the dazzling white
background.

And she thrilled to the crunch of thin crust underfoot which
yesterday's thaw and last night's freeze had formed, the whip of the
dry air in her face, the exhilaration of the long, swift dash as she
glided from the crest of some ridge, a silent, graceful creature, into
the hollow beyond. Her body bent a little forward, her snow-shoe pole
horizontal as a tight rope walker holds his balancing rod, the white
world slid away beneath her, little sinks or humps in the apparent
smoothness of the snow demanding the sudden leap which shot the blood
tingling through the eager body. For the light skis with their three
coats of shellac carried her down the steeper slopes with the wild
speed of a bird skimming the winter whitened earth.

This first day she took an old favourite way which led her up a gradual
slope straight southward until at last she paused, breathing deeply,
upon the crest. Far behind her she could see the smoke of the ranch
house rising from a clump of cedars; straight ahead the black line of
the river. And now, balancing a moment, gripping her pole firmly,
settling her feet securely in the ski-straps, she shot downward, taking
the steep dip which would lead after a little into a long curve and so
bring her flashing through the trees down to the river three miles away.

Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks glowing, her body warm with the
sun's heat and the leaping blood within her, when she straightened up
and touching the end of her pole lightly against the snow came to a
stop near the river. It was swollen and black, a mighty, shouting
thing, the only thing about her whose voice had not been stilled by the
snow.

Her eyes turning found close at hand the first tracks she had seen this
morning, fresh tracks of a big rabbit.

"I must have frightened him," she thought. "He's gone on upstream."

She turned upstream as the rabbit had done, noiselessly following his
trail. And, turned eastward by a rabbit's track, she followed
unconsciously, unsuspectingly, the imperious bidding of her fate. Her
own life, the lives of two men would have been widely different had
Wanda Leland turned westward instead of eastward this morning.

Already she was a mile above the bridge across which the road ran to
the Bar L-M. From where she was a stranger might not suppose that man
or horse could find a place to cross in many times that distance; for
here the river banks were steep cliffs, ne