n she made.

Ewing brought his drawing to the camp and spent the mornings in work. He
had finished his series for the _Knickerbocker_ during the winter, and
these drawings, with the illustrations for the story previously made,
had brought him enough to discharge the Teevan debt. He had reported
this transaction significantly to Mrs. Laithe, and was now busy on
pictures for another story for the _Knickerbocker_.

"Only a little longer," he said, with a meaning she could not fathom,
and he returned to his work with a singular absorption. Not even Ben
could distract him when he sauntered up for his daily criticism. Ben was
respectful to the drawings after he saw the checks they brought, but his
summing up of the purchaser's acumen never varied.

"Well, well--fools and their money! The idee of payin' out cash for a
thing that looks as much like Red Phinney as that there does!"

When work was done for the day Ewing would turn to Mrs. Laithe with a
smile of release, and they would stray along some dim trail or off into
pathless, shaded silences of the wood, lingering in grassy mountain
meadows, or skirting the base of bleak crags where streaks of snow in
shadow still clung to the gray walls. She was conscious then of a tumult
throbbing wonderfully beneath the surface of their companionship--a
tumult of life aching for release. In little chance moments of silence
this rumbled ominously, leaving her fearful, but curiously resigned,
moved to blind flight, yet chained and submissive as were the hills
themselves.

One afternoon they sought their canyon of delayed winter after many days'
neglect of it. They wondered if spring might not have reached even that
secret recess at last. They left the trail that skirted the edge and
descended a rocky way that Ewing found, emerging at last through a
fringe of the stunted cedars into the gloom of the depths.

At first glance this last stronghold of winter seemed to have remained
impregnable. Snow lay deep along the bottom, enormous stalactites of ice
depended from overhanging ledges, and the stream itself appeared to be
still only a riven glacier. But, listening intently, they heard a steady
liquid murmur, the very music of spring come at last to sing the gorge
awake. As they stood, listening, there was a shivering crash; one of the
huge icicles had dropped, shattering on a lower ledge and raining its
fragments into the soft snowbed below.

"It's the very last of winter," said Ewing