shepherd said thoughtfully. “Do you know
that too, Miss Dawn?”

She shook her head quizzically. “I know where one sunken river comes
out.”

“How does this tiny stream feed the Cascada to the south, the lake to
the east and the stream that branches through McGuire’s to the west?”

“Why, there’s a million sources, not just one, for each stream. You know
that. Come.” Pulling at his hand, she scrambled down the slope, showing
him where here and there tiny trickles sought their way down to join a
stream below. The deep moss and the felted carpet beneath them, a
six-inch humus of rotted leaves and vegetation, was saturated as a
sponge with the moisture of spring rains. A thousand little reservoirs
had swelled into the cups and basins formed by the roots of trees,
purling gently over to feed with economical regularity the boisterous
Cascada that would eventually reach the sandy flats of a great river a
hundred miles below.

An hour later they were trotting down a mountain road toward the fork of
the Cascada.

“I’m staying at Benty’s,” Shepherd told her. “But I expect to leave in
the morning. My vacation’s up. I may not get up here again all summer,
but if I do I shall surely come over to the Cascada, if I may. And you
must be sure to let me know if you come down to the city, for the cars
from the dam site go in often.”

They were nearing the fork, where the big stream of the upper valley was
joined by the Cascada. A rider on a sorrel horse was waiting there.

“It’s young Perry,” said Shepherd, “lad from Kansas City, staying at
Benty’s with his family till their camp is set up. Nice kid.”

He halloed as they rode down toward him. He was lost, bewildered, a
trifle uneasy, overawed by the majesty of the peaks that hung, still
frigid with snow, over the primeval forest.

“Hey, Shepherd,” he called out in relief, “I got lost! Glad you came
along.”

The boy, who appeared to be about seventeen, looked with undisguised
interest at Dawn. Shepherd introduced him.

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Perry,” she remembered to
say.

“You live up the Cascada?” he inquired easily. “I could follow that
without getting lost.” The boy laughed. “I’ll ride up tomorrow if I
may.” He bowed with an exaggerated deference.

“Miss Dawn’s a wonderful guide,” Shepherd put in.

“Maybe she’ll show me the mountain,” young Perry responded, looking
eagerly toward the mountain girl.

As he rode down the mountain a few moments later, Jack Perry at his
heels, Shepherd felt that he had had a perfect experience. The day, the
beauty of the mountain side, the girl’s laughter ringing across the
mountain lake, the cavern behind the waterfall—he fairly ached with the
beauty of it. He felt resentful toward the boy who broke in on his
thoughts.

“Some champion, that girl. Wills, Earhart, Ederle, rolled in one, eh?
With looks. So these are the Rockies! What are we doing up here? Oh, my
Dad’s got in with a bunch that are going to develop. He’s got big
interests back of him.

“It’s some country out here, but they’re dead. Dad’s interested in
range, opening it up. He’s invested in a cattle bank in the state, and
he’s got sheep and goats planted somewhere in these parts already.”

“That so?” Shepherd looked at young Perry with interest. “Gone into the
stock business, eh? Has he acquired any range?”

“You mean bought any ranches? No. I imagine the bank’ll take over a
plenty,” replied the boy easily. “He’s got a man running his stock for
him. Some trouble with fool government regulations.” He shrugged as
though those were the least of a developer’s worries.

So that was the way the land lay. Shepherd said nothing but looked
thoughtfully at Jack.

“We might as well make the best of it,” the boy confided. “Mother’s got
to stay in the West for her health. Might as well make something out of
it while we’re here, and open up the country.”

“That was done long ago,” Shepherd said. “Agriculture’s the thing now. I
wish we could interest people with money, like your father, in the
irrigation developments, agricultural projects, you know.”

Jack looked at him incredulously and burst out laughing. “Agriculture,
in a land like this? Why this country’s good for stock and nothing
else.”

They had reached Benty’s, and although Garen was annoyed, he could say
no more at the time.




CHAPTER IV

DAWN AND THE FOUR-FOOTED


The doctor had said that Mrs. Perry must go to the Rockies. She could
not face another winter even in the Middle West. Her lungs were
infected, and she needed altitude, ozone, sunshine, rare air. Mrs. Perry
was pretty, spoiled, but somehow an appealing person.

She sat now on the veranda of the log cabin that squatted on the eastern
slope of Amarillo Canyon. Before her reared the snowy peaks of the
Coronado, rising above precipitous and wooded hills.

In front of the lodge a party was getting ready for a ride off over the
mountains. Her husband, cigar in mouth, and dressed in the most correct
of sports outfits, stood critically surveying the saddling of his horse.
It gave him the feeling of a sportsman to run a finger under the cinch
and tell young Benty to put a martingale on the obedient little mountain
horse so it would not toss its head.

John Perry was a self-made man who believed firmly in development. He
had developed the dump grounds south of the suburb in which he had
lived, and why not the mountains? He had developed his business in
Kansas City successfully enough to catch the attention of the big
fellows higher up. Twelve-per cent. interest had, several years before,
attracted his capital to the banks of the cattle state. But lately his
investment hadn’t been doing so well. Since Mrs. Perry had been ordered
west he had embraced the opportunity to take charge of his business
personally, and had entered a bank of the metropolis of the state as
president.

Young Jack was thoroughly enjoying the experience. An instinctive
wholesomeness, the natural response of youth to outdoor pleasures, had
survived the would-be fast pace set by his school crowd at home. Now he
was artfully exhibiting his horsemanship before the group on the
veranda, pulling viciously at his mild pony’s mouth, causing her to
rear, on which he would pull her back smartly on her haunches, her front
feet helplessly pawing the air.

“He’s a natural horseman,” Mrs. Perry observed with pride. “Do be
careful of that brute, Jack.”

“Where are they going? The Rio Cascada! I’m no wiser than I was before.”
Mrs. Perry laughed and shrugged, wondering if there would be any one
left that evening with energy enough for a hand of auction. After an
hour’s preparation the party was off, cantering up the canyon road.

The horses’ flying feet struck pebbles that bounded rattling down to the
rocky gorge of the river beneath. As the road wound upward they slowed
to a steady walk. Dean Benty, Old Man Benty’s son, rode ahead with Jack.
Mr. Perry rode beside a large powerful-looking man, who slouched in his
expensive but carelessly worn clothes. Perry was waving his arms about
and arguing earnestly.

“It’s not been touched. Virgin, you might say. Needs development, that’s
all, Gershwin. The country’s all right. Nothing to this hard times talk.
They could get back all they’ve put into the cattle business if they’d
just open up these mountain ranges to the full. There’s been more
rainfall the last few years than formerly. Ask the forest service men;
they know. What’s that?

“No-o. Not much range left down below. That’s true. Most of it’s been
taken up. But up here—why look at it! Range for the world and to spare!”
Mr. Perry saw no flaw in his arguments.

“Difficulty is in getting in. Only a certain amount of range supposed to
be leased to each stockman, and under certain conditions. Although my
bank has done so much for the state, extending loans to the cattlemen, I
personally could get only a small per cent. of the cattle, from that Bar
A ranch that I’ve been trying to save, up here for grazing!

“If you hadn’t got that motion by the committee to open up the Indian
Reservation”—Mr. Perry had worked himself up into a state of
indignation—“we’d have been up against it. The goats and the sheep we
had to put over through Gonzales, an old homesteader up here, an old
reliable. And that with the Indian Reservation shut away from the rest
of us. Say, isn’t that an outrage!

“Why, they haven’t even cattle enough to fill a corner of it. Sure. I
know you supported that bill all along. Going through next month for
sure, you say? Fine.”

Gershwin, the big man, conversed chiefly in nods and monosyllabic
grunts.

“Temporary injunction,” he observed, “opening reservation range to
public. First come, first served. Think it’ll go through all right.
They’re not sure of the boundaries anyway.”

They had come to the fork of the Cascada. Here the trail crossed the
stream, and so did the horses. By clinging ignominiously to his horse’s
neck Mr. Perry managed to do likewise.

“Don’t hang on that way, Dad,” shouted Jack from the other bank.
“They’ll think you’re a tenderfoot.”

“He is,” Mr. Gershwin emitted succinctly.

When the crossing had been successfully accomplished Mr. Perry drew
alongside Gershwin, who, in spite of his size, rode as easily and well
as, one felt, he did anything that he attempted.

“We may have some trouble with these forest service fellows,” Perry said
jocularly, although with a trace of concern in his manner. “Sticklers
for regulations, you know.”

“I was born down yonder in Texas.” Gershwin thrust a spatulate thumb
over his shoulder, indicating that he knew the ways of the country.

They were cantering along a level stretch of the trail that led up to
the forest supervisor’s cabin. They could see Damon O’Neill from some
distance, standing in his doorway with another man.

Damon looked down and saw them coming. He recognized in Gershwin a man
born to the saddle, but Perry, by his insecure seat, he assumed to be
one of the new city boarders down at Mountain Lodge. He turned to the
tall Westerner at his side and resumed the conversation.

“I’m awfully sorry, James,” he said regretfully; “I want the worst way
to see you pull through. But your range down below is sure gone, old
man. It’s been grazed to the limit for twenty years; you know that. If
you try to pull out of the hole by borrowing, expanding your herd, and
renting more range, where will you be next winter?

“Even if you let your grass crop lie idle all summer, the range is cut
up so bad, so little root or seed left, it’s going to take several years
for grass to take hold. It ought to lie fallow till the roots have
clamped some of that desert soil down again. You’ll get little hay off
your range next fall. Certainly not enough for two thousand head.”

“I’ll sell enough of the two-year-olds and the old ones in the fall to
make out if you’ll lease me an extra piece of mountain range for late
fall,” James urged, his deep-set eyes burning anxiously under his shaggy
brows. “A summer here’ll condition ’em into A-1 grade.”

Damon slowly shook his head. “You’d have to go in that much deeper to
buy winter feed for the balance. It’s for your own good, James, I’m
advising you. I can’t understand the Cattleman’s Loan offering to carry
you for any more. I know the other banks are simply extending their old
loans where necessary. Go slow till your range recuperates, till I can
get further mountain pasture for you. As an owner of improved ranch
property you’re entitled to preference.

“Let’s see—” Damon crossed to his map on the wall, consulting certain
areas—“you’ve just brought your stock up from the oak-brush forage, eh?
Salted them? Well, they can stay on the aspen-fir location till July 10.
The season was so late this year we couldn’t let them up earlier. On
July 10 you can move them up into the spruce-fir belt. Keep your salt
away from the streams, James. And try to draw your stock up to the west
slopes with it. The forage will be well developed up there by that time.

“Who’ve you got to herd for you till then?”

James flushed. “I’ll have to ride up every week myself, Mr. O’Neill.
I’ve got a couple of kids, but I rightly need them down below, and I had
to let two old hands and my foreman go this spring; the biz was too
broke. It keeps me busy moving the other thousand around down below.
I’ve lost a lot this spring too. About ten head already.

“Looks like the old Custer lobo got a few. Killed two mother cows and et
the calves before they wuz born.” He spoke bitterly.

Dawn had come in quietly and had been straightening the papers on her
father’s desk, sorting the mail. Now she spoke up quickly.

“Let me help herd Mr. James’ mountain bunch, Damon, if he’s willing.”

James looked with surprise at the girl, clad in the riding-breeches,
shirt, and mountain boots of the men of the service. The forest ranger
smiled at the stockman’s amazement.

“She’s as good a cow-hand, James, as she is assistant ranger. I’m
willing, if you are. She usually rides over that range once a week
anyway. If you want she can help your boy move the stock in units.”

“There’s a hundred to a salt-unit,” answered James a bit dubiously.

“All right. Dawn knows as well as any of us just how long a given meadow
can support how many head of stock. She’ll salt them to stay put for a
month, two weeks, whatever the range’ll stand.”

The ranchman’s face cleared. With a look of surprise and relief he
turned to Dawn, slowly extending a hand.

“Well, young woman,” he drawled, “that sure would be pretty of you, if
you mean it. It would sure set my mind at ease. Cattle has pesky tastes
and appetites. Sometimes seems they just naturally _craves poison_. And
they sure can demolish young leaves before the time comes.”

“Dawn is usually all for keeping the stock moving,” her father smiled.
“I never heard her offer to tend cattle before.”

A swift attack of conscience had struck Dawn like summer lightning.
Impulsively her sympathies went out to the man who had suffered from the
animals of her mountain. She was partly to blame, springing traps, and
all. What could she do? She must make amends.

The four who had been riding up the trail now pushed through the trees
into the open space surrounding the cabin. They forded the eager little
stream leaping before the ranger’s door and rode up to the stoop. James
said a hasty farewell and rode off. Gershwin and Perry sat their horses,
but Jack and Dean Benty dismounted.

Dean introduced his party to the ranger, Jack jumped up on the porch and
held out his hand to Dawn. “Good morning, Miss O’Neill. You see, I did
find my way up here.”

He was very smiling, sure of himself, spick and span. Dawn did not like
his manner. She let go his hand and leaned back indifferently against
the wall. Fresh pink and white thing. Did he have bear’s grease on his
hair? No, most likely that perfumed stuff.

Their fathers were talking. Damon O’Neill listened gravely to the suave
tones of John Perry. Surely they were at liberty to ride anywhere they
wished. This was public domain. He was sorry he could not accompany
them, but that would be impossible. He waved to the littered desk which
could be seen from the door. A ranger’s duties were many, and as he was
acting at present in the capacity of assistant supervisor there was
correspondence to which he must attend. Range management was keeping him
very busy just now.

Well, that was one of the very things they were wanting to talk to him
about. Damon knew that very well; he had heard of Gershwin, of course.
And John Perry was the new banker? He had banked with his bank for
years.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Perry,” said Damon sincerely. “You big banking
men have a great responsibility on you this year. I guess they’re all
depending on the banks and on the forests.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” agreed Perry. “Wonderful country you’ve
got up here. Wonderful. Don’t know why they call this a dry country,
with almost fifty per cent. of the area in forests like this. Water
enough, grass enough, to feed all the world, I’d think.”

Gershwin was, as usual, saying nothing. Time enough for talk. Orders
would be received today or tomorrow notifying the forest supervisor of
this section that the Indian Reservation was to be thrown open to the
public, and by that time the rest of his cattle and sheep would be on
the range. But he had other things in mind as well. Perry was talking to
the ranger.

“No, much of the region is wild and very rocky,” O’Neill was
explaining—“almost inaccessible. For that reason there are several
million feet of mature timber that have not yet been taken out. The cost
of getting them to a railroad would be almost prohibitive.

“The old silver mines? No one seems to have located them since the
Indians abandoned their early workings when the Spanish came. Pasture?
Well, there is no more left open at this season of the year. There will
be some open, under regulation, for fall.”

Jack Perry spoke to the ranger. Couldn’t his daughter go with them this
morning as guide? Dean Benty had to get back to haul wood for his
father. Would she be willing? Although she had told herself in the first
five minutes that she despised Jack Perry, Dawn agreed to go.

Either she could take them the way she had ridden yesterday, or they
could cross the Cascada right here, go up through the forest straight
west, above timber line, and see the whole country beyond spread before
them. Her tone made the latter course seem more alluring; so they chose
it. In three minutes Dawn was ready, a new blue kerchief knotted about
her throat, a suède leather coat tied to her saddle. The white collie
barked his delight at the prospect of running with them, but Damon
called him back and he came with instant obedience, though he sat
watching Dawn and Piñon till they were out of sight.

The trail led at once into the deep forest. There was a foot of springy
tanbark beneath their horses’ feet. Before Damon and Hinray covered the
trail it had been slippery with mud at this time of year. The forest
closed about them and the trail grew steeper and steeper. They were in a
dark green twilight, through which an occasional shaft of sunshine
pierced.

There was no sign of wild life or game in these primeval depths,
although in a thicket not thirty feet from the trail a pair of mule deer
fawns froze motionless, their large beautiful ears pricked forward. The
horses had gone about a quarter of a mile when Dawn stopped to rest.
There was a hard climb ahead. A ten minutes’ rest, and they were at it
again. Within five minutes they had entered the densest forest that the
men had ever seen and were climbing almost at a seventy-five-degree
angle.

The horses groaned, all but Piñon, and even he was shining with sweat
and lathered where the cinch pinched his belly.

“Good heavens,” Perry gasped with awe, “think of all this timber going
to waste!”

“Cut it,” Dawn replied crisply, “and most of the valley below would wash
down to the sea.”

They emerged suddenly into the open and found themselves on a rocky
tilted slope. With difficulty they picked their way across the sky
table, which looked as though it had been strewn with giant stone
building-blocks in all kinds of rectangular shapes. They were brought to
a halt at the head of a sheer escarpment that dropped five hundred feet
or more to a meadow of parklike beauty. Gershwin took off his hat, as
though compelled, unconsciously, to uncover before a power so infinitely
beyond his own.

The valleys below them were dotted with cattle. At their right rose a
peak that still harbored in its shadows a glacial bank of blue-white
snow. Occasionally a cold breath blew down across their faces,
alternating with the sun-heated air.

“Whose cattle?” Gershwin inquired.

“Most of them, I think, belong to a Mexican homesteader, Gonzales,” Dawn
replied. “Let the horses have their heads going down,” she warned.

Jack sat awkwardly. Dawn knew very well that he must be stiff. But he
said nothing about it. “I give him credit for that,” she thought.

Jack followed close on her heels as Piñon led the way down the ledge to
where the escarpment sloped into another upland meadow. It stretched as
far as the eye could see.

“You say you haven’t enough range,” exclaimed Perry, Senior. “What’s
wrong with this?”

“It’s not ready yet for grazing,” Dawn explained eagerly. “See, the
ground is soft, and these flowers are not good graze. The forage cover
is just breaking the ground—the bluegrass, the oats, the wheat you see
here—and the browse plants are only in bud.

“We have to have deferred grazing here, because the cover needs
reseeding. This range had been open for grazing for years, long before
the Forest Service was established twenty years ago, and it’s been
burned over again and again by lightning fires. It slopes right down
into the valleys; so it’s an important drainage area into the Rio
Grande.”

“Help, help!” Jack laughed. “School’s over for the year. You sound like
a book. This is vacation, fun!”

Dawn looked at him witheringly. He must be feeble-minded. “I never went
to school,” she said, “but three months in my life. This is my business
and my fun too.”

Perry laughed outright. Mr. Gershwin grinned, and Jack echoed him
sheepishly.

“What is the scrub hillside way down at the foot of this range?” asked
Gershwin.

“Juniper, Mister, likely. But I can’t tell whether it’s monosperma or
occidentals from California. They both grow round seven to eight
thousand altitude. Both are durable light woods, used for fencing and—”

“You’d make a good witness, young lady!” Gershwin smiled. “Point is,
it’s not good forage, eh?” Gershwin was beginning to understand the
meaning of scientific grazing. He was not above learning from this young
girl.

“No, sir. Not very. Take the oak-brush type range of the foothills; not
much vegetation there, it’s been overgrazed so long. Snowberry, service
berry, squaw apple, sagebrush, and a few wheat grasses, all hardy
plants, with needle grass, butterweed, and bluebells.

“But in the aspen-fir”—she waved her hand—“lots of vegetation. I’ll
spare you the names, but there’s all kinds of berries, flowers—see the
sweet cicely, the wild roses and geraniums, the honeysuckle and clematis
above?

“Last comes the spruce-fir range, up around our cabin, about nine
thousand feet. There you find more herbaceous growth in the open parks
and less bush browse.”

Jack was reduced to awed silence during this conversation. He had been
filled with the importance of Mr. Gershwin anyway, and here was the big
man listening respectfully to a girl, a mountain girl, and asking her
questions.

Then he contributed a brilliant idea. “Let’s eat. Have you all forgotten
we carried grub!”

“No”—Dawn ignored such a thing as a pang of hunger—“you’ll have to wait
until we get down to water. There’s a little stream down in that canyon
if it hasn’t dried up since the last fire here.

“Let your horse’s reins loose on his neck, can’t you?” she reminded Jack
sharply, as they started down the trail that would lead them into the
canyon. “You’ll be sailing right out over this precipice if you don’t
stop pulling his mouth on the wrong side.”

Mr. Perry hastily and meekly dropped the tightly clutched reins he held.
They did not speak again till they reached the bottom of the canyon.
Dawn saw a covey of brilliant grouse in the piñon scrub but did not call
attention to them. Jack produced from the various saddlebags the lunch
Mrs. Benty had put up, and they sat down on the rocks to eat.

Afterward the men stretched themselves out with cigars, but Jack and
Dawn wandered down the stream; at every turn it changed, now deep and
swift, now shallow and sunny, with little flower-rimmed beaches.

“You’re a wonderful girl, do you know it?” Jack blurted suddenly. He
really felt that she was wonderful. His weaker nature was impressed with
her strength of mind, her independence and character.

Unconsciously Dawn was relenting to a certain sweetness in Jack; and
then, he was young. She yearned unconsciously for the companionship of
other young creatures. A look of blond delicacy about Jack stirred a
motherliness within her, whereas with her father she had striven always
to be a companion.

Jack had a nice expression, she thought. But he had seemed cocksure of
himself with everything till it came to the mountain. She chuckled to
herself.

What was she laughing at? he wondered uneasily. Jack had been spoiled in
school by girls of a different mettle from this mountain girl. It had
been too easy for him. The girls he knew were active, clever enough. But
in the daughter of the mountain ranger there was a serenity, an absence
of any attempt to charm or amuse, that was new. He could never have
analyzed the vivid force of her, but he felt it as some strong electric
current is felt.

Mr. Perry and Mr. Gershwin were hallooing to them, and they hurried
back. The men had heard shots on the mountain side above and the baying
of dogs.

“There must be a hunt on,” Dawn cried. “The Government hunters are after
lion. They were rounding up this mountain to get the old Custer lobo
too. Come on!” She was resaddling Piñon, whose back had been cooling
while they ate lunch. “We’ve got to get out of here, and we may catch a
glimpse of them.”

The men were delighted. This was something better than Perry had hoped
for. They clambered up out of the canyon over a slope covered with
russet pine needles, sparsely wooded and almost free of underbrush. The
baying of the hounds came nearer.

Shots were closing in round the base of the hill. Dawn halted her party.
“Get off. We’ll have to sit tight right here,” she told them, “if we
don’t want to be blown to kingdom come by a stray shot. We’ve got right
in the way of the hunt somehow.”

She led the horses quickly down behind an abutment of rock, where the
men crouched in safety, peering excitedly over the top. Piñon nickered
suddenly and began to tremble violently. Head up, tail out, he ran up to
where Dawn lay stretched with her chin on her hands. Without warning,
and so swiftly that his yellow length was gone before they could speak,
a mountain lion came bounding through the trees. With a leap he sailed
through the air and over the escarpment of rock, within fifteen feet of
them. Swift as he was, they saw for a clear moment his grace, his cruel
head. His tawny flanks, his long tail, were stretched their utmost. Then
he was out of sight, but they could hear the falling of stones down into
the canyon as his great weight struck. Evidently he had lit on a shelf
of loose shaly rock.

“Driven into the open,” Dawn murmured. The words had hardly escaped her
when a second shadow hurtled from the slight cover before them, a shadow
that for a moment loomed but a few feet away, a grayish ghost with bared
fangs and wide yellow eyes—and was gone.

Jack’s face was blank with incredulity and amazement. His father and
Gershwin had flattened themselves against the rock, a shade paler,
thrilled.

“It’s the great lobo.” Dawn nodded to herself with shocked calm. “They
said they were going to get him if it took all summer. They’ve got
twenty men and fifteen dogs and rounded them in a lion to boot.”

Her color had gone. Gershwin looked at her curiously. “Ain’t scared,
girlie, surely?” His tone was kindly but bantering.

She looked at him swiftly, contemptuously. She mistrusted him, yet she
liked him. His wide-set grayish eyes, with strange yellow lights about
the pupils—why, they were like the lobo’s! A wolf’s eyes, and his
cunning; that was it. Now Dawn understood Gershwin. She laughed back at
him.

“You know better’n that,” she said.

“Gee, I want to get in on that hunting,” Jack sputtered, coming out from
between the rocks where he had taken refuge.

“I expect you could if you wanted,” Dawn replied indifferently. “I
expect Mr. Gershwin could manage that too.” He probably couldn’t shoot
anyway; it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Great guns!” Mr. Perry’s teeth were chattering. “Those are the fellows
that kill the sheep and cattle, eh? Why, they say a few years ago these
predatory animals cost the state over two hundred thousand a year.”

“Gee, there’s the banker talking at a time like this!” interrupted Jack
plaintively.

“Well, it costs fifteen hundred dollars to let one lion live a year,”
insisted his father. “Much as a man would eat. Think of it. That’s gotta
be stopped.”

“Don’t worry, Mister,” Dawn observed with grim impertinence, as she
gathered Piñon’s reins and flung into the saddle. “Before long there
won’t be any great game outside a museum. Except deer. Fifty thousand
big wild animals have been killed in less than five years. Makin’ the
world safe for mutton- and beef-eaters. Come on.”

“I want to chat with this young lady a bit,” said Gershwin, as he
mounted heavily and followed after Dawn.

“Why, I’ve got friends who’d give a fortune just to get a look-in on one
of these hunts,” Mr. Perry exclaimed, pressing along after them.

“Bring ’em on,” Gershwin rumbled. “I read that the skins alone have put
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the U. S. Treasury in the last
few years. Used to be the Government paid _us_ a bounty for ’em when I
was a lad.”

“Well, I always did believe in private enterprise for developing rather
than the Government,” Perry replied with a wink. “The Government makes
us pay its price for the timber we buy up here.”

There was no chance for Gershwin to catch up with Dawn; she led them by
a short cut that brought them out into the canyon of the Amarillo at
some distance below Benty’s place. Gershwin caught up with her as they
reached the road.

“I believe you’re tryin’ to run away from me, young lady,” he drawled,
with a half-humorous glint in his eyes. “There’s so much up here we
don’t half know about. It’s a revelation to get with folks like you and
your father.” It was not without reason that Gershwin had become one of
the suavest lobbyists of his political era. Dawn expanded, warmed
unsuspiciously to one who thus showed appreciation for the mountain.

“Funny there’s no minerals up here in these rocks,” Gershwin rumbled
along. “Plenty in the other ranges, and copper in the deserts. Funny
they never found anything up here.”

“No one’s ever tried,” Dawn flashed. “Gold’s where you find it, you
know.”

“I was just wondering, Miss Dawn, if there was anything to this rumor
that there was silver-bearing quartz on the Indian Reservation?” It was
worth trying out, to question the girl, he thought. Gonzales and others
had shown him samples of first-rate ore from these mountains, but no one
had been able to locate a body of ore. Maybe he could get something out
of this girl. He’d make it his business to acquire the proper locations
and claims no matter on what reservation ore was found. The girl’s face
was perfectly noncommittal, however.

“It would make a great difference to the Indians,” Gershwin continued
aloud. “The Government’s bound to protect the interests of its wards,
you know.”

“And you bet it’ll do it too, Mister,” she retorted, “as far as the
Forest Service is concerned.”

“Mm-m. What would you say, I wonder, if I told you—?” They were walking
at a lazy amble up the road, Jack and his father following about a
quarter of a mile behind, and Mr. Gershwin glanced sidewise at Dawn out
of oblique eyes.

“What, Mister? Shoot!” Dawn turned her steady gaze on him and the
wolf-like eyes turned aside.

“That your father”—he dwelt on the words—“had a claim staked on the
Indian Reservation—what properly should be, and will be, the Indian
Reservation when the correct survey is made.”

“I’d say you were a liar!” Dawn blazed. She pulled Piñon up on his
haunches and looked straight at the big man slouching in the saddle.
“It’s not on Indian ground; never was, and we’ll prove it! Though if it
were it would be safe enough with _us_.

“But all that range you’re aimin’ to open up is Indian ground and always
has been. They’re just tryin’ to give everybody a crooked deal.” Her
voice shook; she was trembling with passion. A slap on Piñon’s flanks
was enough to send him off racing up the road.

A pebble from his flying hoofs struck Gershwin in the cheek, its sharp
edge drawing a fleck of blood. He brushed it off as a giant brushes a
gnat. He was smiling.




CHAPTER V

THE WITNESS TREE


Dawn had never been spanked. Damon O’Neill had evaded that bitter duty.
She had never even been beaten at anything she undertook, and was like a
bull pup that has never lost a fight and thinks the world is his. Damon
was proud of her daring; he envied it, but he feared for it. The
experience of his young manhood had put a mark on him. Though of
physical courage he had plenty and to spare, he was cautious and
taciturn.

Damon was not afraid to trust Dawn to the mountain; he feared to trust
her to the world. The world had not treated him any too well. Yet he
knew that the day would come when Dawn too must undergo her trial. For
that reason he welcomed the coming of the Perrys to the mountain. For
more than a month now young Perry had been a visitor to the ranger’s
cabin, his daughter’s constant companion in her comings and goings.

Dawn bullied Jack shamelessly. She made sport of him, teasing, harrying,
showing him up. He took it all amiably enough, just as Shep took a poke
in the belly from her teasing foot while he lay with his four paws up in
the air.

“You’re so good at figures, Jack,” she bantered as they lolled on the
cabin steps one afternoon, “and I don’t pretend to like ’em. What’s the
rate of precipitation down into the Cascada when a cloudburst deposits
an inch of water in ten minutes?”

They were watching Hinray laboriously trace red rings on a map to
indicate to the Range Supervisor where the fire hazards were in their
section.

“Ask him instead what makes Chiny a near treeless waste?” Hinray cackled
spitefully. “Ask him w’y and w’ere Joseph said, ‘Every shepherd is an
abomination to the Egyptians.’ And w’y the Prophet Ezekiel balled out
the shepherds of Israel?

“‘Woe unto ye,’ he says, says he, ‘shepherds of Israel. Seemeth it a
small thing unto you to have eaten up the good pasture, but ye tread
down with yore feet the residoo of yore pastures?’”

“What are you balling me out for?” Jack complained. “Is it my fault
nothing grows on your ranges any more but cattle, and they’re dying?
Whose fault is it anyway?”

“Well, the old-timers is mostly to blame, and that’s a fact,” said
Hinray sternly. “They just spread out in the public domain and grazed it
all to death. Then when they got confined down to their own pastures
they just naturally let them git wore out too.”

“They’d like to make a Sahara of the whole state,” exclaimed Dawn hotly.
“Who was that French author Damon was reading out of last winter? He
said that the Sahara used to be well watered and well wooded, but it was
made a desert by the folly of man. Many parts of the Arabian and African
deserts, he said, too, would be covered by forests if man and domestic
animals were banished from them for a while. He says trees spring all
round the watercourses, just like they do down on the ranges here,
Hinray; you know. And grasses grow there, but the cattle of the Bedouins
chew ’em off before ever they can seed.”

“It’s sure the truth!” said Hinray. “Git me the Bible, Dawn.”

She darted into the cabin and came out with the worn old book. Hinray
opened at a marked spot and read. “Second Kings, Chapter Three: ‘Mesha,
King of Moab, was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the King of Israel an
hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred thousand rams with wool.’ How’s
that for a sizable herd? But wait!

“First Chronicles tells how Solomon, when he finished the Temple,
sacrificed twenty-two thousand oxen and a hundred and twenty thousand
head of sheep. So, Mister”—Hinray turned on Jack—“you see what expansion
brought that country to!”

“Help, help!” Jack shouted. “Here endeth the second lesson! Hinray reads
the almanac and quotes it to me from cover to cover, and then you both
quote the Bible. But how is it,” he added with a warming spark of
interest, “that the wild animals get off scot-free of these charges?
Don’t they eat their share of the range too? Or is that why the Rocky
Mountain sheep got killed off, because they were too tough for mutton
and they crowded the range?”

“Now you’re talkin’ sense, boy,” Hinray nodded approvingly. “You got
yore bean workin’. Fact is, though, wild animals _ain’t_ destructive.
Their grazin’ habits is conservative. Nature and experience must ’a’
learned ’em.”

Hinray had finished his work and was smoking his pipe, leaning back
against the cabin. Jack was no longer listening; he was idly absorbed in
watching Dawn. He could sit for an hour and just watch her. Dawn was
listening intently as she restrung her Indian leggings with new
deer-hide thongs.

“The Injins never saw the buffalo returnin’ south,” Hinray droned on.
“They used to think that they passed underground, or that a new lot come
out o’ the south every spring. Fact is, they went back by a different
route every autumn from the way they came up. No, they never harmed the
range none, and there was more buffalo, too, than they ever will be
cattle. An’ better eatin’. Men sure was foolish them days.—Looky here,
Dawn, there’s a bad spot, a sure trap for lightnin’ fire. Show yore paw,
will you?”

Hinray hung his unfinished map on the wall and was making ready to
depart. There was fire in the forest, and Damon was putting down a
rather bad blaze of uncertain origin. Dawn had been riding range on Hal
James’s cattle for the past two days and was resting today. Taking care
of James’s stock was an effort to make up, in part at least, for her
responsibility in increasing his losses from wolves and bear.

Undoubtedly it was her fault, she felt, that his stock had fallen prey
to the wild animals of her mountain. Pretty hard, she realized, with all
the range troubles below. She herded his cattle with wisdom and skill,
and with passionate fidelity to a task which was also a service to the
mountain. She rode early and late, spending hours at a time in the
saddle. Jack had gone with her several times. He rode much better now.

James’s cattle had thriven amazingly. They were fine stock and had
fattened on the excellent pasture. Nor had the range suffered; as the
season advanced Dawn had helped the herders move them up higher and
higher into the mountains till now they were in the high parks on the
upper Amarillo.

The weeks had dragged on and nothing had been heard of any action on the
Reservation survey. The question was whether the new survey was to
stand, or that made according to Ranger O’Neill’s interpretation of the
old boundaries. While the question whether the Reservation range should
be opened was held in abeyance through the summer months, Gershwin’s
cattle fattened along with Gonzales’ stock on the homesteader’s leased
range. It was range that he was entitled to if the cattle were his. But
they were not.

Damon O’Neill was not blind to this, but there was nothing that he could
do about it if his superiors could not. He would obey orders and save
his scalp. It was unthinkable, but there were ways in which he might be
removed! He would antagonize no one as he went about his duties.

Mr. Perry had arranged with the Predatory Animal Bureau to go on one of
their hunts, and had brought down a cat, much to his delight. But he
could not make a party of it and bring his friends out to share in the
sport. He’d have to arrange that for himself, he was told, so he went
ahead, preparing for a big hunting party that fall.

Damon and Dawn had twice ridden over to the great tree which Dawn had
been so sure was the Silverstake pine, inspecting it, debating whether
or not it was the boundary of the ancient grant. Damon’s survey brought
the boundary some hundred feet north of the tree and there he had
erected a stone witness, in default of a tree. Yet the lie of the land,
and some doubt as to the interpretation of the old description of the
grant, made him wonder. Damon’s reverence for the forest and for the
rules of its administration was such that he would not have felled the
suspected tree. Those things went so slowly. He had no idea how to press
them.

But there were women down in the capital who did. White women who had
become interested in the welfare of the Pueblo Indians; in their land
and water rights. A bad summer for the pueblos of the Rio Grande had
left many of them almost without crops. Before ever it reached their
ditches the little water remaining to them was diverted by white
settlers, Mexican squatters, homesteaders of both races.

But a voice had gone up out of the wilderness, and the power of press
and of public sympathy had brought the matter of this new invasion of
Indian rights very nearly to a head. Whose water was this? Whose land?

Meanwhile deep in the forest some great tree lifted its branches to the
blue sky and bore silent witness of the source of water and the hidden
wealth of the Rockies. Graven upon its heart wood was the testimony as
to who should be owner of their treasure. Dawn was sure that she would
find the witness tree.




CHAPTER VI

DEATH IN THE VALLEY


August was hot and dazzling. Even in the mountains the sun at noonday
was more than one could bear with unprotected skin. Yet the rays of
light invigorated the very bones with their magic currents of life. Dawn
bathed daily in some mountain brook, where it ran deep between rocky
files or where the swirling waters had dug a pool that hung clear over a
white sandy bottom.

One hot Friday she abandoned the cabin and her fire lookout to Jack’s
care and recklessly flung away on Piñon, ostensibly to look down on
McGuire’s range for trespassers. But coming back, she took the trail
that led past a tiny lake lost in the cup of the peaks. She swam there
for an hour in the cold water. The surface current that lay placid under
the sun was heated so that it was no longer icy, but a dive down into
biting depths brought one up pink and gasping and full of play.

Dawn kept her woolen bathing-suit to slip on when she came out. Then she
lay warming and drying on the hot rocks. She would have none of Jack on
these swims. She’d tried him once, but some unconquerable fear of the
bottomless pools shook him till his teeth chattered. He could not nerve
himself to a plunge.

“I don’t believe that Garen Shepherd would be like that,” Dawn thought
as she wiggled her toes in the fine silvery sand that rimmed the
sapphire cup of waters upheld to the sky. But of course he was no
tenderfoot. What had become of Garen Shepherd? She’d been so busy that
she hadn’t had time to think of the irrigation engineer.

Had she made a mistake to confide so much of the mountain to him?
Suppose he were to attempt some engineering feat with the waterfall
below the sacred source, or were to tell what he had learned that day!
It was a terrible thought, and she shook it away impatiently as
something too disastrous to consider, something of which the man could
never be capable.

“_That_ fellow would _fight_,” she thought. He had a cleft in his chin
that meant something. She did not put into words the knowledge that her
father would not fight; she would have felt that fighting were not
desirable if Damon felt it so. He’d take a last stand, Dad would, but he
wouldn’t want to defy. And Jack, he would run. That was right; he’d run.
Yet she couldn’t help liking the little cuss for all of that. Poor kid,
he didn’t know any better. What could you expect? Such a life as they
led down in the cities!

Dawn had been invited down to the sportily outfitted cabin below Benty’s
where Mr. Perry had installed his family for the summer, but she did not
enjoy it. She had thought she would, had combed her hair carefully, and
had Hinray trim it round her neck. She put on a clean pongee shirt with
a new tie. But when she sat on the veranda looking at Mrs. Perry’s
manicured nails and high-heeled snakeskin shoes, unbelievably tiny they
looked, she had become unpleasantly conscious of her own dusty mountain
boots. Oiling with neatsfoot hadn’t improved them any. Well, she had
some pretty pumps herself, but did they think she was going to walk down
the mountain in them!

She was thinking of it now as she lazed in the sunshine. No, she’d not
go down there again. Rolling over to look at the sun, Dawn lay for a
moment, eyes shaded, staring up into the cloudless sky. Her dazzled
vision did not at once take in a haze that lay over the tops of the
trees. Suddenly a column of smoke shot up, a slender spiral, but with
unmistakable meaning. In a moment she was up, pulling on her clothes.

Fire! Beyond Gonzales’ pasture and the lower lake. Beyond McGuire’s
even—and Dad in the other direction! Piñon sensed the reason for his
being urged. He slid down short cuts on his haunches without drawing
back. Within an hour he trotted down into the clearing on the Cascada,
up to the stoop where Dawn tumbled off and raced to the persistently
jingling telephone.

There was no sign of Jack about. She lifted the receiver from the hook.
Her father’s voice came over the wire.

“Yes, yes, Dad. Oh, I’m so sorry. Did you have to ring long?—I left Jack
here. I was up on the west divide looking down at Gonzales’ lease and I
went swimming.”

His voice came clearly. “I can’t get away down here. We’re beating back
a slow ground fire that’s very persistent. Started by heat lightning, I
think. How’s everything up there?”

Quickly Dawn told of the column of smoke in the northeast. “I was just
hurrying to the lookout to signal you. I’m so glad you telephoned,
Damon.”

“That’s over above the canyon that leads down to James’s ranch,” Damon
replied. “There’s some dead timber there in a small patch that was
burned over years ago. I’ve been afraid of it. The scrub oak’s very dry
too. Well, I can’t get away now. We’re short-handed, as usual. I’ll
phone Benty’s for help and you better ride over at once. Take the
northeast trail from the head of Amarillo Canyon. Signal me from the
northeast lookout if you need help. We’ve got our hands full here and
over on the west slope too.

“Be careful, won’t you?” His worried voice lingered on the wire.

“Surely, Dad. Don’t worry about me. It’s an easy ride; you’ll hear from
me by four o’clock, I expect. ’Bye.”

She hung up the receiver, chained Shep to the stoop, setting a pan of
water, some stew, and a dog biscuit near, and looked about to see if
there was any message from Jack. Yes, a note on the desk. They’d phoned
him that a party from home had arrived, and he had to go straight down
to the cabin. Dawn read the note again incredulously. He’d gone away,
from fire guard at the phone, because visitors had come!

She threw the note down impatiently, rushed into the kitchen for some
bread or crackers to thrust into her saddle bag—you couldn’t tell, she
might be out all night—then down to the stream where Damon had built a
cooling cabin over the rushing water. She was ravenous after her swim,
but there was little time to eat. She broke two eggs into a cup of milk,
tossed it down, and stuffing two bananas into her shirt, ran back where
Piñon was waiting for her. Her slicker, she might need it! She snatched
it from the hook inside the door, tied it behind the saddle, and in a
moment more they were off, trotting down the trail along the Cascada.

She made speed while she could. The ride was uneventful; she met no one.
A slow steady climb up the steeps at the head of the canyon, then a
rocky trail over the mountain side, during which she could no longer see
the spiral of smoke which she’d spied from Lake Peak. But once in the
clear at the top of the mountain she took out her field glasses, and as
she brought them down to the right focus the purple layers of atmosphere
were dispelled as if by magic, her sharpened vision pierced them, and
she could see over one succeeding spur after another to where a column
of smoke arose on the east slope.

Dropping down into a box canyon which was the only pass to the northeast
slope for which she was bound, Dawn could still see the smoke ascending
over the tree tops. The end of the Box Canyon was seemingly a solid wall
of weathered rock. Dawn rode straight up to it and squeezed behind one
of the rounded conical pillars that stood out from the main cliff. There
was just room for Piñon’s plump flanks to push through the passageway.

This trail was Dawn’s secret, her discovery; it had been worn into
grooves by Rocky Mountain sheep, and by wild horses, in the days when
the Cordilleran passes were threaded by those splendid creatures.

Dawn and Piñon emerged from this granite-walled passageway into a
different region. The eastern slope of the mountain was rocky and
barren. It had been devastated by fire and erosion. Only a few stanch
cypress remained, the tree that is anchored to the rocks. The
shallow-rooted hemlock which had formerly covered the slope had been
swept away. These steeps swept sheer up to the mountain meadows from
which Dawn had driven out the goats at the beginning of the summer.
Above them lay the divide, but this slope was the sole watershed into
the valley beneath.

Now Dawn could smell the smoke and so could Piñon. They made their way
toward the ridge above a canyon that led out through the foothills to
the plains below. A crown fire had swept through this region several
years before, taking off the Engleman spruce and Douglas fir and leaving
the stumps which Damon O’Neill had feared might take fire. These stumps
were now smoldering down into the dried cover of the soil. The fire had
eaten into what remained of the scant cover about the head of the canyon
and might spread through the oak brush to the yellow pines on the far
side. Every stick was as dry as tinder.

As she dropped down into the canyon Dawn could see the little forest
creatures scurrying from the smoldering area. The small stream which had
flowed at the bottom of the canyon even in the driest times had
vanished. She could see where the last freshet, that had followed the
heavy rain in June, had torn its way, leaving new stones, a high water
line, and nothing else. Dawn sighed. It was all gone, the lifegiving
water, into the thirsty plain below.

This stream had been fed gradually by melting snows from above, but now
the slopes were furrowed with a thousand hurrying lines that showed
where rain and snow water had torn their way down the stricken mountain
to evaporate or rush to a burning end in the desert. The tragedy was
plain to Dawn.

But how was she to stop this crawling fire? With a man or two it could
be beaten out. She’d have to cross the canyon to get to the fire signal
station anyway. At the foot of the canyon, where it widened out into the
plain, she could see a faint thread of blue smoke. She pushed ahead. It
came from a house. That must be James’s place. It was closer than the
fire signal station on the other side of the canyon. Maybe James would
be there and could rustle another man to help root out the burning
stumps above.

There was a windmill pump turning fitfully as the slight breeze struck
it. Surely there would be men there to beat out the smoldering fire
above before it spread. James was a good fellow; strange he hadn’t
noticed the smoke himself and put out the fire.

Dawn drew Piñon up on the canyon’s brink to take a quick survey. From
the plains that stretched beneath them a hot breath came surging up.
Poised almost motionless in the sky, some great condors hovered, waiting
for a feast that was still alive on the desert below. An eerie cry from
above drew Dawn’s eyes upward. There, so close overhead that she could
see its striped fantail, a splendid hawk was winging to the heights, in
its talons a writhing rattler five or six feet long.

As she reached the bottom of the canyon Dawn urged Piñon into a canter,
but he suddenly stopped and began to back.

“Steady there, old boy. What’s the matter?” His legs stiffened and she
knew from experience he was making ready to jump. In the moment of
silence a dry rattle sounded and there in the sandy bed of the canyon a
great black-tailed rattler was coiled, swaying, ready to strike. Piñon
side-stepped, and they raced ahead.

As Piñon clattered out of the canyon’s mouth the James place lay before
them. It was strangely quiet. Must be no man about; hard luck. But
evidently the womenfolks were inside because smoke still rose from the
chimney. As she let herself and Piñon into the corral Dawn saw stretched
under the trough below the mill, where water dripped, another snake.
After water, of course; dry weather when they’d do that.

She rode across the corral, thinking ranch women were always quiet. A
few cattle stood about the trough, and Dawn saw that the reservoir was
very low. There was little wind to work the pumps, fortunately at that
time, on account of the fire. As she looked toward the house Dawn saw a
strange sight.

A woman was creeping on hands and knees across the space between the
sheds and the back door of the ranch house. Her head was hanging down,
and as Dawn stared her arms gave way, and she fell on her face. Dawn
found her voice and called out, but the woman apparently did not hear.
She struggled up to a sitting posture and dragged herself on. She
reached the corner of the adobe house and disappeared under the porch
while Dawn tumbled off Piñon and fumbled with nervous fingers at the
corral gate. She flew through and ran after the woman.

Where was she? What could the trouble be? Fear clutched Dawn at the
ominous silence. Plunging round the corner, she saw the woman ahead of
her. She was on her knees before a window, peering in. Against her
shoulder a rifle was pressed; she must have taken it down from the
outside of the house, where so many ranch people keep a gun ready
loaded, to use against wolf, coyote, snake, or unwelcome visitor in an
emergency.

Now she was aiming it at something inside the house. Dawn was afraid to
call. Something kept her from screaming aloud. She crept up behind the
woman, who did not seem to hear her, and peered over her shoulder. What
terrible thing was there? Little children played inside in the cool and
darkened room. Two little girls! Good heavens, the woman was aiming to
shoot them! With an involuntary shout Dawn threw up the muzzle of the
gun, then wrenched the barrel from the unresisting fingers of the woman,
who fell forward at Dawn’s feet, her half-glazed eyes closing.

Dawn caught her, laid her flat; the woman was ghastly pale. There had
been two pails of water at the back of the house, Dawn remembered. She
dashed around the corner, seized a pailful, which she threw over her. In
her hip pocket was the thin little flask, long uncorked, which Damon had
always insisted on her carrying. Whiskey. Thank God for it. She forced a
little down the woman’s throat, then more, till she gasped. Her eyes
opened; terror lingered in them. She looked at Dawn heartbrokenly,
pitifully.

“Too late.” Her lips were stiff and she barely articulated. “You come
too late. I been bit by a rattler. Big fellow.” Her strength seemed to
be returning slightly. Leaning sympathetically above her, Dawn heard the
story in a few disjointed sentences.

Hal James, her husband, had gone to town to be gone a week or ten days.
She’d gone out to the faucet above the trough to get some water. The
cows were lowing and she hadn’t heard any rattle; the snake had bit her
from behind, in the leg. She’d tried to crank the old car, to take the
babies and make it into town. She couldn’t. She felt that she was dying,
and that the only thing to do was to shoot the babies first.

She couldn’t leave them there all alone, to starve; just babies, all by
themselves, cryin’. Afraid of the wolves and the coyotes. She’d scrawled
a note to her husband, begging him to forgive her. Her anguish was
pitiable.

“Tell James—take care my babies.” Her head fell back against Dawn’s arm.

Grief and fear came like a chill wave over Dawn. Was this to be death
that she had come upon?—death that she had always hated. Oh, help, oh,
God, help her! She lifted her eyes to the mountains. What must she do?

The mother’s bare leg thrust out from beneath her calico skirt, the
cotton stocking pulled down. An ugly red mark showed, two small
indentations. That was where she had been bitten. Dawn pulled off her
neckerchief and made a tourniquet about the leg several inches above the
marks. She knew what she must do. In the corral a small branding-iron
lay beside the gate. She ran and fetched it, and opening the kitchen
door, went for the first time into the room where the little girls were
playing.

Beans were simmering on the stove and a bed of hard burning embers
glowed beneath. She thrust the iron into them. The little girls ran to
hide in a corner and would not speak. Dawn spoke to them reassuringly.
“I’ll be back in a minute, honey,” she called to the eldest; “stay right
here. I’m helping your mamma.”

The iron was glowing in a few moments, and it took but a few moments
more to burn out the poison wound. Damon had done this for Hinray once,
and she’d never forgotten it. Mrs. James winced and moaned. More
whiskey; the curved flask held more than you’d have thought. Well, that
was all that could be done. Sudden memory brought her father’s medicine
shelf before her. What was that stuff Dad used? She could see the
glass-stoppered bottle that stood there. Often she’d read the label.
“Potassium Permanganate, rattler antidote.” Into the house, a bedroom;
she was searching for a shelf, a likely place. There, above an old
bureau, were some dusty bottles. Boracic acid, compound licorice; a
faded label, potassium permanganate! Just a little left. Tremblingly she
dissolved it in a little water left in the pail, lifted Mrs. James’s
head, and poured it down her throat. She poured the last drop down the
unconscious woman’s throat, lifted the slender body, not so heavy as her
own, and carried her past the two terrified children into the bedroom.

The tragic accident was clear to her now. Since the canyon was dry the
snakes had been coming to the trough to drink. Dawn went out to the
children, who still cowered in the corner. “Well, honey—” she stooped
down to the eldest, who took her hand shyly—“your mamma got hurt, but
she’s going to be all right.”

“Going be all right?” the little girl echoed. She came out of her
corner, smiling at the bright pretty face of the new lady; but the baby
wept inconsolably behind her chair. They were pretty little things, with
a fluff of light hair like dandelions. Dawn looked about for something
to distract the baby. “You want some chocolate, honey baby?” She ran out
and got a bar of milk chocolate from her saddle bag. The novelty and
delight of this comforted and diverted the baby. There was very little
furniture in the ranch house; the old stove, a few chairs, the
clean-scrubbed table. The little white beds were spotless. The children
too were clean; they were pale from the heat, but their baby faces were
luminous with health and good care.

What could she do with them? Their mother might die, left here alone.
Yet she ought to have help, a doctor ought to see her. But the children
couldn’t be left, and how could she take them? The fire! Dawn had not
thought of it for the past hour. It must be past four o’clock now. What
would Damon be thinking? He would be frantic. Through the door she could
see a growing cloud of smoke over the foothills.

What could she do? It was impossible to take the mother. Piñon could
carry herself and the little girls, but the mother could not hold on to
the horse. Well, there were the children to be fed at any rate. The
older one was announcing with shy confidence, “I’m hungry.”

“What do you have to eat at night?” Dawn questioned.

“Milk. Mommy lets Dora milk the nanny. And eggs, or mush. Do you got a
orange? My Daddy is going to b’ing us back oranges from town.”

No, but she had two bananas still. The goat had come into the house. It
was five o’clock and she wanted to be milked. She butted Dora gently.
Dora ran to get her pail and knelt down beside the goat, milking her
most efficiently, her baby fingers pressing a swift stream that pattered
and foamed into the pail. Yet there was barely a quart. Nanny was going
dry.

“You cunning!” Dawn knelt by the little girl and hugged her when she
pronounced the nanny all milked.

Dawn went into the bedroom and looked anxiously at the mother. She
seemed to be asleep now. Her face was flushed as with fever, but she lay
quietly.

“I gave her quite a lot of whiskey after all,” Dawn consoled herself.
She fed the children and ate an egg herself. When she went out to the
windmill to get another pail of water before dusk she stepped carefully.
There were two snakes moving across the corral toward the trough, and in
a corner a mangled shape. Either some cow had managed to trample it, or
Piñon had caught it beneath his sharp little hoofs.

Dawn looked toward the foothills apprehensively. The bank of smoke was
mounting, denser than it had been. It was a slow smudge; no telling when
it might burst into flame. It wouldn’t come down this way, for there was
nothing left to burn, but it might spread back up, and if a wind rose—!
She had forgotten about snakes, and there seemed to be an epidemic of
them. Dawn returned to the house and told Dora and the baby not to budge
through the screen door. She would be back in a few moments.

She took down the gun from the wall, where she had replaced it, and went
back to stand on the side of the watering-tank. From there she shot four
rattlers, big and little, and stoned one that she had not killed. It was
not pleasant, but it made her feel a great deal easier. Poisonous
things, hurting mankind. She hadn’t thought much about that side of wild
life before.

Piñon came nickering and she took him down to a cluster of giant
cottonwood, the only trees as far as the eye could see. Their roots went
deep and their branches were above the reach of animals. When she got
back to the ranch house both children were crying.

“Wolf get you,” Dora wept. “Coyote eat up my nanny.”

“No, no,” Dawn comforted her; “I won’t let anything hurt you or baby or
your mommie.”

The baby kept whimpering for her mother. “I guess it’s time for you and
baby to go to bed now.” She must get them to sleep. Who could tell what
might happen?

Dora was a biddable little thing and entered into the game to surprise
mother by going to sleep before she woke up. After a long hour they
finally did fall asleep. It was dark and Mrs. James was stirring
restlessly, tossing with fever. Dawn took the only chair that was in the
bedroom and sat beside her, bathing her forehead. She thought from time
to time of Damon. Well, he would understand tomorrow. Maybe he would be
able to come, or send some one to look for her.

Just before dark she went out to gaze longingly at the mountain. The
smoke was mounting; no doubt about that. But now she simply could not
leave these helpless creatures, no matter what happened up there. Fire
on the mountain!

It was a terrible night. Dawn did not undress. She put a folded quilt
and some pillows on the floor beside the young mother’s bed, and kept
watch there. It had been a long and more than usually active day for
her, and she slept in spite of herself. During the night she heard the
children’s mother muttering and moaning and jumped up at once. She gave
her a drink of water and in covering her touched the injured leg by
chance. It was very cold. Had she made the tourniquet too tight? She
thought she had been doing the right thing but wasn’t sure. She loosened
the tourniquet.

Before five in the morning the children began to chipper like birds.
Dawn woke, but was terribly sleepy. Mrs. James was still feverish, and
as she leaned over her the poor thing opened bright eyes and rambled
deliriously. She was afraid the mountain lion would come in and get her
baby. She was afraid they’d lose the ranch and starve this winter; she
wanted to go back home down in the Mimbres Valley and go to farmin’.

What would James do to her if she’d shot her babies? She sure didn’t
want to do it, but she couldn’t leave them there to be scared and die by
themselves. The woman kept tearing at the tourniquet and trying to get
it off her leg. Dawn thought it might as well be removed; so she took it
off. She bathed Mrs. James’s head and pushed her back on the pillows.
Soon she sank into a heavy stupor. Was this to be the end? Now Dawn
could do nothing more for her; either she would get well by herself or
die.

The nanny did not come around to be milked. Had she wandered away to
browse in the foothills or had coyotes got her? Perhaps she thought it
was time to wean the children. Dawn remembered how a goat she’d had used
to butt her away, gently at first, then with quiet determination, when
she tried to milk her. There were a few chickens in an inclosed yard,
but not an egg in the nest, nor in the kitchen cupboard. Dawn found a
little cornmeal and when she had kindled a fire she made the children
some mush which she gave them with a little tin of canned milk that she
found on the shelf and that proved to be still sweet.

When she went outdoors again she could see red fire in the mountains.
Dawn was frantic. No one had come to their rescue yet, and now you could
smell the smoke from the foothills. What a lonely place! When the
children had eaten their breakfast Dawn tied on their little bonnets and
took them out to the corral where she had already brought Piñon to
drink. She was not used to human babies and handled them with the rough
fondling she would a puppy or a lion cub. But they liked it, and were
delighted when she set them up on Piñon’s neck and mounted behind. She
judged it was about eight o’clock.

Once out of the corral she started off at a canter but found that that
would not do at all. The little things in front of her bounced about,
one up while the other was down; they must slow to a walk. How long
would it take to get to the signal station? Damon would see the flag
from the eastern lookout.

As they went higher and higher into the hills the smoke became thicker
and thicker. The fire was on both sides of the canyon at last, and from
the thick humus of the south side the smoke rose like a dense smudge.

Dawn stopped to pull out the wet cloths she had stuffed into the saddle
bag; she tied one across the bonnet of each child, covering its face. At
last they reached the foot of the ridge on the top of which the station
was built in a high tree. Obediently Piñon faced the ascent, although it
was plain that he disapproved. When they reached the summit Dawn spoke
sternly to Dora.

“Hold on to the horsie,” she said; “don’t budge. Sit right here on the
ground and don’t let the baby move while Dawn is up in the tree. Piñon
will take care of you.” She kissed the sober little faces looking out
from under the cloths and caressed Piñon’s neck. “Don’t stir, old boy.
Stay right here, _sabe_?”

Dawn sprang up the ladder and stopped only when she was so out of breath
that she could not climb another foot. Ah, now she was getting above the
acrid smoke that choked her. She reached the lookout nest, took the flag
from her pocket, shook it out, and raised it to the masthead. She heard
the baby crying down below. In her haste to get down she lost her hold
for a moment and slipped, held by one hand while she got a footing
again. The smoke burned her eyes and stung her throat.

When she reached the foot of the tree she found that the baby had
slipped off Piñon and that she had taken off the wet cloth, and dazed by
the smoke, was crying bitterly. The trip back was a fearful ordeal,
worse than she had imagined it could be. She herself could not see the
trail and in her anxiety became confused. Piñon lowered his head to the
ground, snorting, but in spite of his fear of fire kept ahead. Had it
not been for his surefootedness and sagacity they would never have come
out alive. Dawn regretted bitterly that she had tried to put up the
signal.

It would have been better to let the mountain side burn while they
stayed at the ranch house. At least, there the babies would have been
safe. She felt a passionate responsibility for them. She had saved them.
And she was still responsible for their baby lives. They were the most
important thing of all just now—more important than the mountain.

Piñon was finding the trail by instinct. Dawn had difficulty in keeping
little Dora from slipping forward off his neck as they descended the
steep incline, with the horse’s neck outstretched, nose to ground. At
last, the bottom of the canyon; Piñon broke into a run. They raced the
last mile down to the ranch house, Dawn holding the baby tightly before
her, while with the other hand she grasped Dora, whose own dimpled hands
clutched the pommel firmly.

The corral gate! They had been gone several hours; it must be nearly
noon. Dawn lifted the children down; carrying the baby and dragging Dora
by the hand, she flew toward the house. What would they find? She was
almost afraid to go into the bedroom. Mrs. James lay pale and still on
the bed; Dawn thrust Dora behind her, but just then the dark eyes
opened. “Dodo, baby,” the mother called. She was all right; weak, but
normal, the poison vanquished.

She hugged the children to her silently, then turned her face to the
wall so that Dawn would not see the tears that flowed down her cheeks.

“I reckon I owe you a lot, girlie,” she said thickly. “Seems like a bad
dream. I sure am sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”

Dawn’s spirits lifted. “Trouble? I guess God struck that fire with
lightning on purpose. ’Cause it’s the only time I ever heard of a fire
doing any good turn.” She didn’t say that if it hadn’t been for the fire
no one would have been likely to pass that way.

The mother told her where to find the cold cellar, where she had some
fresh food and her canned goods stored. The trapdoor was covered by the
couch so that the baby couldn’t open it and fall through. Dawn got out
salt pork, stirred up some batter bread, stewed the carrots.

The little girls were as content as kittens to snuggle beside their
mother. They seemed none the worse for their ride, although they were
very sleepy—one of the effects of smoke. While she minded the cooking
Dawn went every few minutes to the kitchen door and looked anxiously
toward the mountain. The smoke was growing denser slowly but surely.

She fed the children and put them on their little cots to sleep in the
same room with their mother. Mrs. James dozed but took a cup of tea
gratefully. Her leg was now painful and feverish. The warm afternoon
passed; outside the sun was high, the desert listless under a dazzling
white heat. About four o’clock, while she was watching at the door, she
saw red glow. That meant that the fire had burst into flame. Well, there
was nothing she could do. She would mind the children. The mother seemed
exhausted and had again fallen into a stupor.

About five o’clock she heard the sound of horse’s hoofs and rushed out,
her heart pounding. Maybe it was Damon. But it was Hal James. He was
covered with dust and nervously flung himself off his horse as he saw
Dawn standing in the doorway.

“Afternoon, Miss. Anythin’ wrong with my folks?” he blurted.

Dawn shook her head, smiling. “They’re all right. But your wife had a
little accident. I just happened to ride down here; I was on my way to
the fire station.”

They glanced toward the mountains. James had heard about the fire and
had turned about and come home frantically; he had a lot of cattle loose
in the foothills. They went inside, and the cattleman sat with awkward
tenderness on the edge of the bed, stroking his wife’s hair. Not a word
was said.

After a while he whispered to Dawn, “What you reckon’s the trouble?”

Dawn told him about the rattlesnake bite and what she had done for it.
He looked at the painful leg. After a moment he asked, “What were you
aimin’ to do, mother?”

Mrs. James seemed dazed by her experience. “I—I didn’t know,” she
faltered, “that you’d be back before another ten days. I didn’t rightly
know what—to do. Tried to crank the old Ford; she wouldn’t budge. I run
around till I dropped. I was plumb crazy, I guess.” She looked pitifully
at Dawn. What had the girl told her husband. She put her hands over her
eyes and tears streamed from under them.

“Nothin’ to carry on for now,” James said gruffly, squeezing her hand.
“I guess Miss Dawn here saved things from bein’ worse.”

“Oh, yes, yes, she did,” the woman on the bed gasped. “She just about
saved me from puttin’ a bullet through each of us. But I swear, Hal, I
didn’t aim to take the children with me. But what could I do?” She was
in a pitiful state of shock and terror, the fruit of long lonely days
and nights, silent, isolated.

James sat with one hand over his eyes, the other holding his wife’s.
Tears rolled down his lean cheeks. What might he have come home to?

“You know,” he said awkwardly after a moment, “those critters aren’t
what you’d call always dead poisonous. They’ll kill a lamb, or a pig,
maybe, or a child; but they haven’t usually got enough poison in ’em to
get a full-sized human. Leastways, not a man.”

“I guess I was in a poor way, Hal,” Mrs. James faltered. “It took a
quick holt on me. And it was so warm. I guess I got frightened.”

James nodded. “This young lady’s whiskey did the trick all right—or
maybe that’s what laid you out, old lady?” And the shadow of death was
brushed off with a laugh.

“I had to get into town,” he told Dawn, “to arrange for extensions. I
lost ten head of sheep the last few weeks,” he said; “coyotes, and maybe
lobo. When I was a boy the quail came right up to our door here. And the
jacks. My father wouldn’t let any stock pasture about the house. The
coyotes were afraid of guns and human habitations then. But now they’re
so bold—”

Dawn went out to look toward the mountain and see how the fire had
advanced. It appeared to have died down, though there was still heavy
smoke lingering over the foothills. Now she must ride back at once.
There would be a bright moon tonight; she could find the way easily.
James said he had to ride up after some strays anyway, and he’d ride a
piece with her. Mrs. James’s eyes wore a beseeching look as they made
ready to leave her, but she said nothing. Hal had to think of the cattle
first. He came back from the door and patted her head. “So long, mother,
don’t get up. I’ll make it back soon’s I can.”

Dawn kissed the little girls good-by and rode quickly away. If she could
go straight through she would reach the Cascada by nine or ten. If she
had trouble it might be midnight or after before she was home. Why had
Damon not come for her or sent for her? She was more worried than she
had ever been. There must have been a long hard fight with the big fire
on the other side of the mountain. That was the only reason, and Damon
probably didn’t even know that she was not at home on the Cascada. Yet
it was not like him to fail to have her signal watched for by some one.
Thus debating and reasoning out the situation, they came to the canyon’s
end.

When Piñon scrambled up the last steep bit of the canyon trail, Dawn saw
two figures above, rather hazy through the blue smoke that still
lingered on the slopes, coming down the trail. One of them was Damon.
Was the other Jack? To her surprise her heart was beating like that of a
trapped bird.




CHAPTER VII

FIRE


It was Garen Shepherd who stood at Piñon’s head, cap in hand, as Dawn
released Damon from a kangaroo-like hug. Perhaps the Irish in her helped
Dawn to recover from her surprise, her disappointment.

“Didn’t you bring any water with you, Mr. Irrigation Expert?” she
grinned, taking his outstretched hand. Well, it was rather nice seeing
him again. She just hadn’t been expecting him.

“I’m only an engineer, alas!” Garen was frankly smiling his pleasure.
“And I don’t seem to be able to engineer much.”

Damon was exhausted, his worried face scorched and smudged with
fire-fighting. He had been more upset than he would admit at Dawn’s
disappearance. He himself had gone at four of the preceding day to look
for her signal. Seeing neither signal nor smoke at the time, he decided
that she had found matters not so bad and had returned to the Cascada.

He had fought fire all night and just before sunrise had managed a few
hours’ sleep, leaving the conflagration whipped. The fire brigade, made
up of specially hired helpers and volunteers from the homesteaders and
mountaineers, lay down behind the lines for a well-earned rest. Around
ten that morning Damon woke, rode over to the nearest phone, and called
his cabin. Hinray answered. He had been at the cabin all night. No, Dawn
had not been home.

Then Damon had sent Hinray to Lake Peak lookout, from which point he had
seen and reported Dawn’s signal. The next half hour Damon spent calling
the different stations for help. Having sent Hinray on ahead, he himself
followed to the northeastern slopes. For five hours he and his men had
been fighting fire in the ground—ever since noon. They had it beaten out
now; just about licked, at any rate, thanks to Garen Shepherd, the four
Bentys, and a couple of summer folks who sure were men and had
volunteered gladly.

“Let’s get back up the mountain,” Damon concluded the story. “I want to
get a fresh breath of air in my lungs.” He turned to thank Hal James for
riding up with Dawn.

“Keep a watch on this side of the mountain, now you’re back, James, will
you?” he cautioned the ranchman. “Use the fire lookout on the other side
the canyon to signal us. And say, can you ride over in the morning first
thing and take down the signal Dawn left? This humus is as dry as
tinder.” Wearily he remounted Little Sorrel and turned her head back up
the trail.

“Oh, James,” Damon remembered and called back over his shoulder, “you
can move your stock now, goats too, over to the far side of the canyon.”
They rode on. “That’ll please him and help make up for the hard season,”
Damon explained in a tired voice to Shepherd, who rode between Dawn and
her father. “It takes seventy-five acres to keep one cow alive down on
the desert range, but the other side of the canyon’s covered with scrub,
fine browse, piñon, juniper, and acorns ripe by now—the best sort of
mast. That shows the wisdom of closing the foothill pastures for a
while.

“The goats’ll do it good too, for once. They can break up that rocky
hard-baked soil with their hoofs so that when it does rain it’ll soak
in.”

“Rain, did you say?” Shepherd laughed. “Does it ever rain anywhere? I
came back up to the mountains to see if there was such a thing as rain
left.”

“I wondered what brought you,” Dawn remarked, meaning to be polite.

“Well, not just the hope of rain, to tell the truth,” Garen replied
boldly. “If that were the sole reason I might have joined the Indian
dances at any one of the pueblos down below, for they surely are working
overtime at their ceremonies, being unable to coax water onto their corn
any other way.”

A light wind had risen from the south and was blowing the smoke away
from them. As the air cleared the sun sank and they moved through an
orchid twilight. The forest ranger was in a tired daze, but Garen felt
vitally alive and happy. Dawn was more subdued than she had ever been.

Desolation and the shadow of death on the desert from which she had
come, devastation on the mountain side. As the men talked her depression
grew.

“Two to three floods a year now,” Garen was saying to her father.
“Everywhere that unsupervised cutting has been practiced. Fatal with
this soil. Of course the problem this year is _no_ rain.”

Weary as he was, Damon could not let the statement rest undefended. “The
average rainfall will be the same,” he persisted. “True, this has been
an extraordinary year. You can laugh! But usually at our elevation we
have a light rain _every afternoon_ during the summer. There hasn’t been
a drop for over four weeks now. But it will come. You’ll see. Under
natural conditions dry periods are easily tided over.”

Fanned by the pine-scented southern breeze, they mounted the trail
slowly. Gradually the violet light diffused into a mellow glow. The moon
was out, riding full and high. Day had exchanged for night without
darkness. They were going through the burned-over area and beyond could
see the line that had been beaten out by the fire-fighters.

Damon, who was riding ahead, looked back, calling out to ask what had
kept Dawn at the James ranch. He stopped to rest his horse, and Dawn and
Garen reined up beside him. Dawn explained why she had been unable to
put up the fire signal until that morning. “Good girl.” Damon’s tired
smile was guerdon for Dawn. “I’m mighty glad you happened by in time.
James was trying to cheer his wife, but the things _are_ deadly just the
same. Many a grown man’s been laid under grass because of a rattler.”

Dawn’s spirits began to rise, perhaps because they were getting back up
on the mountain, or because she could breathe freely. Her heart was
light and she whistled gayly, “Oh, Mariana.” Soon they were
singing—plaintive Mexican folk airs learned from the despised sheep
herders. Garen’s baritone joined the chorus.

“I like love-songs,” Dawn announced in a matter-of-fact way when they
had ridden in silence for a while. Garen’s expression quickened
hopefully; he reined his shabby pony closer. But at this moment Hinray
stepped out from the trees before them. Hinray had been keeping guard,
and there was no sign now of any more smoldering. Just the same, young
Benty and a couple of the men boarders were going to stay on watch all
that night. The other fighters had already left for home.

Garen promptly offered to spend the night on the mountain with the boys,
but Damon and Hinray thought that was not necessary. With a word to the
three fellows who came down through the pines to hail them, Damon led
the way up the trail. They were still quite a way from home. A mile up
to Box Canyon Pass, a half mile through to the canyon, a mile over the
mountain, three miles down the Amarillo, and another mile up to the
cabin on the Cascada. The long ride was made for the most part in
silence. Garen rode beside Dawn in a thrall of happiness: he was in
love. He had been surprised at the persistence of this attraction, had
been tormented to return to the mountains, giving himself a half dozen
vague reasons why he should go. Now he knew why he had come.

But he had made up his mind that he would never tell Dawn until he felt
sure that she cared a little bit to have him around, that she enjoyed
his company. He would keep it a secret until she was older. So much was
Garen enjoying the tender discovery that he rode in selfish contentment
beside her.

Dawn too was content to ride silently. She was not given to analysis,
but the difference between Garen and Jack was plain. As they neared the
forks of the Amarillo and the Cascada she asked her father, “Why didn’t
some of the folks at Perry’s cabin go?”

Damon was half asleep in the saddle. “Eh?” he queried. “We telephoned
Benty’s to send over word if they could lend a hand with the fire, but
none of them turned up.” He called out to Garen, who was riding on
ahead, “Better come up and stop the night with us, Shepherd. It’s
late—and quite a piece yet down to Benty’s.”

Garen hesitated. Would it be putting them out? He would like to accept,
but Dawn was already riding ahead. “I’d better go on down,” he said;
“it’s easy going, all down hill from here on.” He turned his horse’s
head toward the ford, which sparkled and leaped in the brilliant
moonlight.

If she’d wanted him to stay she would have stopped and seconded the
invitation. As a matter of fact Dawn had not heard her father. She had
ridden on, eager to get home, tired out, disappointed in Jack.

Hinray had gone on ahead, making good time on his little mountain
“mosquito.” When they dragged themselves into the cabin, after
unsaddling Piñon and Little Sorrel, he was already snoring lustily on
the swing seat before the fire.

“Even snoring couldn’t keep me awake tonight,” laughed Dawn. “Good
night, Damon, dearest. You’re the only man I love!”

“Faith, I thought so!” He brushed her hair back affectionately. Now why
did she say that? But Damon was too exhausted to think long about
anything. All was soon silent in the aspen log cabin, humble and crude,
but shining with a silvery brightness under the moon.

Over on the northeast slope young Benty too slept the sleep of
exhaustion. The two tenderfoot lads made the rounds of the fire area,
and as they saw no flames, sat down on the soft mattress of pine needles
beneath the trees. Relaxed with a sense of security, they too dozed. It
was almost dawn. They did not see the slowly creeping ground fire that
emerged from the beaten-out area. Fanned by the warm south wind it
glowed now, sending out tentative little tongues of flame. Curling about
the dry twigs, the new blaze spread slowly through the still hours.
There was little for it to feed on yet.

It was late when the cabin on the Cascada roused itself with a yawn. The
sun stood at nine, an unheard-of-hour for a ranger to lie abed. Damon
was already coming up from a dip in the Cascada when Dawn appeared on
the stoop, stretching. Hinray had made his toilet, modest and befitting
his circumstances—one dip of the head in a bucket, a vigorous drying
with a towel never thereafter to be used.

“Another hot day, Dad,” Dawn called, holding up a wet finger to the warm
south breeze. “I’ll go up to Lake Peak lookout after breakfast just for
luck, shall I?”

“Yes,” he smiled. “The thermometer must be at all of sixty-five. But the
air does seem a bit heavy yet.” His nostrils dilated with the memory of
smoke on the air, the effort to detect it still.

They were at breakfast when Garen came trotting up to the stoop and
swung off with a “Cheerio. How’re all the fire-eaters this morning?”

“Does the air seem heavy to you?” Damon asked.

“Not a bit,” Garen replied. “I just came down from the Lake Peak
lookout. James evidently took the signal down first thing and it was
apparently all fair and serene over there. I think it’s amazing the
air’s so fresh and moist,” he added, “considering the drouth below and
the number of fires in this vicinity.”

“Never will have no dry air s’long’s there’s trees standin’,” said
Hinray between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs. “Did you ever figger that
every good-size tree exhales a barrel of moisture every twenty-four
hours? But it’s sure dry down below, I’ll admit.

“Drouth and death,” Hinray paused significantly, “and depression; I
notice as they come in fifteen-year cycles, just as the almanac says.
They’ve had drouth, they’ve had death a-plenty; and now—” he paused
dramatically—“watch out for the depression.”

“Oh, Hinray, don’t be so gloomy at breakfast,” Dawn protested. “I feel
uncomfortable anyway.”

“Oh, we’ll git rain a-plenty,” Hinray reassured her quickly. “The
cycle’s bound to be up. That’s what I was aimin’ to say. And we’ll need
it, with these fires and short-handed as the service is. Do you know,
Mr. Shepherd”—he wagged his pipe at Garen—“that with a million acres to
a forest unit in this country we’ve got only one range to one hundred
and twenty-five thousand acres?” Hinray’s plaint was cut short by the
jangling of the telephone. It was Jack Perry.

Dawn smiled as she put the receiver to her ear, but she answered in
noncommittal monosyllables; Jack was tied up with his father’s guests.
If he could get away, or get them to ride, he’d ride up that afternoon
sometime and see her. All right. She hung up the receiver.

Damon had gone outside and now called out to ask if the folks didn’t
smell smoke. Dawn thought she did. She telephoned Benty’s to talk with
the boy. He hadn’t got back yet. Chances were he’d gone to sleep right
on the ground. It was now nearly eleven o’clock, and Damon had some work
to do at his desk. Hinray set off for the Lake Peak lookout again and
Dawn washed the dishes while Garen dried them. Garen mentioned that he’d
seen young Jack Perry again the day before. He’d been fishing along the
Cascada with some company from the East as Garen rode by with Benty’s
son on his way to the fire.

“I wonder he didn’t volunteer,” Damon commented over his shoulder. He
made no other disparaging remark. He liked Jack.

“May I stay to dinner if I peel the potatoes?” inquired Garen boldly.
“I’m a swell K. P.”

“You can stay to dinner,” Dawn agreed solemnly, “and if you’ll wash
dishes you can board all year round.”

Damon was still nervous. As they ate lunch he was on the alert.

“If I don’t hear from Hinray he’s to go on to the southwest timber
stands,” he said. “D’Orsay is an expert timber cruiser,” he explained to
Garen, “and he’ll be gone the next two or three weeks, marking the
mature trees. They’ve been sold on the stump to Gershwin, and Hinray
will show the lumber company where they can construct their roads to get
the lumber out and not damage the young trees.”

The dishes were soon finished and Dawn and Garen sat in the swing seat,
resting. Dawn treated Garen with a respect she never accorded Jack, yet
somehow she kept listening for Jack’s whistle. Was he going to spend the
whole afternoon with those tenderfeet? Couldn’t they breathe mountain
air alone?

“Show me your books of flowers, Dawn,” Garen suggested. She brightened
and sprang to get them. Damon had returned to his work at the high desk.
The afternoon had grown warmer, but the little weathervane outside the
window swung its arms about, showing that the wind was veering slowly
but surely from the south to the northeast. Dawn jumped up to open the
windows facing north. A fresh breeze whisked Damon’s papers from his
desk and almost simultaneously the telephone began to ring violently.

Damon sprang to answer it while Garen picked up the papers. They heard
him exclaim, saw astonishment and distress on his face. “Get every one
possible together,” he shouted into the phone. “I’ll call in the
Southern Reserves and we’ll go straight over.” The forester was all
action. “Dawn,” he instructed tersely while he gathered pick,
gunnysacking, and other things together, “call Benty’s again. Fire’s
broken out on the northeast slope once more.”

Young Benty had just got back. The kids had slept on the job; let the
fire gain headway from nothing! When he waked they’d fought it awhile
but saw it was useless; they were helpless. The south wind had blown it
into fresh fields and kept the smoke away. Damon talked in terse
sentences. Hinray had seen James’s signal from the other side of the
mountain, but when he went to telephone there was something wrong with
the line. He had started to ride back down the trail to the cabin, but
on the way had seen what the trouble was with the wire, mended it, and
returned to Lake Peak lookout, as that was the quickest thing to do.

The change in the wind had turned the blaze in their direction. Flames
were near the divide and a crown fire was raging.

“The wind’s rising,” Damon said. “We must get every station we can
reach. Dawn, ride up to Lake Peak lookout and relieve Hinray. He’ll go
on down to the fire zone as soon as he’s done phoning. Some one should
have been up there all morning. Shepherd, can you fight with us? Dawn,
phone me at McGuire’s what direction it’s headed. We’ll be there by the
time you reach the peak or shortly after. We’ll start from beyond there
and fight back.”

Dawn was already at the phone, ringing the stations. Over the wires the
call went out and was passed along by word of mouth, and from every
mountain ranch and isolated homestead volunteers set forth with shovel,
pick, or gunnysacking, to gather before the fire. Dawn rang the base
camp of the fire-fighters that had been organized to protect the
southern slopes of the range which Damon had left only the morning
before. She caught them just as they were setting out to disband. Some
of the emergency helpers had already gone, but the young ranger in
charge was there.

Damon took the receiver in his hand. The ranger said he would be on the
ground in three hours at most. “Three hours,” Damon repeated as he hung
up. “Three hours. And it’s now after three o’clock. A crown fire, a
northeast wind!—Good-by, honey.” He strode back to kiss Dawn, who had
made a rapid change into her riding-clothes and was halfway to the door.

Garen held her stirrup. “Take care, Dawn. Take care,” he said in a low
voice.

She hardly heard him. “Good-by. Come on, Shep.”

Piñon had never been so cruelly pressed by the adored being to whom he
always responded with all his spirit. The speed of the wolf, the
sureness of the great-horned sheep, were called upon now, as Dawn turned
from the trail, urging him by difficult short cuts to the summit. The
dog asked no lifts but crept with hanging tongue at a steady pace as
they mounted higher and higher. Near the summit of Lake Peak he fell
behind, but overtook them as they stopped for a moment of enforced rest.
At last Dawn saw above her the lookout, built on the summit of a spur of
Lake Peak. As her head cleared the tree tops the distant forests came to
view.

She gasped with horror. From the northeast a great blaze rolled. With
field glass leveled she could see it as though it were just opposite.
The acrid smoke was actually in her nostrils and she fancied she could
feel the scorch of its breath on her cheek. She left Piñon at the foot
of the steps and leaped up to the telephone. McGuire’s ring was two
short and one very long. There was no answer for some time. Then McGuire
took down the receiver.

Yes, this was McGuire; he kept repeating it over and over. Oh, fire, she
said. Fire? He couldn’t see nothing, but he sort of thought he’d smelt
smoke all afternoon, but the sky was so hazy anyways. Dawn was wild with
the delay.

“My father, isn’t he there? Didn’t he telephone you?” McGuire and all
his family had been down in the canyon, fishing and berrying, nearly all
day. He couldn’t tell. Just came in. Hadn’t been near the phone. Wait!
Here was the ranger now!

“Damon,” Dawn’s tense words came clear and crisp, “it’s a crown fire all
right, traveling with the wind. Not very wide; about a quarter of a mile
maybe. It’s _crossed_ the divide. It might be stopped by a cross fire
between the upper Amarillo and the lake.”

“All right, daughter. Well send a man up to the Amarillo ridge.” He rang
off. Dawn gazed through the windows of the lookout station. Two hours
dragged by, incredibly long, nerve-racking. She answered a few hurried,
frantic calls on the telephone, and the rest of the time her eyes were
glued to the field glass. Where were the men working? At the end of an
hour she saw that they had started a cross fire not far above Corona
meadow, from which she had driven out the goats at the beginning of the
summer. She saw their fire creep from the rocky Amarillo ridge to the
granite ramparts of the meadow. She saw the flames rise and die
smolderingly away, as the men at the far end met and beat them out. But
this was such a short stretch compared to the whole!

The sky to the west was still rosy with sunset, and now the blaze to the
northeast was reflected against dark skies. Night was coming on, a fiery
night. Before her and on the left rose the Coronado Peaks, jeweled
patches like rubies showing where snow banks caught the red firelight.
Behind Dawn the slope dropped to Lost Lake where she had bathed only two
mornings ago. It seemed weeks away.

She watched the scene in helpless distress. It occurred to her to call
Benty’s Lodge again. The line was busy. She rang persistently. Some one
was probably talking to the little store, telling the news, or just
gossiping. After ten minutes Mrs. Benty’s voice came shrilly over the
wire.

“Everybody’s gone over to Snow Lake. Perrys and them just left here to
see the fire.”

“They’ll see it all right pretty soon, wherever they are!” Dawn
exclaimed. “Tell folks, Mrs. Benty, to keep out of the way. Who knows
what may happen tonight!” When Dawn turned from the phone the whole sky
was lit by the galloping fire. Night had fallen now, but the moon had
not yet risen. It was a terrific but magnificent sight. So must the
forest have been swept from primeval times by lightning-lit fires,
ranging unhindered over the Cordilleran summits, watched with awe and
superstition by the red man.

Dawn tore her fascinated gaze away long enough to try the lookout
station on the southern watershed. There was no answer. Every one had
left to meet at Snow Lake. She rang McGuire’s again. Shep whined,
crouching beside her, his ears pricked forward. There was no answer from
McGuire’s. Even Mrs. McGuire must be outside, the two babies with her,
and that sturdy little nine-year Bonny was probably carrying
drinking-water to the men.

There was no change in the wind, no veering of the fiery danger at the
north. Dawn could bear it no longer. No use sticking here. She could
fight with the men down below. The moon was rising slowly and in a few
minutes its radiance would flood the trail. Yet even now the starlight
was enough to show the way. She hurried down the rock steps, found Piñon
patiently waiting, and with Shep at her heels took the trail down Lake
Peak to McGuire’s homestead. It was not as far as the distance to her
own cabin, but as the trail led through heavy timber the moon could
scarcely pierce, it took longer.

The way seemed interminable, and when at last Piñon burst into McGuire’s
meadow Dawn could see a mighty glare in the heavens. Now they could run.
She pressed heels into the chestnut pony’s quivering flanks. Through the
upland valley they raced up the ridge. On the other side lay the lake,
where in June she had swum Piñon across after her encounter with the
goat trespassers. Beyond and above lay the meadows. She had circled by
the Amarillo ridge to reach them then and had crossed the lake from the
far side. Now, from the top of McGuire’s ridge, a terrible panorama
spread before her.

With a roar greater than a rushing wind the fire swept through the tree
tops, consuming itself utterly in its speed, so that only black ruin and
coals smoldering among the seedlings were left in its wake. Ah! Dad had
started another blaze above Snow Lake, from the barren escarpment
sheering away from the upland meadow, north, in the path of the fire.
Could it give battle to that oncoming holocaust? If not, the summit of
her beautiful mountain would be ruined. McGuire’s homestead that he had
worked so hard to improve would be laid bare. His cabin and barn were
right in the path of this demon of the elements.

She saw the two fires meet, roll together. Fire fighting fire. The
onward march had been stopped in the north. The fire crew and the
tumbling stream that fed Snow Lake halted the spread of flames on their
side. She must get down to the dead-line where the men were working to
the south. Garen and her father would be there. Beyond the lake the
forest narrowed to a vale thick with timber, tall, between two barriers
of granite a quarter of a mile apart. Damon had started another blaze at
the edge of this boxed vale, and now he and his band fought the vanguard
that leaped up among the resinous boles. As she rode she could see them
beating at the flames that licked the ground—beating, shoveling dirt,
trying to stamp out an area of fifty feet, one hundred, to push the fire
over into the path of Snow Lake.

Dawn left Piñon near the lake. “Swim for it, Buddy, if you must”—she
spoke to him as though he were a human being—“but come if I whistle. I
may need you. All right, Shep, come if you like, but mind you don’t get
in the way, boy. Find Damon.”

Now the forest was filled with a heat such as she had never known. Hal
James, who had ridden up through the Box Canyon to try to overtake the
blaze and join the workers, said that the fire passed him a mile away
roaring like an express train through the tops of the trees. He never
saw anything so beautiful or so terrible. By the time he reached Snow
Lake, however, it was all over, for he had been cut off for two hours.

To the spectators from Benty’s Lodge and from Perry’s place the
spectacle was superb too, but to the workers that galloping demon of
speed struck terror. It froze the heart and scorched the brain. Now they
had beaten out a stretch of several hundred feet. Dawn beat with the
rest, working side by side with a slender Mexican lad who sobbed as he
toiled, “_Mis bacas, mis bacas._” His cows were somewhere on the range
beyond.

A great tree crashed not far beyond and McGuire staggered from beneath
its flaming branches, pulling his sixteen-year-old son out of the way
barely in time. Damon O’Neill was at the south end of the fire’s path,
near Amarillo ridge, trying to close the narrowing gap, to stop the fire
there. Unless the fire-fighters could cover the remaining distance to
the lake, the fire would leap along an unburned path through McGuire’s
homestead.

They were working north, trying to stop the gap between the lake and the
mother rock that thrust up around the sheltered meadows above. Dawn was
racing through the stretch of yellow pine, down whose slopes she had
chased the goats. The firefighters were obliged to fall back. Beyond
them their world was roofed with flame, leaping from tree to tree. It
would burn itself out, down to the waters of Snow Lake, and if God
willed, no farther. Had Damon and the brigade of toilers stopped it at
both sides?

Stumbling along the pasture fence, whistling for Piñon, Dawn saw two
women coming on a staggering run through the trees. They were the wives
of herders. She turned back and headed them toward McGuire’s cabin. They
could take refuge in the fields, could hide somewhere, even if the
flames had not been stopped on the right flank of attack. The women
stumbled on, their shawls pulled over their faces. Dawn turned once more
to find Piñon.

Last among the forest creatures to flee the flames was the golden eagle.
Now he rested on a crag above the lake. As the roaring heat came nearer
he flapped from one tree to another. Now even the haven of the lake
seemed menaced. He rose up, his seven-foot spread looming against the
fire-lit heavens, winging his way to the blasted pine that stood stark
beyond the waterfall. No one saw him but the dog Shep, who barked with
passion, though now he had no lambs to defend.

Once upon his favorite lookout, the eagle folded his wings majestically.
He would flee no farther. He awaited the oncoming holocaust as though
defying it to destroy him or the dead tree which he had made his throne.

The fire-fighters were still divided into two squads, one at either end
of the attack. The lake must be their bulwark in the center. On the
eastern slope, running wildly along in the path of the oncoming flames,
Dawn saw people, well-dressed strangers, fleeing in terror of their
lives from the great fire which they had come out to see, to be
entertained by. On the far side of the fence, some distance behind them,
she saw Jack, and heard his excited shouting; but he could not hear her.
The men reached the fence, jumped over, and were almost immediately in
the glade that opened into McGuire’s valley and safety.

But Jack had stopped, bewildered, dazed. Now he saw the fire dragon
rushing down on him. “The lake, the lake!” Dawn shrieked, and above the
roar overhead he appeared to hear her. Plunging through the underbrush.
Jack made for the shore of Snow Lake.

“Piñon, Piñon” Dawn shouted. Her frantic whistle pierced the crackling
of the fire. She wondered if the pony had become panic-stricken with the
smell of smoke and would refuse to move. No, he was a wild horse! A
high, familiar nicker close at hand answered her piercing whistle. Piñon
trotted up, tail outstretched, head high, his nostrils distended, afraid
but faithful. Dawn flung into the saddle, crouching low while they fled
before the heat of the flames. She would leap the fence and be behind
the lines with Garen and her father, out of the path of danger in a few
minutes. They were probably looking for her now.

Through an opening in the trees she saw that the little lake was
illumined with unearthly brilliance. Already the fire’s hungry advance
guard had in places reached the shore-line. As Piñon sprang down the
slope Dawn remembered Jack. Then she saw him, backing out into the
water, farther, farther, his hands over his face as he crouched away
from the scorching heat. She gasped, called to him then to go out no
deeper. But as she raced down to the lake he slipped out of sight.

Probably Jack never heard her call as he struggled to the surface and
struck wildly out. His limbs were numbed to all but uselessness by the
cold water which seemed to drag him down, pull him under to its black
depths. With one leap Piñon, responding to Dawn’s pressure, cleared the
little beach and entered the water. In three steps the horse was beyond
his depth, swimming. By the time he reached Jack’s side the boy was
unconscious, sinking slowly, only his white face and useless hands above
the water. Dawn seized the bulging sweater and pulled it towards her
just as the water closed over Jack’s face.

It was the feat of an Amazon to lift the dead weight up from the heavy
depths, with Piñon milling around beneath her, and her vigor was too
spent with fire-fighting. She was almost pulled from the saddle. Get
both her arms about him, under his arms, lift him up—that was it. “Keep
on, go on, Piñon.”

With the unconscious and demoniacal struggle for life of the drowning,
Jack’s arms clutched her shoulders with a grasp, sudden, unexpected,
dragging her off the horse, down into the water. Her foot in the stirrup
saved Dawn. As she came up she doubled her right fist and caught Jack on
the jaw, putting all her strength in the blow. He ceased struggling. The
cold water revived and stimulated Dawn, and she was able to pull herself
and the boy over Piñon’s back. But the weight was overmuch for him, and
he sank so that Jack’s head went under.

She pushed the unconscious boy face downward on Piñon’s outstretched
neck, and with one hand twisted in the chestnut pony’s mane, neck and
neck she swam by his side to the far shore. Behind them the lake was
rimmed with flame, the pine glade a field of giant flambeaux. Before
them firelight lit the shore where watchers were waiting with
outstretched hands to pull them from the water.

Beyond the lake the bare granite cliffs had stopped the fire’s flight,
and at the base of the cliff tired men wiped sweat and tears and grime
from their eyes and gratefully threw themselves down on the hot smoking
earth.




CHAPTER VIII

TRAPS


Tragedy brooded over the mountain. The air was depressed, heavy with
smoke lingering from the fire the night before. Still heavier was the
atmosphere of the cabin on the Cascada. For a half hour Damon had been
talking with two visitors on the porch. One was James Barnes, the Forest
Supervisor, whom Dawn knew, and the other a man whom she had never
before seen.

They had been sitting at lunch when the callers arrived. Hinray had
slipped out the back door without being noticed. Garen and Dawn had
cleared the table and sat down a trifle uneasily. Damon talked on with
the Supervisor outside and finally came in, his face unusually grave and
worn. The Supervisor and his companion followed.

“No, don’t go, Shepherd.” Damon nodded as Garen lifted an eyebrow of
inquiry as to whether they wished to be alone.

The uncomfortable sense of something pending that Dawn had had all
morning now came to a sharp reality. What had happened?

“Daughter, this concerns you,” Damon said with obvious effort. Dawn
lifted her chin, waiting. The Supervisor took a seat at the table
opposite her. Garen stood behind Dawn, and her father sat beside her.
The other gentleman, who was introduced as the Assistant Supervisor of
the Predatory Animal Bureau for the state, sat down too. His expression
was dour.

“Supposing I talk with the young lady,” said the Supervisor. He had
known Dawn for a long while, having come to the state but a few years
after Ranger O’Neill.

The matter was this. Here was a letter from the Department of
Agriculture, the Bureau of Predatory Animal Extinction, setting forth a
complaint against her, Dawn O’Neill, on the testimony of one of the
Bureau officials; that she had willfully and maliciously interfered with
his work: namely, that whenever she found baited traps she had sprung
them; that she had released certain small animals and had hidden or
demolished poison bait spread in far parts of the range, difficult of
access. As these baits were not put out till late in the season, after
all cattle had been brought down from the range, the Government’s agent
had been unaware of the interference with his work until he visited
these places, weeks, sometimes months, later.

Damon O’Neill was looking with painful concentration at his daughter.
Could she have done this?

The Supervisor finished speaking. He regarded Dawn seriously. There was
absolute silence as she struggled with a stony rage in her heart. The
Supervisor coughed. “It is really a serious matter,” he observed, “and
one that we would not expect to encounter right in the service. I am
told it has been going on for some time, more than a year to certain
knowledge and probably still longer.” He read three instances of
meddling with traps and poison bait.

Dawn sprang to her feet, but before she could say anything Garen caught
her arm firmly and pushed her back into her chair. “I guess I’m the man
who did it, Mr. Supervisor,” he asserted boldly. “At least I did on
certain occasions, cited here. If this gentleman here was an eyewitness
he must have seen me covering up a poison bait this spring. I was afraid
that the game birds—some members of the bureau seem to forget that this
is a bird refuge, too—might get it. I have found dead quail and turkey
that have fed around the bait. A single grain of arsenic is sufficient
for them.

“I am willing to make an issue of this,” Garen concluded firmly, “to
protest against this method of killing wild animals. Not only because of
its cruelty, but because of other, profounder, aspects of their
slaughter. The true meaning of this I’ve learned by contact with this
splendid forester, Damon O’Neill, and his daughter, Miss Dawn, who has
done more for the Service than it can ever repay.”

Garen’s declaration had given no one an opportunity to speak. Dawn was
staring at him in amazement. She stood up again and came over behind her
father, putting her hands on his shoulders.

“I did it myself,” she said firmly. “Mr. Shepherd can’t lie for me,
though I’m much obliged to him. He did help me cover one poison bait.
But I sprung the traps, and many more of ’em; all I could find and
spring. And I always have hid every bit of poisoned bait I found. I—I’ve
been sorry at times—when I saw some one lose cattle that couldn’t afford
it. But just the same—” she turned defiantly to the solemn-faced
Supervisor of the Predatory Bureau—“it’s not right, killing wild things
like that.

“Even though my father says it’s necessary under the circumstances, it’s
_not_ right. Shoot them if you will. Oh, I know that I can’t do any
good. My little help isn’t going to straighten out all the wrongs of my
world any more than what you’re doing is going to help any one in the
end. It’s gone beyond that. But just the same I’m not going to sit still
and act as if I liked it! Why, there’s too many cattle for the range
now.” She spread her hands helplessly, tears in her blazing eyes. “Why
kill off the wild creatures? They don’t eat grass! They keep your
forests and watersheds healthy.”

The expert on poison chemistry looked pained and bewildered. What was
this abandoned, headstrong young person talking about? But the
Supervisor had listened with involuntary appreciation. “O’Neill, your
daughter is filled with true scientific ardor, I can see.”

“Well, I am to blame for that,” Damon replied quietly. “She has been
brought up on the soundest principles of forestry. The French hold the
wolf a great friend to the forest. They have not the problems of a stock
country over there.”

“I see, I see.” The Supervisor was drumming on the table with his
fingers. “Miss Dawn, you love this mountain, don’t you?”

Dawn did not reply. She could not. She flushed painfully. The Supervisor
continued.

“You want to stay here, of course. And so you must yield to orders.
O’Neill—” He turned to Damon, who, having revolved the matter in his
mind, was about to say something. “No, just a moment, please. Let us say
nothing more about this. I think that when I have explained to the
departmental heads the peculiar feeling that Dawn has for the forest and
its wellbeing, for the mountain and all the life on it, that the
complaints which have been forwarded to the local office will be
withdrawn.

“It is scarcely necessary to remind them of your long and exceptional
service, but knowing nothing about the facts, I could make no
explanation. You and Dawn had better come down to the District
Superintendent’s office and talk it over.”

The forest ranger nodded. “Dawn has worked as hard on this job for the
last three years as many a man,” he said gruffly. “She’s preserved more
range to fatten more cattle than the beasts you kill could destroy, I
venture.”

“That’s pure imagination.” Pickering of the Predatory Bureau spoke for
the first time. “If you have no conception of the value of the work, at
least you can keep from interfering. We had set traps for a most
dangerous lobo, but finally had to put our hunters on his trail. We got
him too—” he glared triumphantly—“the outlaw lobo that we’ve been after
for years—and the last grizzly on this mountain. Shot yesterday.”

A cry escaped Dawn, and Damon’s big knotty hands shook so that he had to
steady them by holding on to the back of a chair. He recovered himself
in a moment.

“You may say,” he said directly to his chief, “that my daughter will not
interfere with any of the work of the bureau in the future.” He came to
his feet, his voice rising. “Let them kill off everything and be damned
to them. You know as well as I do, Chief, that one wrong don’t right
another. That’s what this country’s suffering from now. Too damn many
cattle. And I guess the wild beasts know it. But no one takes the hint.
Some day the real predatory animal that walks on two legs, ’ll get his.”

“By golly, O’Neill, you’re right. Ours is a slow uphill job; but
remember, reclamation isn’t accomplished in a year.” He shook hands all
around, and departed, Pickering protesting as they rode off that the
forest ranger was an impractical fool, a visionary.

Damon was shaking with passion. Dawn stood by the table, the color
drained from her face. To these two, children of nature, hating the
strife and friction of the outside world, the morning’s visit had been a
decided shock. Garen Shepherd broke the silence by coming forward with
outstretched hands to Dawn.

“Let me shake hands with you, Dawn, and with you, sir. I’m proud to know
you both. You are ornaments to a grand work and should be presented with
special medals. And you will be, before the task is finished. Mark my
words.”

“That old lemon-face!” came Hinray’s voice from the kitchen door.

Dawn laughed suddenly, a bright spontaneous laugh, clearing away the
gloom that had fallen on the cabin as a fresh wind sweeping through
clears out smoke. She had laughed this way when Garen first heard her
across the lake.

“That’s that!” she shouted. “Oh, Damon, cheer up! I’ll not be shot or
put in the reformatory. Thank you, Garen Shepherd,” she whirled on the
Irrigation engineer, “thank you for that one grand lie. But do you
suppose I’d let anybody else take the credit for a sin I’m proud of?”
And while she wrung his hand she laughed again, happy once more, full of
exuberant gayety.




CHAPTER IX

DAM IN THE DESERT


Just above the forks of the Cascada lay a deep pool where rainbow trout
hovered, darting from the shade to flash tantalizingly across the sunlit
shallows. Sometimes they leaped through the rapids where the tumbling
Cascada foamed into the Amarillo. Then anglers bit their nails and
swore.

For no one could say, “I caught this fellow up in the Cascada, just by
the forks.”

Mr. Perry had thought that was nonsense. Every day for three weeks he
whipped the stream ardently, but still had nothing to show for it. He
made a strike that dragged him into the rushing fork flat on his face.
With his bones aching from the unaccustomed chill he tramped all the way
down to his camp, where with chattering teeth he recounted the tussle.
Proudly he displayed the hookless line, snapped just above the leader.

“Who says they won’t bite up there? Some fish, boys! Did he pull? And
how!”

But the next day Hal Benty found the hook, the fly, and the leader,
caught in the willow brush on the far side of the rapids.

“He ought to _know_ Dawn don’t allow nobody to actually fish anythin’
out o’ here.” Young Benty passed sentence and appropriated the fly. This
was one of the streams that the forest ranger had stocked with fish from
the Government hatcheries that spring.

Hal closed his fly-book hastily. Here was Jack Perry, Junior, coming
across the ford right now. Jack pulled up his pony beside Hal just as
Hal made ready to whip the branch upstream to the Amarillo.

“Howdy? How’re yuh?” he answered the other boy’s greeting. “Not much
luck yet. Only been out an hour. Just thought I’d take a little time
off, after fighting fire the last month and herding dudes all summer.
How’re yuh feelin’ now?” Jack Perry was a real likable kid. Hal himself
was only seventeen, with the mind of a boy of eleven, but he looked
twenty-five. People born and reared in that altitude were apt to look
older than they really were.

“Oh, I’m all right now,” Jack replied. “I was kind of knocked out for a
couple of days after the ducking I got. Swallowed a lot and had a sort
of chill.”

“It was sure lucky Dawn happened to see you,” young Benty reminded him.

Jack flushed. “I’ll say! I’m going up there now to thank her again.
Haven’t been able to ride up since that night. The doctor made me stay
in bed two days.”

“You’re too late. She’s not there,” Hal called over his shoulder,
grinning. “Her and her father went to town this morning. Wonder you
didn’t see ’em pass. My brother drove ’em down in the car to the train.”
Hal went on up the stream.

Jack stood still in the water, his horse content to cool his feet. She’d
gone to town. What must they think of him? Not one of the Perry family
had been up there since the night of the fire. His father had been over
at the store the following morning and telephoned the O’Neill cabin, but
neither Dawn nor Damon O’Neill had been at home. Well, his dad had sent
a box of chocolates up by a little Mexican boy. _That_ was something.

No one ever learned of the mishap with which the small Mexican had met,
losing his box of chocolates in the Cascada. The sodden package
recovered with unusual agility and concern, the lad had retired into the
bushes, to emerge a half hour later with an expression of wan
satisfaction.

Jack turned his horse’s head about. Might as well go back home. His
uncomfortable feeling persisted. He’d ride up first thing they got back.
He certainly did want to see Dawn. Come to think of it, she really had
saved his life. Gee! He’d never forget the sensation when he found there
was no bottom under his feet. He had backed right out into the lake, it
shelved off so suddenly. And the cold—that choking blanket of water! He
didn’t remember much of anything more till he got home.

Jack shook off the dark memory. Here, now, the sunshine was warm and
friendly. He rode on down the canyon road, stopping in at the general
store, also the post office, where fish stories were swapped and great
trout catches pictured and described on the walls. He enjoyed the
notoriety of having had so close a call the night of the fire. He had
hoped to see that Government chap, Garen Shepherd, again. A nice fellow,
college chap too. Funny he was content with this hard-labor, out-of-door
thing.

But at the store Jack heard talk only of the fire and similar fires. Old
man Benty was full of fact and fictions, which he dispensed as he
weighed sugar and passed out cigarettes. What had started it? The
electrical storm a week ago. It had lit twenty-three fires in different
spots on the mountain range.

Nobody could blame Hal for goin’ to sleep over on the northeast slope,
for he’d fought fires for forty-eight hours with practically no sleep at
all; and he’d been working as patrol man and “smoke-chaser” for the
forest service all summer. There was a fire still burning over beyond
the Coronado Peaks that nobody couldn’t get at. Burned for weeks.
Surface fire, just above timber line.

“O’Neill said this morning how they’ve already put out six hundred fires
in the state this year. But that’s higher than usual, owin’ to drouth.
Remember the great Minnesota fire?” Old Man Benty had nearly as many
facts and figures as Hinray. “It lasted eleven hours and cost fifteen
million dollars. It burned four thousand homes, five thousand barns, and
cost five hundred lives. Yes, sir! That’s what a fire _kin_ do if let
loose. This one could ’a’ swep’ right on to Albukirk, I reckon. And
those boys that was standin’ watch for Hal thought the sparks in the
moss didn’t matter!”

Jack found that Garen Shepherd had gone back too. He had driven down to
the station with Dawn and her father. Jack felt a pang akin to jealousy.
He had been mildly infatuated with Dawn all summer and had played about
with her because he had to have a companion. But now he felt all at once
that this was different. As he rode back to the cabin camp he was moved
to more gratitude than he had ever felt.

Faintly it dawned on him that he might be somehow remiss. Dawn might
think him a slacker not to have joined the men and boys who fought the
fire. He and his father’s friends had gone to look at the great
spectacle as though it had been one of the entertainments provided by
the Forest Service and were to be enjoyed as part of the summer’s
vacation. He had a vague feeling that perhaps it would have served him
right to drown. Yes, that was so, he concluded wretchedly, as he came in
sight of home.

He owed Dawn his life. He had said that before. They had all said it,
jovially; but now he realized it. All that was decent in the boy was
strongest at that moment. He could hardly wait for her to come back. As
he trotted up the slope to the lodge he reflected that meanwhile he’d
have to be nice to Norine Masters. Her father was one of his dad’s
partners. He succeeded so well in being agreeable to Norine that by
afternoon he had already been teased into secret shame for the emotion
he had felt for the mountain girl that morning.

Dawn had not wanted to leave the mountain. Her father had been called
down to relieve the district forester’s office, and it was decided that
she might as well go with him now. Garen decided that he would cut his
vacation short and take a few days at another time. He would ride down
with them. They reached the city that evening, and Garen went on to the
dam the next morning.

On the third day Dawn sat with her father in the district forester’s
office. The Supervisor talked with his eyes gazing through the windows
off to the mountains. “In the face of your record, O’Neill, and of Miss
Dawn’s unsalaried services, the very mention of these protests seems
unfair. But, you understand, I was obliged to look into them. Although I
may say I very much disliked having to pay you a visit accompanied by
any member of the—ah—other branch of the service, I thought it would be
better than to discuss the matter coldly by letter.

“However, I am happy to state that the subject is closed.” He brought
his gaze back to Dawn, smiling, and laid a letter in her lap. She read
it with a radiant smile and handed it over to Damon. With grave dignity
the ranger read the statement of the Supervisor. Then he thrust out his
hand. “Thank you, sir,” he said huskily. Damon had not realized how
distressed he had been by this charge against Dawn. It had filled the
whole horizon and at night crowded his fancies with all sorts of horrid
possibilities.

Now they would always be together on their mountain, as they always had
been. The Supervisor wanted Ranger O’Neill to stay in the office for a
week, which would free him to get into the field. He wanted to ride over
the northern forests with his assistant. Damon was glad to serve and
pleased with the confidence and honor shown in entrusting some special
work to his care.

Dawn stayed too, of course, putting in a more or less lonely week. The
evenings were delightful, however. She and Damon, hanging on each
other’s arms like sweethearts, saw the sights and ate ice-cream and more
ice-cream. But by day it was dull. Dawn was not resourceful in the
unaccustomed life of even the quaint old Spanish town. She was too timid
to call on any of the people who had visited them in the mountains,
eaten at their table, taken refuge before their fire.

She missed Garen and wished that he had not gone. She thought of Jack
and looked forward to getting back up on the mountain, when she would
see him again. They’d had good times riding over the mountains together.
It had never occurred to Dawn that any demonstration should be made
because of her dragging Jack out of the lake. She herself felt no injury
at not having seen any of the Perry family after the fire, as she knew
that Jack was sick abed.

Now she wandered about the streets, unable to sit still, and listened to
people talking. “Damon,” she said, “everywhere down here I see cattlemen
standing talking. And in the hotel lobby all I hear is hard times. I
thought we were getting through the summer fine, even if it is hotter
than usual.”

“On the mountain, yes,” he replied; “but we’ve been so busy with fires
and the work up there that we forget sometimes what’s going on down
here. Things look rather bad, I guess. I’m mighty glad we aren’t
dependent on the range for a livin’. And I’m glad too that we’ve money
in the bank.”

“Money in the bank,” Dawn echoed. “I’ll need a lot when I go to school
this winter, won’t I, Dad?”

Money had little actual meaning for them in the present, but its
existence in the safest bank in the state gave Damon a great and abiding
sense of protection. Protection for Dawn; there was the money, a bird in
the hand, for after all, a mine—a mine—well—he would grin to himself a
trifle sheepishly.

It seemed ages before the week came to an end. They were to go back to
the mountains Sunday morning. But on Friday Damon was called down to the
state office in the big city of the railroad, to go over some reports.
They sat in the train, choking with the dry powdery dust that blew in
from the desert-dry mesas, themselves parched with the unaccustomed heat
and dryness. Damon bought the morning paper.

On the front page he read that the Southern State Cattleman’s Bank had
closed its doors and was refusing payment. That was disquieting. Still,
it was a small bank, entirely state capital, owned largely by big
stockmen in a cattle county. The big state and Federal loan banks would
probably not feel the depression. He saw among the “personals” that Mr.
John Perry and family had come down from the mountains to be in town for
a while. Mr. Perry had been called back on business. On another page
there was a statement by Mr. Perry that there was no likelihood of any
financial depression in the northern part of the state.

Down in the city, however, Damon heard talk, hints, forebodings of hard
times to be weathered that fall. There had not been a drop of rain all
summer. People spoke hopefully of the new dam.

The heat of the day was incredible. It was impossible to stay out on the
streets. Damon decided that it would be nice for Dawn to go up to the
Perry’s home for the afternoon. The courts and deep verandas of the
hotel were fairly cool, but there was no face she knew. The downtown
streets were like a furnace. Dawn shrank from the treeless glare, but
she walked with her father up the street to the offices where he would
have to spend the afternoon. Damon gave her the address of the Perry
house and showed her where to wait for a trolley.

But she walked, her sun-brown arms swinging bare in the sleeveless dress
bought the day after she came down from the Cascada. The wide streets
were now canopied by great cottonwoods, that noble tree of the lowlands,
which Dawn regarded with pleasure and reverence. How well they did
themselves in this dry air! Their shade was an oasis in the desert. Her
feet seemed small and light in their new sandals. Jack would be glad to
see her.

In this alien world at the mountain’s foot she turned to Jack as to an
old friend. She was lonely, awkward, ill at ease. But with a friend she
would once more feel herself. It seemed strange to walk on a level. All
the houses seemed to be leaning over her. Her legs all but ached from
having no hill to climb. Where was the house anyway? She came on the
place at last, a gaudy stucco meant to be pure Spanish, with a red-tiled
roof. It looked very grand to Dawn. She went up the steps timidly. No
one was on the wide, screened veranda, dazzling with yellow wicker and
chintz. The screen door was locked; so she couldn’t reach the bell to
the house door. She rattled the screen, knocked, and after a while a
Mexican maid came.

“What you want?” inquired the girl indolently.

“Mr. Jack Perry. Is he at home?” Dawn pressed her face to the shiny
copper screen, through which she could scarcely see.

No, he was out. The maid turned as if to close the front door behind
her. “But Mrs. Perry?” Dawn spoke quickly. “Or Mr. Perry?” Weren’t they
at home, and when was Jack coming back?

“Mrs. Perry she is on the bed, rest. Can not be disturbed by _nada,
nadie_. Mr. Perry he make siesta too,” droned the Mexican girl.

Dawn stood forlornly on the steps in the hot sun. She could not see
through the close wire screening whether the girl had closed the front
door or not. The cool, darkened porch, the welcome she had expected,
seemed denied her. She waited, chin up, feeling rebuffed. There came
quick steps, the screen door was pulled open, and a man hurried out. It
was Mr. Perry himself. He started down the steps to the car waiting at
the curb but turned as he saw the girl and hesitated.

Dawn spoke.

“Oh, yes, yes. Miss O’Neill, the ranger’s daughter. Of course, of
course.” He was hurried, seeming to remember her with an effort. “Ah,
yes. Down in the city, eh? Just walk in, won’t you? Make yourself at
home.” As though vaguely aware that there was something that he might do
in the way of hospitality, he waved his hand toward the porch. “Go right
in, go right in!” Muttering something about having to get back to the
bank, he hurried on out to his car.

Dawn stepped inside, seating herself on one of the wide, flowered
chairs. It was refuge for the moment from the heat and from depression.
The Mexican girl stood in the doorway. When Mrs. Perry woke, Dawn told
her, please say that the girl she had met in the mountains was
downstairs. Mr. Perry had told her to come in and wait.

She sat silently for a long time. The afternoon waxed and waned with
breathless heat. How good a drink from a bubbling spring would taste!
Her eyes closed. Dawn could see the drinking-hole on the Cascada just
below their cabin. The Mexican girl came out again after a while. “Mrs.
Perry waked up but say she can not come down. She have bad headache. Too
bad.” The girl shrugged with resignation.

“I think I’ll be going.” Dawn rose with dignity, picking up the twisted
handkerchief that served as purse. A car was coming down the street and
she paused irresolutely. It slowed, stopped suddenly before the door
with a grinding of brakes, and Jack himself jumped out, turning to help
a slender girl, a slip of a girl in a wide floppy hat under which peeped
corn-colored curls. Her little blue dress, sleeveless too, was no bigger
than a child’s. Two boys followed, and they came up the walk, all
chattering at once.

Dawn wavered in panic. Her instant thought was flight. But they were at
the steps. She plunged through the front door into the house, down the
hall ahead, through a dark doorway. Before her the kitchen opened, a
door into the back yard. She hurried by the Mexican maid, sitting
wide-eyed at her pan of peas, and out. Voices behind her, Jack’s voice.
Well, let him follow. But she wouldn’t stay.

It was all right, of course, but she just wanted to get away. She’d been
there long enough anyway. She turned and ran, down a tiny lane, behind
an old adobe wall, into a quaint crooked street of old Mexican houses,
where hollyhocks and zinnias throve in the sun like lizards. Here all
was peaceful and familiar.

It was six o’clock before she found her way back to the hotel. Damon
was already waiting on the veranda. She had walked off her hurt and was
able to say yes when Damon asked if she had had a good time. They went
into dinner at once, an experience which they always found delightful.
As they awaited the inevitable ice-cream a familiar figure walked into
the dining-room. It was Garen Shepherd. He looked about, saw them, and
came straight over to their table.

Dawn’s eyes grew bluer, her color deepened; she felt a sense of
happiness and gratitude. Here was a friend. Where had he come from?
Garen had seen in the paper that they were still in Santa Fe and was on
his way up there himself when he’d noticed their names on the register
of this hotel. He sat down with them and they lingered through the meal.
Garen seemed to know a good deal more about the financial condition of
the state than Damon did.

The paper that evening carried on the front page the news that two more
banks in the southern part of the state had failed. It was the opinion,
however, that the northern part of the state would pull out of the
admitted depression. A statement was quoted from Mr. John Perry to the
effect that the depression would be short-lived and that another year
would show a great development and expansion, a chance for investment.

“No investment for me. I’ll keep mine in the bank,” said Damon.

As the three sat in the cool patio after dinner Garen received a
telegram. He read it regretfully and handed it to Dawn. Just when he was
having such a nice time! He must get back to the dam in the morning.
Then Garen had a brilliant idea. Chief Engineer Stearn, of the dam, and
his wife were in town and were leaving that night. Early in the morning
they would reach the station from which one motored out to the dam. He
would return with them. Wouldn’t Dawn like to go and make that trip to
the dam? He would show her over the whole thing. They might not get such
another opportunity.

Damon looked at Dawn questioningly. Would she like it? She would. She
had always wanted to see the dam. Garen seemed so eager to have her go.
He would speak to his chief and Mrs. Stearn at once and arrange matters.
And so for the first time since she could remember Dawn slept that night
in a sleeping car, whirling over the desert in a sun-heated steel case
hot to the touch. She lay for a long time staring into the darkness,
listening to the song of the wheels and the roar of the engine. When the
cool air of early dawn rushed over the desert she fell asleep; two hours
later she woke as refreshed as though she had slept ten hours.

Powerful motor cars met them. Dawn sat in a luxurious seat with Garen
and the charming motherly woman who was the chief engineer’s wife. They
whirled over a desert delicately opalescent in the early light.
Suddenly, without warning, the great lake behind the dam lifted into
view—a sheet of the sky laid down like a vast mirage.

“It’s the nearest to the ocean I’ve ever been,” Dawn said. This was
where the water from her mountains came! Her heart ached for the lofty
wooded summits so far away. Water, water, in a fantastic desert of
carven mesas, painted spires, incredible flats, vast crouching foothills
like creation in the making. Now they were whirling down a canyon, a
tree-bordered gorge below the great man-built lake that lay behind the
dam.

In a house whose cool elegance reflected its silver-haired mistress,
they ate an exquisite breakfast—fruit, iced coffee with real cream,
thin, delicate bacon, and rolls that were a confection to the healthy
palate accustomed to coarse whole wheat. The distinguished engineer and
his wife showed Garen Shepherd flattering attention and paid his word
marked deference. They treated him as though he were an important
person.

Mrs. Stearn drew out the girl charmingly. “You were born in Washington,
my dear? And so was I.” Think of it, there they were in a land where the
arctic regions and the tropics were both to be found. “We’re in the
desert, and you in the Alps,” said Mrs. Stearn.

Dawn was to make the trip over the dam before ten o’clock, for the sun
would be too hot after that. They were at an altitude several thousand
feet below that to which she was accustomed, yet Dawn climbed like a
mountain goat up the great works that looked like an Egyptian temple. At
last she stood on the broad summit, to look at lake and sky of such
intense blue that the eyes ached from gazing.

“It’s full of fish,” said Garen, who stood beside her. “The best black
bass fishing in the world. I’ll let you fish for my fish almost any
time, and that was more than you would let me do in your river!”

Dawn laughed, and with the laugh vanished the hidden pain that had hung
like lead within her ever since Government officials had stepped into
the morning sunlight of their cabin door, all the heavy-heartedness that
the Perry home had so shaken up yesterday. There was no room for hurt
any more. The world was a sparkling place of kindness.

“All this water is from your mountains and from the foothills,” Garen
was saying. “Look, Dawn, already the dam has saved the spring downpour
from these poor denuded dunes. It will supply irrigation water to
thousands of farms and grow melons sweet as honey, peaches big as
grapefruit, and when the old Rio Grande rises and comes rolling down….”

“It will catch all the silt,” Dawn interrupted teasingly.

“With rare observation the young lady has put her finger straight on the
sore spot of all engineers,” said Mr. Stearn, standing beside her. “Far
too much of the desert already lies at the bottom of this lake. It will
have to be dredged some day, Shepherd. But mind your mountain up above,
young lady—” he shook a jovial finger at her—“for if I find any black or
red earth at the bottom I’ll know you haven’t been tending your
business.”

“I’ll not neglect it for anything,” Dawn replied. “I’ll go back right
now and watch my shrubs and trees grow themselves. I’ll leave you valley
folks to grow grapes as big as a bushel basket and corn eighteen feet
high!”

During the heat of the day Dawn and Mrs. Stearn stayed indoors, sipping
iced drinks. Major Stearn, as Dawn learned that the engineer-in-chief
was called, and Garen, joined them at sunset. After dark they ate dinner
on a veranda under the stars. A cool air breathed over the desert that
had scorched at noon. Dawn’s train left at midnight. Her father would
meet her at the station in the morning.




CHAPTER X

MONEY IN THE BANK


Damon had never mentioned to Dawn the incident of the poisoned bait. He
understood his daughter too well. It would have been punishment to her.
It had wounded him deeply that she should have been reprimanded. He was
only human, and after the matter had passed, his feeling of their being
in the wrong was tinged with resentment.

In his world there were the mountain and the Service. In Dawn’s world
there was only the mountain. The Service was a servant and she a
hand-maiden to the mountain. If the servant was in the wrong she would
disregard him.

“But they’re not entirely in the wrong, darlin’,” Damon protested. “We
have to effect a balance for the unnatural conditions man makes. Keeping
down the beasts is cruelty that’s for the good of the whole, and _that_
patterns after the grand scheme of Nature too.”

Dawn flung out her arms impetuously. “All right, all right. We won’t
argue about it, Damon, we won’t argue,” she cried irritably. “But
they’re wiping out the creatures, and that’s just the beginning. When
the creatures go, it’ll all be desert.”

“Well, now,” Damon soothed as he puffed at his pipe, “think of what the
bird refuges have done this year. Think of the antelope and deer, and
cheer up. That’s some help, isn’t it?”

Apparently it was. “Damon—!” Dawn’s eyes flashed with her usual
spirit—“do you know I saw the grosbeak and the chestnut-backed bluebird
in the willows about the dam, and yesterday there were mocking-birds
down in San Mateo. The mountain bluebirds that had almost gone last year
were thick, and the blue piñon jays calling ‘peenyoney, peenyoney’ as
they picked off all the nuts. Poor things. They had flown before the
fire. And do you know, Dad, I saw the biggest eagle I ever saw the day
after we came back from down below.” Dawn was sewing up her stockings.
Damon’s she darned with a beautiful weaving of wools taught her by
Hinray. “This bird was a golden eagle, I’m sure, from his shining golden
brown color as he soared in the sun. He must have been nine feet from
tip to tip.”

Damon whistled. “And I brought her up to be truthful! Go on, go on, my
gal. You’ll be a writer yet.”

“Well,” Dawn went on, undeterred, “he soared round and round over one
spot. I was above McGuire’s and I looked across the valley to where you
can catch a glint of the waterfalls if you stand in just the right
place—that’s where I took Garen—and I saw the eagle.

“Once before I saw that eagle, when I was just a kid. I remember it
swooping down over me as I was picking flowers in the meadow while you
surveyed below. Suddenly I thought the sun went under a cloud, but
something made me look up, and here was the cloud between me and the
sun, dropping down to earth. I was frozen still. It swept so close I
could see its beak and eyes. Then with a great whirring of wings it
stopped and shot straight back up into the air again.”

“He might have taken you away,” Damon observed thoughtfully. “I’d never
thought of that danger, thank goodness. I know that bird too,” he
nodded, pulling at his pipe. “He’s the oldest on the mountains, I
imagine. He is a huge creature.”

“Well, what I had meant to tell about was this,” Dawn went on. “After
circling, the eagle dropped like a stone and disappeared just about
where the falls were. I wanted to see where he had landed, because maybe
there’s an eyrie there, and with all my hunting I’ve never found an
eagle’s eyrie this far up, though I know there are some. But it was too
late when I got over to the other side; he was perched above me on an
old tree, a dead tree.”

“That’s the fellow,” Damon replied. “He likes the old dead tree. They
often do. He’s too old for mating, but he’s feathered many a nest of
eaglets in the past, that old bird, and I’ll wager could tell tales if
he could talk—of the trappers in these woods and the old scouts and
Indian fighters.—What about some grub?”

As they ate, Hal Benty rode up with mail and papers. He sat on his horse
by the stoop awhile, chatting.

“Perrys’re comin’ back,” he said just as he was leaving. “They’re
bringin’ a bunch with ’em for some fall hunting. Pa says it seems as if
those fellows was never too busy nor too much taken up to hunt. They’ll
be here tomorrow, if they ain’t already in this afternoon.”

“I’m going to ask Mr. Perry about the rumors in the paper of the banks
in the city,” said Damon. “I’m mighty glad we’ve got our money in a
state bank. Things don’t seem to be getting any better. That reminds me,
honey. What school is it to be for the second year? You know we want to
get the application in this fall.”

“I know, I know, Damon. Let’s decide it this evening or tomorrow.” She
began to laugh, to tease Shep, and putting a record on her phonograph,
essayed a one-step, very stiffly.

“Them dances is turrible!” There was Hinray looking in the door. He was
always appearing unexpectedly. “Why’n’t you do the Hota or the
Tekalotita that you learned down to the Pecos dances? They’re somp’n to
look at. But you got to have a flower in yore teeth. Wait!” He
disappeared, returning a moment later from the river with a sprig of
wild roses.

Dawn was in a gale of merriment. The idea of holding the flowers in her
teeth was convulsing, but when Hinray put on a Spanish record she seized
them and flung into the stamping abandon of the old folk dance preserved
by the descendants of the conquistadores who dwelt in the little town at
the foot of the mountain.

She was stamping the dust out of the floor when the music stopped amid
more handclapping and _otra vezes_ than an audience of only three could
achieve. The door was filled with people—Jack, a young woman, an older
man.

Jack was smiling in his disarming and confident way as he jumped in and
seized Dawn’s hand. She yielded with nothing of resentment. She’d been
afraid that Jack would never come back to the mountain. He’d been almost
her first playmate. For you couldn’t think of Hal that way; _he_ wasn’t
understanding enough. Sometimes she had regretted that she had run away
that day in the city. Perhaps if she’d stayed she’d have had a nice
time. But she couldn’t face all those others.

At times she’d felt that Jack meant to ignore her; that it couldn’t be
accidental, and that if he returned _he_ should be ignored. But what
reason _could_ he have for not being nice! Of course, she was just
acting like a baby. Now here he was and they’d have a grand ride. Dawn
was radiant with the surprise. The party were out to take a ride and
wanted her to guide them.

Jack felt very much at home at the O’Neill cabin. He was troubled with
no misgivings. He was glad to be back, and when he was in the mountains
he wanted to see Dawn, and that was all there was to it. Norine Masters
had gone back home now, but in town—well, maybe it was just as well that
Dawn had got away that day, after all.

“Sorry we missed you when you were in town,” he offered casually. “Dad
is so busy he hardly knows what he’s doing, and Mother was down with the
heat. I wasn’t sure it was you. You should have waited.”

The Kansas City guests were charmed with the aspen-log cabin, with the
view, with the trout in the Cascada, with everything. They wanted to
ride through the dark forest, up the tanbark trail to Lake Peak, to look
down on Lost Lake and up to the snow-capped Coronados. Tomorrow they
were to go on the hunt. Turkey. Oh, too early for turkey? What a pity!

Dawn glanced at Damon. Should she go? He nodded; he had desk work at
home. Jack was beside her on the ride, which would bring them home after
sundown. It was when they had started down the trail that Mr. Harmon,
gazing on the little lake that lay like a vanity mirror in an emerald
case below them, said, shivering, “That must have been some plunge you
had the night of the fire, Jack, in ice water. Who was it they said rode
in with a horse after you?”

“It was this girl here,” Jack replied in embarrassment. The mountaineers
had told the tale to the Harmons. “Oh, I thought I had explained when
you were introduced. It was Dawn. I don’t know what I would have done
without her. I never did have a chance to see you afterward and thank
you, Dawn. I came up—I surely did appreciate—”

“Don’t mention it,” Dawn interrupted coolly. “A little thing like that!”
There was a twinkle in her eye. Mrs. Harmon burst out laughing and
exchanged significant glances with her husband. Jack joined rather
ruefully in the merriment at his expense, tried to say something, but
couldn’t.

Mrs. Harmon was an excellent horsewoman, Dawn discovered, warming to
her. “I’m coming out here again,” Mrs. Harmon told her, “and if you ever
come through Kansas City please let me know and come and stay at my
house. I’ll give you the best horse I can find to ride. It won’t be like
your Piñon here, though.”

How moist it was up under the trees! Yet they’d had no rain for weeks.

“There’ll be a terrific rain before the week is out,” Dawn prophesied.
“It is due the mountain, and when it comes, look out. Seems as if the
whole state is just waiting for a deluge, for something to burst.”

Mr. Harmon looked at her curiously. “I love thunder and lightning,” Mrs.
Harmon said quickly, shaking her head at her husband.

“You’ve never heard it before,” Dawn assured her, “until you’ve heard it
in the mountains.”

Jack rode as near Dawn as the trail would allow. He felt a change in her
manner toward him, and as though he knew he was losing something, tried
to regain the old footing, the something that he’d rather drop than have
taken away from him. But he could not regain it, try as he would. Nor
could Dawn.

Her pleasure in having him back faded, and with it faded also the hurt
attached to the thought of his home. Yet in the going a loss was left, a
vacancy that even the glory of her mountain did not quite satisfy or
fill, a loss of faith in humankind. It was one of the first encounters
that Damon had feared for her; he knew too well the hurts that
friendship can experience.

When Dawn parted from the crowd at the ford near her cabin Jack rode
close to Piñon and said cheerfully, “I’ll be up first thing in the
morning, Dawn. The bunch are hunting, but I’m not going. I’ll break
loose and be over. So long.”

Damon had put the potatoes on and was reading his mail. He looked
worried and hot. “Here’s a note from Shepherd. He’ll be up the end of
the week.” He tossed it to Dawn. “The state is in a bad way.” He was
reading a two-day-old paper with detached interest. “Goodness, the bank
at Tucumcari has gone, and three in other sections of the state. That is
the tenth in the last ten days. Yet here are statements from Perry,
among others, saying that though the situation is hard for the smaller
cities, there is no danger for the state banks.

“I guess things must be all right,” Damon tossed the paper down, “or
Perry wouldn’t be up here at this time. That’s a big banker from
Chicago, or Kansas City, that he’s got at his place now. I’m glad we’ve
got money in the bank, my sweet.”

Damon left the next morning for a survey of the burned-over area on the
northeast slope. One gain only had been accomplished; the dead wood and
rubbish, the worst sort of fire trap, had been completely burned off,
leaving the upper slope free for a fresh start. The lower slope was
denuded. Centuries later it might again accumulate enough soil to
sustain a forest growth. Now, however, there was not a sprig left to
keep the soil from washing down into the desert.

James’s canyon would be dry except for flood waters. The ranchman had
written Damon for information on how to make application for a farming
homestead under the new dam project. It was a distressing trip over the
mountains. The fire, Damon discovered, had smoldered its way, worm-like,
through the humus for days. It was not surprising that the boys had not
seen it. It had taken two days to travel a half mile, and in one hour
after the wind rose it had swept through eight miles. So swiftly had one
part burned, leaping from the crown of one tree to another at forty to
fifty feet from the ground, that the growth beneath had merely
shriveled, and with rain would spring up again from the roots.

Still, it was a depressing sight, and Damon was glad to get back to the
upper Amarillo and the untouched woods again. It was nine o’clock when
he lifted a weary leg from the saddle and stepped off on to the cabin
porch. Dawn met him, took Little Sorrel’s bridle, unsaddled and turned
her loose, then hurried to place Damon’s dinner before him. Cup after
cup of steaming coffee he drank in contented silence, then pushed back
his chair and held out his arms.

Dawn settled down, disposing her long legs over the arm of the chair.
She had stayed at the cabin all day, working about the place. Jack had
come over, but hadn’t been there more than an hour when his folks had
sent for him. He said he would phone her back, but she hadn’t heard from
him, and just about an hour ago one of the Bentys had come by and said
that the whole crowd had left. Gone back to town on the evening train.
Mr. Perry had been called on business. Dawn handed Damon the morning
paper. Jim Benty had brought it up to them.

The banks had _crashed_! The whole state had been stricken by a sweeping
financial disaster. The loans extended to the stockmen and renewed
through the past four years had been called in at last, the resources of
the state were exhausted, and this morning the First State Bank and the
Federal Cattlemen’s Loan had had to close their doors. Yesterday there
had been a run on one of the savings banks, which had paid out to the
last penny, and the president had given his guarantee to his depositors
that he would in time make good to them every cent, and that he would in
some way safeguard all his investors.

But the Cattlemen’s Loan! Perry up here hunting with this damnable thing
imminent! Had he wanted to be out of the way when it happened? Or was he
trying to get help from the Kansas banker? The paper said that although
the Cattlemen’s Loan had been the last to go under, its resources had
already been exhausted.

Damon read and reread the front page. Then he threw it down, smiling
bitterly.

“Money in the bank,” he said. “Money in the bank, oh, yes! Your money,
Dawn. Yours! My God, that young—”

“Don’t say it, Daddy; don’t say it!” Her firm fingers were on his lips.
“Perhaps it isn’t gone. Wait till tomorrow, darling. And—I don’t care,
Damon. Honest, I don’t. We’ve got our home, we’ve got Piñon and Little
Sorrel, our jobs. And, Dad, look! We’ve still got a chance at the
Silverstake Mine. See.” She thrust the paper before him again, pointing
to a small boxed item.

Congress had refused the bill to open up the Indian Reservation for
public grazing or any public uses whatsoever. But a statement made by
the Indian Office said that the survey made by the Land Office would
have to be the accepted boundary. That would mean that the Indians would
be cut off from the Sacred Source which they loved so much, and it would
also impair their title to the use below of their own water. It left
Damon’s claim on the public domain.

“Daddy, tomorrow I’ll ride over there.” Damon nodded. Nothing made much
difference anyhow. She might as well look for the old pine tree again,
if she wanted to.




CHAPTER XI

THE SILVERSTAKE PINE


The double-headed engine came snorting and puffing up the grade, pulling
behind it the early express. Through the red canyons it wound and slowed
to a stop for thirty seconds at the highest station on the Santa Fe
system. In those thirty seconds Garen Shepherd swung down, suitcase in
hand, waved ahead to the engineer, and turned to Hal Benty, whom he had
wired to meet him on the five-thirty and who was waiting with his Ford
on the other side of the tracks.

Hal had had to leave home at three-thirty but was just as glad, for it
was a hot day and they might as well make the trip early. They would be
up on the Amarillo by nine. Already the temperature in the railroad cut
was insufferable, and the place looked like an inferno of red earth,
studded with stunted, twisted little trees, writhing in the heat.

Garen might have stopped for breakfast at one of the dude ranches in the
lower valley, but he pushed on eagerly. He had left the city at four,
forcing his way on to the through express. The city was prostrate with
bad news and heat. The afternoon before there had been queues of
creditors before every bank till long after closing time.

The stockmen were all ruined and had pulled down with them tradesmen,
citizens, shopkeepers, and professional men. There wasn’t any ready
money to be had, Garen told Hal; just the cash people had on ’em. They
would have to get along till more actual cash was brought into the state
from outside. He had fifty dollars himself till next Government payday.

The president of the People’s Bank had nearly lost his mind. He had been
fighting this thing for weeks. He’d make good every cent with his
personal funds before he finished. But it would clean him out, leave him
penniless. The Perry bank? Perry had paid out that afternoon and had
left on the midnight train for the East with his family.

“I don’t think he has the faintest notion of coming back,” said Garen,
“though I may be doing him an injustice. He said he was going East for
loans. His personal fortune is untouchable. He’s a blowhard.
Development? Hell!”

Garen spent little time over the breakfast that good, fat Mrs. Benty set
before him. He was eager to be on his way up to the aspen-log cabin on
the Cascada. The sun was already high and incredibly hot for the
mountains when he parted the trees on the trail and splashed across the
ford below the ranger’s home.

“Halloo, there!” They would be surprised to see him, two days earlier
than he had said he would come. Damon appeared in the door, shouting a
hearty greeting. Dawn had ridden over to McGuire’s valley. He’d told her
not to go. They sat down and Damon heard the news. As Garen’s story of
the bank crash corroborated his worst fears Damon’s teeth closed tighter
about the old briar pipe.

“Cleared out, eh? Wish I’d taken a minute with him yesterday! It can’t
be possible that they won’t pay up in full! Until the day before
yesterday I had never even been afraid of that bank. Man, do you know
that all my savings of years, everything that was for Dawn, is in that
bank—was in it, I should say?”

Garen nodded silently. A terrible thing. People down below had lost the
savings of years. And how were the people in the cities to tide over
without cash, actual cash in hand, for the next few months? It was
harder on the bank people than any one else. _They_ had lost everything.

“And it is in the next few years that my girl needs her schooling,”
Damon exclaimed bitterly.

As they talked the air outside had grown strangely lurid, and the white
heat of the sun became suddenly obscured by a greenish light. Damon
jumped up and went to the door. “Rain! By the powers of the mountain, at
last!” he ejaculated. “And a heavy one. And Dawn’s over on the other
side. I hope she started for home as soon as it began to cloud over. I
told her she’d better stay home.”

“I’ll ride over and meet her,” said Garen. “She’ll likely come back by
the upper trail, won’t she?”

“Yes, that’s the shortest way,” Damon nodded. “And she usually rides
back that way when she’s been to the falls. She likes to go there when
she’s the least out of sorts.”

“I know.” Garen jumped eagerly on the horse which he’d rented from Mr.
Benty. “I’ll look after her, Mr. O’Neill, or she’ll look after me! So
long.”

When Garen emerged from the aspen glade at the top of the trail it was
like another world. The clear green light that looked as though one were
living at the bottom of the sea had turned to a dark angry blue. About
the head of the Coronado Peaks thunder rumbled mutteringly. Heat
lightning flashed on distant summits. The air was disturbed, electric,
menacing.

Where would Dawn be? He started down the trail into the valley. Above
him and about, the clouds were massing rapidly. The mutter and rumble
increased, echoing from one peak to another with solemn majesty. Garen
felt a nervous response to the tension of the elements. Beyond lay Snow
Lake and the gateway out of the valley where the fire had been stopped
so short a time ago. He had been the first to reach Dawn and to pull her
from the water the night of the fire, while others dragged young Perry
from the horse. So many heroic deeds had been accomplished that night
that the girl’s act had passed among the others, so unconscious had she
herself been of any heroism.

She had been quite unaware of his own torturing anxiety for her that
night. And now he felt most uneasy. This was going to be a tremendous
electrical storm. Lightning took its toll in the mountains every year.
That splendid natural quality that made Dawn so fine in his eyes made
her take a joy in the elements beyond the power of mere thinking to
understand or explain. While animals took shelter from the storm, she
braved it. Garen was worried. What had begun with admiration for and
delight in Dawn, had become a strong, deep love.

Where was she? The waterfall lay straight across the valley from him.
Lightning struck the rocky summits as he looked. He could see faintly
along the ridge, and as he peered intently, searching for the great tree
which Dawn had showed him on that first day of theirs together, he saw a
great bird wing laboriously up from a summit directly over where the
falls must be and with a few powerful wingbeats reach a dead tree, a
gaunt giant standing beyond the falls.

What a monarch among birds! Huge, primeval, as the forest itself, Garen
thought. But already large raindrops were falling. He pushed his horse
down into the valley. He must find a shorter trail up to the falls. The
storm, he felt, was gathering its powers for some fearful demonstration,
and he prayed it would hold off until he could find Dawn. Surely she
must already be headed toward home.

He reached the bottom of the valley. McGuire’s son was hurrying through
the pasture. Garen shouted to him, asking whether he’d seen Dawn. The
boy pointed up to the ridge and the falls, shouting, but Garen could not
hear him between the peals of thunder. Now the sky was leaden, the air
green, the heavens filled with rending flashes of lightning, succeeded
by claps of thunder. The noise was deafening. Then came a roar like
stampeding cattle, a patter of rain on the leaves; the heavy clouds were
rent by louder and more appalling successions of thunder and lightning;
and a sheet of water stood between heaven and mountains. “My God, what a
cloudburst!” Garen shouted futilely.

Dawn had seen the storm mounting and had lingered to watch its grandeur.
From where she sat well above the waterfall she could see the peaks and
the valley magnificently. Now too she could see the great pine which her
father had made use of as the base for his last survey which had
resulted in such hopeless variance with that of the ancient grant.

“I was wrong,” she thought; “it was not the Silverstake after all.” She
had been so sure; she felt defeated, but not discouraged. Perhaps the
silver-bearing ledge itself could be found. She was thrilled,
exhilarated with the coming storm, tingling in an atmosphere vibrant
with electric forces. She knew that she should be returning to the
Cascada if she were to get back before the storm broke; yet she
lingered, climbing a bit in this direction and then in that.

Piñon was down at the foot of the cliff, tied under a projecting shelf
below the waterfall, where the foliage was dense. Clap after clap of
thunder broke overhead, and the terrific echoes had not died before
another followed. Now rain began to fall, and without delay Dawn
commenced to scramble down to the foot of the cliff. A jagged bolt of
lightning struck somewhere on the peaks above her, and she winced in
anticipation of thunder that did not come.

She’d barely make it to McGuire’s cabin. Dad would know that she’d gone
there. It never occurred to her that Damon would doubt her ability to
take care of herself on the mountain. Suddenly she saw the golden eagle,
no longer shining, but dark and majestic, his powerful wings cupped to
hold the air as he sailed straight over her head.

She watched him, forgetting her own situation, as he made straight for a
dead tree not far away, the same in which she had seen him before, and
lit among the nest of branches at the top. There the great bird folded
his wings and bent his head to the storm. The rain was now coming fast.
Dawn clambered down the trail, her own head bent. She would reach Piñon
and they would make what speed they could down into the valley. But
before she could reach the chestnut pony she was drenched. Then one
terrific flash of light smote the mountainside and threw her on her
face. The skies became like an ocean turned upside down.

Cloudburst! A cloudburst never to be forgotten. If it had come the night
of the fire it could have extinguished twenty such fires. Only the
shelter of the cliff saved Dawn. She was flattened against it, subdued,
acquiescent, as she had never been. Stones came rolling down the slopes,
gathering speed as they came, and suddenly, with a grinding roar, a
great boulder shot over the ledge almost over her head, bounding
downward with frightful speed. Loosed from its place by the torrents
above, or perhaps by the shafts of lightning that smote the hillsides
repeatedly, it tore its way down the mountain.

Dawn gasped for breath as the rain beat in on her. She pursed her lips
vainly to whistle for Piñon. If he would only come to her. She shouted
his name over and over, and strangely enough, through the storm her
cries carried to Garen. He was fighting his way up the trail which was
clearly enough marked now by the water which had followed it downward,
cutting it into a rapidly deepening trench. Garen had found it almost
impossible to climb, but the certainty that Dawn was above him on the
mountain gave him new strength.

He pulled himself up by bushes and trees; he must make it, must cover
the distance quickly before the greater deluge that follows such a
downpour should wash them away as it tore down the slopes. Piñon must be
near. Dawn was calling the chestnut pony. She was calling _him_. “Garen,
Garen! Piñon!” Garen Shepherd thought he heard the pony’s nicker. He was
blinded by the rain, but with an effort he pulled himself toward the
sound. At that moment the great boulder tore its way through the trees
and passed him like a landslide, following the path of the eroded trail.

His heart almost stopped with the shock of it; then he saw Piñon ahead
of him. A moment’s respite gave him strength to overtake the horse and
he caught him by the bridle and urged him on. The chestnut pony
responded gallantly. He quivered with response, his flanks shook, his
nicker sounded above the storm. Garen seized him by the tail and Piñon
pulled him up the slopes and under the cliff. Dawn was almost ready to
let herself be washed down the mountain. She would find Piñon below and
reach the valley before the water that was coming down from the peaks
should wash her away anyway, crush her with its freight of stones. And
then Garen was beside her. He put his arms about her and forced her back
under the ledge. She saw that Piñon was there, and subsided. Presently
she was clinging to Garen for support.

Piñon drooped over them, the water running down his tail. Together they
weathered it through, and the chestnut pony kept them from being swept
down the mountainside. They waited till the torrent should have rushed
by them.

At the same moment that Dawn was thrown to the ground the golden eagle
had fallen too, plunging from his lofty perch. He had been struck by the
same electric bolt, had gone out in glory at the last moment of his
days, spared the ignominy of falling to lesser birds or to the jackals
of the wild. The ancient tree on which he had perched had also received
its last blow, the _tiro de gracia_, the mercy-stroke, of the elements.

Short and terrific was the storm. Dawn unclasped her arms from Garen’s
neck, sighed, trembling. She had clung to him like a child. The bolt
that had taken the veterans of the forest had spared them. But it had
struck something in Dawn. One does not go through such an experience
without coming closer to the being with whom it is shared.

“Thank goodness I found you.” Garen tried to dry her off with a kerchief
pulled from the saddle bag. “I was afraid when the storm broke, Dawn.
Why do you take such risks?”

“I love it,” she answered, “but this time I was frightened. I called
Piñon, but he didn’t hear me.”

“I did,” Garen replied. “You called me too.”

She had not known it and looked at him in surprise. Garen was drenched,
muddy, his clothes half torn off. His face was smudged and scratched,
his fingers bleeding. Affection and gratitude shone from her wide eyes.

“Dawn, Dawn,” Garen stammered, “I’m not much, but—but—”

Impulsively she leaned toward him and kissed his cheek.

“You’re all a man should be.”

He wanted to shout and yell. He shook her rapturously. “Including a bath
and a close shave, eh?” he shouted in her ear.

The rain had stopped, but the deluge was still rushing down the mountain
side with fearful velocity. Already they could hear the roar of the
falls above, and of the stream below in the canyon opening into
McGuire’s pasture.

What had become of the eagle? Dawn looked up; he was gone. The tree
itself was gone!

“Let us start down now, Dawn,” Garen was saying. “I think we can make
it.”

“Oh, Garen, I must see where the lightning struck over there. It’s just
a little way. We couldn’t be any wetter.” She was already leading Piñon
through the drenched shrubbery, and Garen had to follow. The blasted
pine loomed before them; the trunk still stood, but it was split down
into the earth. At its foot lay the golden eagle, conquered only by
death at the hands of the mountain. Tenderly Dawn stooped to look at the
great creature. “See, Garen.”

Then the riven tree gaped before her. It confronted her with something.
She peered closer, saw and gasped. There on the heart-wood, exposed by
the lightning shaft which had split it neatly, laying it bare for the
first time since the healing bark had closed over it so many years ago,
_there_ was the “witness blaze” of the old Pueblo grant! “Garen, look!”
They came closer. Together they stooped above it.

It was unmistakable. On a smooth surface of the pine it was still
clearly written for all the world to read:

  Northeast corner of the grant made to the Pueblos of Picuris; Anno
  domini 1870.

And beneath the legend:

  70 feet east and south this point by 30 paces the vein of the
  Silverstake mine lies, following the mother vein to the fault.

“This is an act of God,” Dawn said. She passed her hand over the writing
traced there so long ago by the early surveyors. Why had they not
returned to work the mine themselves? That the surveyors had never again
penetrated this wilderness to claim the discovery was clear. But the
story had survived; had even been entered in the public records. No
wonder that no one had ever been able to find the witness tree.

Garen was profoundly impressed. What instinct had led her here? “No one
but you, Dawn,” he said, “would have been drawn to this spot at such a
time.” Some subtle connection between her and the wild, he felt, surely
existed.

But if it had not been for the golden eagle she would never have found
the tree. Before any one came that way again the surface of the exposed
wood might become so weathered that the inscription would have looked
like the meanderings of a worm through the dead tree. The trunk of the
old pine was still sound wood, and the heart-wood was still firm and
colored darkly, the wood about it still light and resinous. Great
growth-rings encircled the core. The tree had stood alone in its youth,
receiving plenty of light, growing to great size. That was undoubtedly
why it had been chosen as the witness tree.

“To think,” murmured Dawn, almost forgetting Garen, “that you have stood
all these years, until this moment, growing by day, sleeping at night,
covering your secret, month by month, year by year, hiding it until this
moment. Oh, witness tree, wait till I fetch Damon!”

She could not take the golden eagle with her; yet she could not bear to
leave him to be rent by the creatures of the forest. So Garen lifted him
and laid him on a ledge of rock where he might lie covered by stones
till some one could return to get the splendid wings for Dawn. Then she
mounted Piñon and turned his head down the mountain. Garen found his own
horse just over the top of the ridge.

It had begun to rain again, and although the fury of the storm had been
spent, still the rain fell in sheets. Sometimes they had to take shelter
under the pines to keep from being washed down the mountain side.
Eventually they reached McGuire’s cabin just as a fresh outburst shut
off all view of the hills about them. None but the anchored trees could
have held a place on the slopes. Rocks were loosened and rolled down as
though by the ocean’s waves.

In McGuire’s cabin Dawn and Garen sat before the fire, wrapped in
blankets and old clothes while their own things dried, and were plied
with hot coffee by Mrs. McGuire. All telephone wires were down, so that
Dawn could not call her father. The cabin was crowded with children,
dogs, a young deer, and a little striped coon.

“Come, Dawn,” Mrs. McGuire was bustling about with motherly solicitude;
“lay right down on the seat and go to sleep, girlie. You must be clean
tuckered out. I’d put ye in a bedroom, but the baby’s in one with the
old man, and grandma’s in the other. She didn’t sleep all night with the
toothache, and she sleeps awful light.”

Dawn nodded and smiled. She was warm and safe and relaxed. The seat was
too short for her feet, but Garen took her head on his shoulder, and
while the children played about them she slept the deep sleep of
exhaustion. Mrs. McGuire nodded meaningly to her husband, and they
turned their backs and went into the kitchen.




CHAPTER XII

HEART-WOOD


“Yes, you bet I testified,” recounted Hinray, who stood before a mirror
hung against a tree and combed his mustaches. “I seen it with my own
eyes. ’Twas all the better that the tree _was_ old. You can’t
counterfeit _old_ heart-wood. No! Nature ain’t to be duplicated.

“There she read, just as pretty: Silverstake claim, 70 feet east, and
south by 30 paces, and on—”

“But when is my father coming back?” Dawn persisted. “Now that the
Indian thing is straightened up why doesn’t he come back? I expected him
yesterday morning and again this morning. What’s that you have, Hinray?
Give it to me now. It’s mail.”

With exasperating deliberation Hinray was sorting out some very dirty
envelopes from one or two fairly clean ones. He handed her a heavy,
important-looking envelope.

“That’ll be from the Irrigation Service, I take it.”

“Yes, one might guess it from the letterhead,” Dawn replied witheringly.

Hinray appeared not to notice her sarcasm or to have further interest in
the letter.

“Oh!” Dawn exclaimed, too disappointed to hide her feelings. “It’s from
Garen, and he can’t get away till Thanksgiving. That’s six weeks! He
sends two paper clippings. Look, Hinray!” She cried excitedly and thrust
the paper before him. “It’s all about the Silverstake tree, and me
finding it. Read it.”

The evidence of the Reservation boundary recently located was
unmistakable, so the article said; the disputed boundary of the Indian
Reservation was now settled, for never had there been any doubt of the
validity of the original grant. With the discovery of the old blaze had
also come to light the exact location of an ancient silver working, long
since forgotten, but referred to in old records and remembered by the
Indians. There was still evidence of a long-abandoned shaft on the
Indian Reservation, and the vein extended along the mountain to the edge
of the Forest Reserve where there was a fault or slipping of the rock.
There had been only one claim filed on the faulted vein in the last
forty years, and that had been made ten years ago by Damon O’Neill,
forest ranger.

Dawn shouted with delight. “Read, read,” Hinray counseled, and she
continued. “The immediate workings in the shaft of the Pueblo mine, it
was said by the caciques of the Tesuque and Picuris pueblos, had been
exhausted, and there was a curse on the mine. One of their chiefs had
been killed there by an arrow from the Spirit of the Mountain. Others
among the young men thought that it was because the shaft was so
inaccessible that work in it had been abandoned. It was less trouble for
the Pueblo to get silver for jewelry by working for the white man.”

The article went on to say that the Pueblos, a simple agrarian people,
were more interested in their water rights and their crops than anything
else, and that now that the source of their rivers had been determined
and secured to them, they were satisfied. Through the white friends of
the Pueblos the use of their own water had been restored to them, so
that never again even in a time of drouth would they be made to suffer
for lack of water as they had been in the past ten to twenty years,
particularly this summer.

At the end of the article Dawn read the simple statement, “‘The finding
of the exact location of the old witness tree was made by Miss Dawn
O’Neill, daughter of the Forest Ranger, Damon O’Neill.’

“Dad’s probably getting his sample assayed,” Dawn said. “The claim is
his; he can sell it or work it himself if he wants to. Can’t he,
Hinray?”

“He can that,” Hinray agreed, “but I misdoubt iffen he’ll want to. If
you sell it and it proves to be worth the sellin’ or buyin’, that’ll
mean an awful mess in the best stand of timber left up there. It’ll mean
workin’s and noises of cranes and pulleys and ingines and dynamitin’.”

“But I thought, Hinray,” Dawn faltered, “that this kind of mining would
all be done underground. I thought a shaft and maybe a small engine
would be all they’d need.”

“And how would they get the ore out?” Hinray pursued relentlessly. “And
where would the miners live? They’d not want to climb up from McGuire’s
valley every morning and down every night. No, sirree. Ever go to a
silver mine? See them great steam shovels?”

“But, Hinray, don’t be a silly. Those are what they use at the great
ghino copper mines, where the ore runs only two per cent. to the ton and
is scooped by steam shovel. _This_ ore is rich, rich! And they’d pack it
down by burro to the railroad.”

“Mm-mm. Would they now? Do you think if Perry and that gang got
interested they’d stop at a _burro load_ of rich ore? Not them. They’d
have a railroad spur run right up into the mountains, that’s what. Look
at what they do just to get timber out. Build camps, stores, railroads.
They have to. Thing to do is work it yourselves. Little by little as you
can.”

Dawn was visibly depressed. “But Dad’s no miner, and I’m surely not. I
don’t want to work underground, Hinray, at the _roots_ of trees, or in
the heart of the mountain. We’re foresters, Hinray, the two of us.”

“Well,” Hinray concluded consolingly, “perhaps Perry and them’ll buy it
from yore father. Now they’ve been shet out of the Indian Reservation
range they’ve had to sell their cattle. But Gershwin took no loss. Not
he! Mark my words. ’Twas a fine set of cattle his herders drove down to
the stockyards to ship east. What profit Perry made he lost in the bank.
He brought nothin’ with him; he took nothin’ away.”

“And the James?” Dawn queried. “How did they come out? I never heard.”

“I reckon that poor fellow had to let his profit go, if he had any, to
cover his loan. But if he had any cash in hand I hope he kept holt of
it.” Hinray was a confirmed skeptic about the ways of the financial
world.

Dawn sat idly on the porch, her back against the wall, grateful for the
October sun. Shep lay with his head in her lap, and Piñon was grazing
near the cabin. The trees parted below them at the ford where the trail
turned up the Cascada, and a rider appeared. It was an Indian, mounted
on a little cream-colored pony. The diminutive creature plodded slowly
up the incline to the porch, weary as though it had traveled far that
day. The Indian slid from his horse as Dawn greeted him. It was Julio, a
boy who had worked for Damon in restoring Pueblo cave dwellings. He was
a nephew of the rain-priest.

Julio seated himself on the steps and Dawn asked him if he would have
food, but he shook his head gravely and courteously. The boss, her
father, where was he? Dawn explained that Damon had gone into town two
days after the storm and had not yet returned. They were expecting him
the next day. Julio remained quiet and reflective a while and then
turned to her and said in a manner both sorrowful and proud, “We have
found him, the Priest of the Rain. He has gone to the Dance Hall of the
Dead. For two days we have searched.”

Dawn was mystified. In reply to her eager questions Julio told the
story. “He was a great rainmaker, Mi-uchin,” he concluded devoutly.
“Never have we had such rain in our lifetime in response to prayer. For
one week he fasted and prayed in the mountains, and you saw—” He waved
his hand about the heavens.

“But none knew where he had gone or that he had gone. When he did not
return during the days following the rain, we came to search for him—I
leading the young men, for I thought I knew where he would be. But we
found him not there.—Mi-uchin gave his life in exchange for the rain,
for when at last it came it took him. He lay in the stream, washed, and
with a great happiness upon his face—” The boy fell silent. Dawn had no
further words; her tender pity had been sympathy enough.

At length the boy drew a deerskin pouch from his pocket. “I have brought
this for you,” he said. “It is a gift from our people for you.” He held
out a chain of white shell from which hung an emblem of turquoise mosaic
of unusual design. “For you,” Julio repeated, “because of your
friendship for our people. And that you have saved their land and their
water. The forest has held our secret since the boyhood of my
grandfather. That secret was shown to _you_. Take this.” He regarded
Dawn with a look of superstitious awe.

She took the luck emblem reverently. But, she told Julio, she had
already been more than repaid for the chance service she had been able
to do the pueblo. Long ago Mi-uchin had shown her the Source and the
ancient shaft of the Indian mine. She had known all the time where the
Indians came to get their silver and where they held their springtime
ceremonies. “But no one shall ever know from me,” she concluded.

“Mi-uchin knew that you were like a good tree,” said Julio, “the
heart-wood of which is sound. Once the heart decays the tree falls, the
forest falls. It is so with men. What is graven on the stout heart
remains there.

“The red men gave you the forest,” he said after a while, finding his
words with difficulty. “It is for you to keep it. I go. Good-by.”




CHAPTER XIII

THANKSGIVING


“Well, if I’m not going to school this winter I might as well be busy.”
Dawn was pecking at the typewriter, copying botanical notes. Her school
books were spread on the long bare table around her; a fire was burning
in the fireplace. Frost had already touched the aspens, turning them
into little silver trees with golden leaves. The mountain side was a
glory of yellow and copper.

Hal Benty sat on the swing seat and ate piñons contentedly. “Gee, I’m
glad we live up here, Dawn. Folks down in town are havin’ an awful time.
My aunt’s husband is a butcher and now that meat’s so cheap he says you
can’t give it away. Nobody will buy it. They’re awful poor.”

“Did your ma’s summer boarders all pay up?” Dawn questioned
sympathetically.

Hal shook his head gloomily. “Some of ’em had to borrow money from her
to get back to town. She figgered it would be cheaper to let ’em go than
to keep ’em and feed ’em. So they went. Never have heard from them two
boys that was the cause of the fire creepin’ up on me.”

“Oh, you will, I think,” Dawn consoled. “They were good kids. They’re
just broke. When they get some money they’ll remember your mother. How
about the Perrys?”

“Oh, yes, they settled up nearly everything before they left. Perry sent
Ma a check for the last week’s balance, the eggs and canned goods, after
they got back. Say, that reminds me. Do you ever hear from Jack Perry?”
Hal put his question slyly, he thought. In fact he had been leading up
to it all afternoon. He had arrived at the stage where he got red in the
face and grinned foolishly at the least provocation in Dawn’s presence.

Dawn did not answer. Hal went on, “That reminds me, Dawn, here’s a
letter from Kansas City, and it says J. Perry on the back. It came this
morning. I brought it up to you.”

“So I see,” Dawn replied calmly. “Well, why didn’t you give it to me
then?” She reached out a hand for the letter.

What was in it? She laid it down on the table, looking at the unformed
scrawly boy handwriting. Somehow she didn’t want to read a letter from
Jack now. She picked it up and held it before the fire, ready to toss it
in; then laid it slowly down again, between the leaves of her study
book. If she opened it Hal would want to know what was in it.

Damon had gone over to the Amarillo Ridge to look at the burned-over
area for his final report. Dawn would not go. She could not bear to look
at it now. It was but two weeks until Thanksgiving, when Garen would
come. When Dad had come home from town, on the trip after the
cloudburst, he had been downcast. His sample of ore, treasured for so
many years, had been assayed, and showed up wonderfully well. The silver
deposit would run three hundred and fifty ounces to the ton easily. But
he could get no one interested in a silver mine. Why, the state was
flat, suffering under the worst depression it had ever known! There had
never been such hard times. Even mining men handed the sample back to
him regretfully. “Nothing doing, O’Neill, I’m afraid.”

As he sat in the dusty red plush seat of the train on his way back home
Damon told himself that he was an impractical fool, not fitted for the
world. He was tired, discouraged. Just because he had wanted so much to
send Dawn to school this winter, in spite of the bank failure, he had
thought he would be able to wrest money from his claim. Even yet it was
hard to give up. Damon was full of visions and tenacious. Dawn had done
her part; she’d found the witness tree. Why couldn’t he do his?

He brooded all the way up the grade. Last winter he’d had an offer to be
forester for a big private lumber company in California. He knew how to
grow trees; a good farmer he was. They offered him a fine salary. But he
had just laughed. He and Dawn had money in the bank then; why, they
wouldn’t think of leaving the mountain and the Service. Then last spring
there had been another offer from an Oregon concern—wood pulp. To
superintend the cutting on a million acres! Perhaps he had been a fool
not to accept such offers. They would probably never come again. Great
forest tracts were, after all, getting scarce.

Dawn was nearing seventeen; she was so well grown. She didn’t want
schooling so much for her self, but Damon wanted it passionately for
her. She had never known anything but the mountain, but he, after all,
could never forget the ambitions of his youth. Dawn should have a taste
of life _beyond_ the mountains; then she would return to them with even
greater affection. It never occurred to him that Dawn might ever be
wooed away from the life she loved. He knew better than that.

He had stepped out of Benty’s old mountain rig on to the stoop of the
aspen-log cabin, feeling dirty and silly in his town clothes. But Dawn’s
arms about his neck had restored him. They sat for hours before the
fire, and Dawn listened sympathetically, the shining pebble in her palm,
turning it this way and that in the firelight.

“Don’t mind, Dad. We’ll work the claim ourselves if no one wants it!”
She laughed with delight at the idea. “Can’t you see me in overalls, my
face dirty, a miner’s candle on my forehead? No, Dad, when this bank
failure has cleared up we’ll be able to sell the mine all right, or get
the cash to operate it maybe—on a small scale.”

“But who knows when that will be, child? It might be five years. School
can’t wait forever.”

“Yes, it can, Dad; as far as I’m concerned it can wait a long time,”
Dawn asserted stoutly. But in the days that followed this talk, she
turned with more than her old interest and fervor to her books. Garen
Shepherd sent her a box of his own favorite books and one or two new
ones for which he’d paid quite a penny. Dawn had finished a classified
list of the trees of their mountain. She had gathered rare data on
seventy-five birds. What she needed was a good camera. Her own had been
ruined last summer when she had attempted to swim the lake with the
camera held aloft in her left hand. That was all right, but when she had
tried to snap a picture of a kingfisher, treading water meanwhile, she
had got a ducking and so had the camera. The camera had never recovered.

“Your notes are excellent,” Garen wrote her, “and the snaps are good,
the illustrations extraordinary. Did you really draw them yourself? I
showed them all to Mrs. Stearn—you remember, the wife of my chief, who
entertained us—and she was immensely interested.”

Dawn was enchanted. Garen’s interest stimulated her, pushed her forward.
She had gathered her material from love of it, but had made no attempt
at orderly and complete data. Accurate classification she had insisted
on. Damon had used much of Dawn’s findings in his reports and had
secretly hoped that in some way the Forest Service would sponsor the
publication of a book on Rocky Mountain flowers when Dawn had completed
her collection. It was almost ready now. She had but to mount the
specimens gathered in the summer and drying now between sheets of
blotting-paper.

He did not himself realize how much she knew about birds until one
evening after the cloudburst, when Garen had challenged the statement of
how early the golden eagle nested. With the first week of February, at
over eight thousand feet altitude, too, she had _seen_ eggs, Dawn told
them. She knew far more about the feathered inhabitants of the forest
than the ranger did.

Garen was amazed and filled with admiration. “What a contribution to the
Biological Survey all this personal observation would be!” he exclaimed.
“Why, I know their bird expert is dying for just such data as you can
roll off your tongue, the actual observation of an eyewitness of the
habits of the birds in all the various zones in this state.”

Dawn flushed with resentment. “I wouldn’t tell him a word,” she fired,
“if he begged me on his knees. Not if he’s one of the Biological Survey
gang.”

And nothing he could say would change her. She’d keep her facts to
herself and thank Mr. Garen Shepherd to mind his own affairs. “Little
spitfire,” he grinned. A wild cat herself. Nevertheless Garen gave the
idea that had come to him a good deal of thought.

And Dawn gave Garen a good deal of thought. She wanted him to be proud
of her. Ever since the visit to the dam and the glimpse of another
world, she had thought seriously of Garen. That nice lady had liked him;
he was very smart. He knew figures. She had acquired a vast respect for
figures. Everything he did had to be worked out by arithmetic, she
suspected. But she knew more about the mountain than he did. Ah, that
was something! Well, she’d just show him how much she did know. So from
six to ten every long evening since the great rain, she had burned the
old student-lamp while Dad dozed before the fire, read a bit, or worked
at his desk. Painstakingly Dawn wrote out all that was stored back of
her level brows and in her loving heart. Enthusiasm for her task
possessed her; she could remember all sorts of things that she’d seen
and known ever since she could remember at all on the Cascada.

She could see that Damon had set his heart on doing something with the
Silverstake claim. She could see that he brooded. Well, perhaps she
could sell it for him. She knew there must be money somewhere else than
in this state. A silver mine was a silver mine. One day she wrote a
letter. Hal Benty took it down for her to the weekly mail that left from
the village at the foot of the valley. Damon was in truth having a bad
attack of depression and resentment over the loss of his money, but he
would not speak of it to Dawn. He did not need to; she knew him too
well. Damon could not part with the slow savings of years without a
pang, or some effort to recover or replace the loss.

But when the opportunity came and father and daughter sat in the big
room of the aspen-log cabin, opposite Gershwin, on a Monday before
Thanksgiving, they were silent. Neither reached out to grasp the
dazzling chance. Gershwin was patient. He thought he understood them.

“I don’t think you will do better than that, Mr. O’Neill,” he said with
an air of openness and candor. “You understand that this particular
proposition will require capital. It will have to be developed on a big
scale.” Developed? Dawn shuddered. Gershwin went on unheeding. “Your
former claim, and the new claim you’ve made, cover the only direct
outcroppings of ore.

“I had the ground gone over last summer by expert mining engineers. The
mountain is full of faulted veins, and the risk of locating the mother
vein would be too much of a venture. You might sink a million and not
strike ore. There’s enough exposed on your claims, however, to justify
following the vein along, although it will take capital to cover the
initial investment: shafts, tracks, engines, and so on.”

He waited again for three, five minutes. “Well, what do you say? I’ll
make you an offer—” he spoke slowly, letting out each word impressively
and as though testing its effect. “I’ll make you an offer—of—” He named
a sum far beyond their wildest dreams, twenty-five thousand dollars,
fifteen thousand down and ten more in the next six months. Damon almost
put his head in his hands. The agony of indecision was terrible. Dawn
did not speak. She was waiting to hear what her father would say.

Damon got up and paced the floor. School, travel, comfort, security,
luxuries. Finally he looked at Dawn. “What do you think, daughter?”

She shook her head. “We won’t sell,” she said simply. Gershwin looked at
her in astonishment. His wolfish intelligence was off guard. Sheer
surprise overtook him, anger. They wouldn’t sell? Surely that wasn’t
final? They’d live to regret it—that he could prophesy. It would take
this country twelve years to recover from the financial blow it had
suffered this summer. It would take it fifteen or twenty to begin to
recover from the overgrazed condition of its ranges.

Here was a chance for them to bring in some outside capital. It would
help develop the state—develop it. At that word Dawn’s eyebrows pricked.
Her lips set in a stubborn line. No, they would hold on to their claims
just the same. Fifteen or twenty years to recover. She looked at Damon;
Damon looked at her. Before them a vision of the fire-swept heights
above Snow Lake materialized; in another five years the barren slopes
beyond would have grown into golden glades of aspen and cool stretches
of blue spruce. Others might take up the work, some one else labor in
the vineyard. Some one else? On this part of the forest? Never. Never so
long as Dawn and Damon lived. She caught her lip between her teeth;
stinging tears came.

Suppose Damon should decide to sell and to send her away? Sometimes he
got stubborn and held to a notion, and then she knew that after all he
would have his way. But Damon was thinking too.

“Why are you so greedy?” Dawn cried to Gershwin. “Didn’t this summer
teach you a lesson? Must every one begin again right away? Can’t you
wait to start in wrecking the forest? I’d rather live right here the
rest of my life than anywhere. I don’t want to hear engines snorting,
whistles screeching, under the Three Sister Peaks. I don’t want to see
one tree cut on the most perfect spot on the mountain. If the fire
spared it that’s the least that we can do.”

“I thought last summer that you were a very sensible young woman.”
Gershwin glared, rolling his big cigar betweeen his lips. “But now you
are behaving foolishly.

“Well, O’Neill, if you change your mind in the next ten days let me
know. The offer won’t be open indefinitely.” Gershwin got into the
mountain wagon, which sagged perilously from his great girth, and it
rolled down the hill, forded the Cascada, and disappeared through the
trees.

Dawn heaved a great sigh. Another peril had passed them by. “Dad,” she
said, pushing Damon into a chair and piling on to his lap like a young
colt trying to dispose of its legs, “Dad, it’s rather fun just having a
silver mine for a hobby, isn’t it?”

Damon could not speak. After all these years, what had he done,
sentimental visionary that he was! But the spirit of the mountain that
had brooded above the peaks in the shape of the soaring golden eagle
still flowed about the two in the cabin on the Cascada.

“Order is Heaven’s first law,” he said at last. “Let us see how we have
followed it on earth. Do you know that we had more range this summer, my
girl, than for seven years past?”

The first snow of the season had fallen on the mountain two nights
before Thanksgiving. The thermometer stood at zero at noon. Yet it did
not seem cold, for there was no wind. By night the thermometer had
dropped to ten below, and on the deep silence of the dark Dawn could
hear once more the wolf song, the cry of the hungry wild under the moon.
She bolted the door securely, having kissed Piñon on his cool velvet
nose and petted Little Sorrel. “I’d let you sleep indoors, darling, but
Daddy wouldn’t like it,” she murmured into each pricked ear.

Back in the cabin she pored over the work spread out under the
student-lamp. She must get it finished before Garen came up tomorrow. It
was midnight before the last slip was pasted into place, and Dawn’s eyes
were a deep violet with unaccustomed fatigue. “Come, my girl,” Damon
said at length, “you mustn’t keep at that any longer.” But the task was
done. The beautiful book was set on the shelf and Dawn tumbled into bed.
Tomorrow would be a great day. Garen Shepherd reached the cabin on the
Cascada about three o’clock. He brought with him many good things that
did not suggest hard times. Cigars of the finest for Damon, the red wine
he had promised, candy for Dawn, and dainties she’d never eaten in her
life. Last of all he pulled a letter from his pocket. It was from Mrs.
Stearn, their hostess of last summer; an invitation for Dawn to visit
the Stearns in Washington that winter. Couldn’t she leave New Mexico
after Christmas and stay in Washington as Mrs. Stearn’s guest throughout
the winter? They would be in New York a while.

“Will you go?” Garen asked, his face beaming.

“Must I, Daddy? Oh, I scarcely know, Garen. But what a wonderful sound
it has.”

“Mrs. Stearn also invites you to come down to the dam next June and be
her guest at the official opening. And”—here Garen paused
impressively—“I am allowed to inform you that you will be officially
asked to inaugurate the ceremony, baptize the dam. You’ll do it, won’t
you?” Garen seized her hands boyishly.

“Do it?” Her eyes were solemn and reverent as she raised them to his.
“Why, I think it’s perfectly wonderful, Garen! Of course I will.” He was
radiant. Garen had long cherished a vision of Dawn dressed in white,
standing on the summit of the dam above the blue water, drawing the cord
that would let the water through the dam—the symbolical figure of the
mountains.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always told you that you were the guardian of
the water. Well, I told the chief too all about you, and he suggested
you for the baptism and said it would typify the union of the mountain
and desert. Sort of poetic thing, you know? The wedding of the mountain
and the plain—”

“Is weddin’s bein’ talked of?” Hinray D’Orsay interrupted. Hinray came
in through the kitchen door and dumped his bulging sack on the hearth.
Garen shrugged hopelessly.

“I have something else still to tell you, Dawn,” he said later, sitting
down to talk seriously, “some grand news. Your flower and bird material
can be made into a book; I’ve talked with some publishers who will bring
it out. What do you think? Could you work on it this winter, get enough
in shape to show them by spring?”

She got the leather binder from the shelf, its sides bulging with the
mounted cards and the typewritten sheets, and laid it in his lap. A
white envelope from Kansas City fell to the floor unnoticed. Garen
opened the book with delight. It was wonderful. She had done this in two
months! He was astounded with the book’s skill and beauty. Could he take
it with him? Would she trust him?

She would. “Providing—” They both burst into laughter at memory of
Dawn’s animosities. Then he must hear all about Gershwin. But the tale
was soon told. Oh, yes, Garen said, fellows like that were already
trying to buy up the dam reclamation facilities. Today there was no time
for anything but themselves, and this vast, silent, frozen world.
Twilight fell too early now, but in the morning they would snowshoe
across the divide to the Silverstake pine.

The Thanksgiving dinner would be late in the afternoon, and Damon would
watch the turkey roasting; Hinray would be on hand as assistant cook
too. They would have wild turkey, stuffed with piñons, red wine from
Pecos grapes, wild berry jelly, rice and canned vegetables. Mrs. Benty
would send them mince pies, and Dawn would make a plum pudding, which
she would deck with holly, and around which she would burn the brandy
Dad had been saving since last year. The McGuires had promised them a
large pumpkin from their fields and a sack of beans, and Hal James had
sent them a kid and two young pigs, scarcely larger than shoats, for
their winter larder. They were squealing and rooting now in a new corral
out back on the hillside.

Hinray had brought in for his contribution some wild honey, found in the
mountains, and promised them a haunch of venison too. That would be
good, for Dawn was tired of rabbit stew. They had had a lean cupboard
all fall. Provisions were hard to get up here, and prices in town had
gone up. Thinking of the good food they would have soon, Dawn did not
mind living on beans and cornbread, with an occasional chicken. They
hadn’t had butter in three weeks, and she’d used the last of the lard in
the biscuits and beans last night.

The bird must be stuffed tonight; so Damon tied on an apron and set
himself to the task of plucking out pinfeathers while Dawn and Garen
cracked piñon nuts for the stuffing and jokes for the sauce.

Fresh snow fell during the night, and when they left the cabin stoop the
next morning the little snowshoe cottontail flopped before them, leaving
its unguarded spoor clear as day. “It knows that it has nothing to be
afraid of,” said Dawn, “with that turkey and a haunch of venison
inside.”

It was no easy hike that Dawn took Garen on. He was fairly winded when
they reached the top of the hills above McGuire’s valley. Swiftly they
shot down the slopes, along the ridge from which Dawn had watched the
fire in the early fall. They reached the shore of Snow Lake, frozen now,
and climbed to a seat on a boulder.

“Do you know where we are?” Dawn asked. Would he ever forget?

It was the stone on which he had sat when he watched Dawn swim Piñon
across the lake so long ago last summer. The snow covered the scarred
bank now, but the dead trees stood exquisitely etched against the
drifts. Yet the world was glistening and white, lovely as a bride. Here
they had sat in the summer, and here Garen had carried Dawn when he
pulled her from the water on the night of the fire. They sat for a
while, resting, then made for the top of the ridge. The sun would be
going down early.

Indeed, it was already dropping in a fiery disk below the western
mountain. Hand in hand Garen and Dawn stood on the top of the ridge,
bathed in glowing color, that waxed and waned and reappeared again on
the slopes of the Coronado Peaks. As the rich afterglow crept up their
granite flanks the two snowshoers dug their staffs into the snow and
sped along the ridge, down the slopes, and into the deepening twilight
of the Canyon of the Cascada.

 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76514 ***