ds, seemed very remote to
the ranger, as he stood in his door that night and watched the sparkle of
Swenson's camp-fire through the trees. With the realization that there
waited a brave girl of the type that loves single-heartedly, ready to
sacrifice everything to the welfare of her idealized subject, he felt
unworthy, selfish, vain.

"If I should fall sick she would insist on nursing me. For her sake I must
give Swenson the most rigid orders not to allow her--no matter what
happens--to approach. I will not have her touched by this thing."

Beside the blaze Lee and her mother sat for the most part in silence, with
nothing to do but to wait the issue of the struggle going on in the cabin,
so near and yet so inaccessible to their will. It was as if a magic wall,
crystal-clear yet impenetrable, shut them away from the man whose quiet
heroism was the subject of their constant thought.

To the girl this ride up into her lover's world had been both exalting and
awesome--not merely because the rough and precipitous road took her closer
to her lover while placing her farther from medical aid, but also because
it was so vast a world, so unpeopled and so beautiful.

It was marvellous, as the dusk fell and the air nipped keen, to see how
Lize Wetherford renewed her youth. The excitement seemed to have given her
a fresh hold on life. She was wearied but by no means weakened by her
ride, and ate heartily of the rude fare which Swenson set before her.
"This is what I needed," she exultantly said; "the open air and these
trout. I feel ten years younger already. Many's the night I've camped on
the range with your father with nothing but a purp-tent to cover us both,
and the wolves howling round us. I'd feel pretty fairly gay if it weren't
for Ross over there in that cabin playin' nurse and cook all by his
lonesomeness."

Lee expressed a deep satisfaction from the fact of their nearness. "If he
is ill we can help him," she reiterated.

She had put behind her all the doubt and fear which his abrupt desertion
of her had caused, and, though he had not been able to speak a word to
her, his self-sacrifice had made amends. She excused it all as part of his
anxious care. Whatever the mood of that other day had been, it had given
way to one that was lofty and deeply altruistic. Her one anxiety now was
born of a deepening sense of his danger, but against this she bent the
full strength of her will. "He shall not die," she declared beneath h