deepened in her cheeks. He had a way of taking
in his stride the barriers between them, but it was impossible for her
to feel offended at this cheery, vigorous young fellow with the winning
smile and the firm-set jaw. She liked the warmth in his honest brown
eyes. She liked the play of muscular grace beneath his well-fitting
clothes. The sinuous ease of his lean, wide-shouldered body stirred
faintly some primitive instinct in her maiden heart. Sheba did not know,
as her resilient muscles carried her forward joyfully, that she was
answering the call of youth to youth.

Gordon respected her shyness and moved warily to establish his contact.
He let the talk drift to impersonal topics as they picked their way out
from the town along the mossy trail. The ground was spongy with water.
On either side of them ferns and brakes grew lush. Sheba took the porous
path with a step elastic. To the young man following she seemed a
miracle of supple lightness.

The trail tilted up from the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw.
A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by
ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered
the trail with sunlight and shadow.

They were ascending steadily now along a pathway almost too indistinct
to follow. The air was aromatic with pine from a grove that came
straggling down the side of a gulch to the brook.

"Do you know, I have a queer feeling that I've seen all this before,"
the Irish girl said. "Of course I haven't--unless it was in my dreams.
Naturally I've thought about Alaska a great deal because my father lived
here."

"I didn't know that."

"Yes. He came in with the Klondike stampeders." She added quietly: "He
died on Bonanza Creek two years later."

"Was he a miner?"

"Not until he came North. He had an interest in a claim. It later turned
out worthless."

A bit of stiff climbing brought them to a boulder field back of which
rose a mountain ridge.

"We've got off the trail somehow," Elliot said. "But I don't suppose it
matters. If we keep going we're bound to come to the waterfall."

Beyond the boulder field the ridge rose sharply. Gordon looked a little
dubiously at Sheba.

"Are you a good climber?"

As she stood in the sunpour, her cheeks flushed with exercise, he could
see that her spirit courted adventure.

"I'm sure I must be," she answered with a smile adorable. "I believe I
could do the Matterhorn to-day."

Well up