all
and stalwart, filled with vigorous strength in repose like the straight
valiant cedars. His eyes were black and piercing, as keen as those of
the hawk which, circling in the deeper sky, had seen him when he moved;
he, too, had seen the hawk. All about him was a lustily masculine phase
of the world, giant trees dominating giant slopes, rugged boulders
upheaved, iron cliffs defying time and battling the years; he, like
them, was virile, his sex clothing him magnificently. He had not shaved
for three days and yet, instead of looking untidy, was but clothed in
the greater vitality. While his eyes sped swiftly hither and thither,
now busied with wide groupings, now catching small details, his face was
impassive. In keeping both with his own magnificent physique and the
rugged note of the forest, it was the face of a man who had defied and
battled.

Beyond the lake a peak upthrust its rocky front into the sky. It frowned
across the ridges, darkened by the shadows which its own irregularities
cast athwart its massive features. But the sun, slowly as it rolled,
sought out those shadows; they moved, crept to other hiding-places, and
the golden light coaxed a subdued, soft gentleness across the massive
boulders. This, too, the man saw.

He stood looking out across the ridges and so to the final bulwark
against the sky still white with last December. He sought landmarks and
measured distance, not in miles but in hours. Then he glanced briefly at
the sun. But now, before starting on again, he turned from the more
distant landscape and, remembering the immediate scene about him as he
had viewed it last, drowsing in the Indian summer of last October, he
noted everywhere the handiwork of young June. The eyes which had been
keen and alert filled suddenly with a shining brightness.

The springtime, eternally youthful coquette, had come with a great
outward display of timidity and shyness into the sternly solemn forest
land of the high Sierra. To the last fine detail and exquisite touch
was she, more here than elsewhere, softly, prettily, daintily feminine,
her light heart idly set on wooing from its calm and abstracted
aloofness this region of granite and lava, of rugged chasms and august
ancient trees. She filled the air with fragrances, lightly shaken; she
scattered bright fragile flowers to brighten the earth and clear
bird-notes to sparkle through the air. Hesitant always in the seeming,
she came with that shy step of hers to