Only it is so far."

"Oh, the ride is nothing. I don't like to think of your being here
alone."

"I'm not afraid. But we shall be glad to see you just the same."

And in appreciation of her smile he removed his hat and rode away with
bared head.

The young ranger was highly exalted by this visit, and he was also
greatly disturbed, for the more he thought of that warning letter and
the conditions which gave rise to it, the more menacing it became. It
was all of a piece with the tone and character of the Shellfish gang,
for this remote valley had long borne an evil reputation, and Watson and
Kitsong had been its dominating spirits for more than twenty years and
deeply resented Kauffman's settlement in the canyon.

"It would be just like old Kit to take the law into his own hands," the
ranger admitted to himself. "And the writing in that letter looked to me
like Mrs. Abe Kitsong's."

Instead of going up to the Heart Lake sheep-camp, as he had planned to
do, he turned back to his station, moved by a desire to keep as near the
girl as his duties would permit. "For the next few days I'd better be
within call," he decided. "They may decide to arrest her--and if they
do, she'll need me."

He went about his evening meal like a man under the influence of a drug,
and when he sat down to his typewriter his mind was so completely filled
with visions of his entrancing neighbor that he could not successfully
cast up a column of figures. He lit his pipe for a diversion, but under
the spell of the smoke his recollection of just how she looked, how she
spoke, how she smiled (that sad, half-lighting of her face) set all his
nerves atingle. He grew restless.

"What's the matter with me?" he asked himself, sharply, but dared not
answer his own question. He knew his malady. His unrest was that of the
lover. Thereafter he gave himself up to the quiet joy of reviewing each
word she had uttered, and in doing so came to the conclusion that she
was in the mountains not so much for the cure of her lungs or throat as
to heal the hurt of some injustice. What it was he could not imagine,
but he believed that she was getting over it. "As she gets over it
she'll find life on the Shellfish intolerable and she'll go away," he
reasoned, and the thought of her going made his country lonesome, empty,
and of no account.

"I wish she wouldn't go about barefoot," he added, with a tinge of
jealousy. "And she mustn't let any of the Shellfish gang see