to Job to
be thus protecting a girl! He felt a queer interest in her; he did not
know what it was. He took her arm a little later to help her over the
rocks, down the hill. He lingered, in a bashful way, at the spring at
the foot of the path to see that she got to the cabin door safely,
then went around by the main road home, so slowly and so thoughtfully
that the moon was high when Shot barked a response to Carlo's bark as
he entered the gate.

That was not the last time he saw Jane Reed. A something of which he
had never heard and of which he was barely conscious drew him to her.
That autumn he often walked home from school with her. When the snows
came and the logging sleds were passing every day loaded for Andrew
Malden's mill, he always managed to find Jane at Sugar Pine Hill at
all odd sorts of hours and give her a ride to the mill on the top of
the logs, and walk back with her, as he let the horses tug the old
sled slowly up the mountain. The only rival he had was Dan, his
pretended friend but certain enemy.

* * * * *

It was at the time of the big snow. Indian Bill, the rheumatic old
native trapper whose family had perished at the massacre of the
Yosemite some years before, and who ever since had lived in a little
cabin on the edge of the Gulch, said it was the biggest in two hundred
moons.

When Job, shivering and chattering, looked out of the little, narrow,
cheerless upstairs room which he called his own, he found himself
apparently in the first story. He gazed on the endless drifts of snow
that rolled away in a silent sea over barn and fences, with only the
shaggy, white-bearded pines shaking their faces at him above the
limitless white. The little ravine back of the house, where the
milk-house stood, had leveled up to the rest of the world, the chicken
corral was missing, and only the loft of the old barn rose above the
snowy waves.

What a busy day that was of shoveling tunnels, and, with the full
force of the mill men and all the logging teams, breaking a path up
the road to the logging camp! By night the whole country round was
out. Dan was there riding the leader, and reaching out to get
snowballs from the high bank to throw at Jane, who had clambered up
on the vantage point of an old shed and was watching the queer
procession, with its shouts and rattle of bells and chains, push its
way up the road.

That night old Andy Malden gave a treat to all the hands at t