day in an ever-widening circle around the spot
where she had lost the trail, with her heart almost still, and her
eyes straining at every tree as it came within her vision. Where?
Where? Would there be no more blazes, no more broken limbs, no more
prints of hoofs on the mossy earth? Had she left the trail farther
back than she had thought? And would she wander over all the vast
bosom of the mountain until she fell from the saddle, and knew no
more?

It was a real peril, and one that might have had a tragic termination
as easily as a happy one,--more easily, indeed, if she had lost her
head. But something strong within her kept her senses keen; and
suddenly she broke out in a cry of joy and triumph that went echoing
down the forest aisles. There, on a patriarchal pine, though almost
obliterated by time and weather, was the blaze in the bark that told
her the trail ran at the base of that solid trunk. She halted Tuesday
there--and faced a new difficulty: in her many circlings she had lost
the general direction in which she had been riding. The trail was
under her horse's hoofs; but which way should she go? There appeared
to be no ascent the one way or the other, and no slope on either
side.

She solved the problem by following the trail regardless of direction
until she was able to discover in the black mold the fresh print of a
horse's hoof--an unshod hoof this was, and the print certainly no
older than yesterday. Without serious misgivings now, she rode on, and
in a few minutes the trail mounted again with a sharpness sufficient
to remove the last of her doubts.

Well, she was a woodsman now, and would fear no more. But she took the
precaution to banish all thoughts excepting those necessary to the
task in hand. The woods themselves offered countless temptations to
distraction. They were alive. Grouse moved among the branches of the
trees; small birds of a very silent habit fluttered across the trail;
and once a deer slipped away through a dim and leafy avenue. In moist
places flowers of tender hues still bloomed as if to shame the autumn
browns of the underbrush. And then she emerged from the soft shades of
the green woods into one of the most melancholy of mountain places, a
great patch of burnt timber. For surely half an hour she rode through
a veritable cemetery of pines, among multitudes of tall straight
shafts from which the flames had licked the foliage and stripped the
limbs, and from which the rains and sno