resented this almost as much as if it were the question of an
eavesdropper; but she answered: "Yes; he wanted to know how my mother
was."

She turned as she reached the street and looked up toward the glorious
purpling deeps from which the ranger's voice had come, and the thought
that he was the sole guardian of those dark forests and shining
streams--that his way led among those towering peaks and lone canons--made
of him something altogether admirable.

That night her loneliness, her sense of weakness, carried her to bed with
tears of despair in her eyes. Lize had insisted on going back to her work
looking like one stricken with death, yet so rebellious that her daughter
could do nothing with her; and in the nature of fate the day's business
had been greater than ever, so that they had all been forced to work like
slaves to feed the flood of custom. And Lize herself still kept her vigil
in her chair above her gold.

Closing her mind to the town and all it meant to her, the girl tried to
follow, in imagination, the ranger treading his far, high trails. She
recalled his voice, so cultivated, so rich of inflection, with dangerous
tenderness. It had come down to her from those lofty parapets like that of
a friend, laden with something sweeter than sympathy, more alluring than
song.

The thought of some time going up to the high country where he dwelt came
to her most insistently, and she permitted herself to dream of long days
of companionship with him, of riding through sunlit aisles of forest with
him, of cooking for him at the cabin--what time her mother grew strong
once more--and these dreams bred in her heart a wistful ache, a hungry
need which made her pillow a place of mingled ecstasy and pain.

VII

THE POACHERS

One morning, as he topped the rise between the sawmill and his own
station, Cavanagh heard two rifle-shots in quick succession snapping
across the high peak on his left. Bringing his horse to a stand, he
unslung his field-glasses, and slowly and minutely swept the tawny slopes
of Sheep Mountain from which the forbidden sounds seemed to come.

"A herder shooting coyotes," was his first thought; then remembering that
there were no camps in that direction, and that a flock of mountain-sheep
(which he had been guarding carefully) habitually fed round that grassy
peak, his mind changed. "I wonder if those fellows are after those sheep?"
he mused, as he angled down the slope. "I reckon it's up