nny little
squirrel-tailed pack rats, and me." She reached for her brand new ax,
and picking her way from stone to stone, crossed the creek, and
attacked a sagging panel.

Patty Sinclair was no hot-house flower, and the hand that gripped the
ax was strong and brown and capable. Back home she had been known to
the society reporters as "an out-door girl," by which it was
understood that rather than afternoon auction at henfests, she
affected tennis, golf, swimming, and cross-country riding. She could
saddle her own horse, and paddle a canoe for hours on end. Even the ax
was no stranger to her hand, for upon rare occasions when her father
had returned during the summer months from his everlasting
prospecting, he had taken her to camp in the mountains, and there from
the quiet visionary whom she loved more than he ever knew, she learned
the ax, and the compass, and a hundred tricks of camp lore that were
to stand her well in hand. Partly inherited, partly acquired through
association with her father upon those never-to-be-forgotten
pilgrimages to the shrine of nature, her love of the vast solitudes
shone from her uplifted eyes as she stood for a moment, ax in hand,
and let her gaze travel slowly from the sun-gilded peaks of the
mountains, down their darkening sides, to the dusk-enshrouded reaches
of her valley. "He used to watch the sun go down, and he never wearied
at the wonder of it," she breathed, softly. "And then, as the darkness
deepened and the bull-bats came wheeling overhead, and the
whip-poor-wills began calling from the thickets, he would light his
pipe, and I would cuddle up close to him, and the firelight would grow
redder and brighter and the soft warm dark would grow blacker. The
pine trees would lose their shapes and blend into the formless night
and mysterious shadow shapes would dance to the flicker of the little
flames. It was then he would talk of the things he loved; of quartz,
and drift, and the mother lode; of storms, and bears, and the scent of
pines; of reeking craters, parched deserts, ice-locked barrens, and
the wind-lashed waters of lakes. 'And some day, little daughter,' he
would say, 'some day you are going with daddy and see all these things
for yourself--things whose grandeur you have never dreamed. It won't
be long, now--I'm on the right track at last--only till I've made my
strike.' Always--'it won't be long now.' Always--'I'm on the right
track, at last.' Always--'just ahead is the strik