"There's the ranch, Annie," he told her. "I can't give that up."

"And you can't go back there till I let you," she a.s.serted, smiling.

"I'll get Lorry to talk to you about that. I'm thinking of making him an offer of partnership. He may want to set up for himself some day. I married young."

"I'd like to see the girl that's good enough for my Lorry."

Waring smiled. "Or good enough to call you 'mother.'"

"Jim, you're trying to plague me."

"But you will some day. There's always some girl. And Lorry is a pretty live boy. He isn't going to ride a lone trail forever."

Mrs. Adams affected an indifference that she by no means felt.

"You're a lot better to-day, Jim."

"And that's all your fault, Annie."

She left the room, closing the door slowly. In her own room at the end of the hall, she glanced at herself in the gla.s.s. A rosy face and dark-brown eyes smiled back at her.

But there were many things to attend to downstairs. She had been away more than a week. And there was evidence of her absence in every room in the place.

Chapter XXV

_The Little Fires_

With the coming of winter the Blue Mesa reclaimed its primordial solitude. Mount Baldy's smooth, glittering roundness topped a world that swept down in long waves of dark blue frosted with silver; the serried minarets of spruce and pine bulked close and sprinkled with snow.

Blanketed in white, the upland mesas lay like great, tideless lakes, silent and desolate from green-edged sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. The shadowy caverns of the timberlands, touched here and there with a ray of sunlight, thrilled to the creeping fingers of the cold. Tough fibers of the stiff-ranked pines parted with a crackling groan, as though unable to bear silently the reiterant stabbing of the frost needles. The frozen gum of the black spruce glowed like frosted topaz. The naked whips of the quaking asp were brittle traceries against the hard blue of the sky.

Below the rounded shoulders of the peaks ran an incessant whispering as thin swirls of powdered snow spun down the wind and sifted through the moving branches below.

The tawny lynx and the mist-gray mountain lion hunted along snow-banked ranger trails. The blue grouse sat stiff and close to the tree-trunk, while gray squirrels with quaintly tufted ears peered curiously at sinuous forms that nosed from side to side of the hidden trail below.

The two cabins of the Blue Mesa, hooded in white, thrust their lean stovepipes skyward through two feet of snow. The corrals were shallow fortifications, banked breast-high. The silence seemed not the silence of slumber, but that of a tense waiting, as though the whole winter world yearned for the warmth of spring.

No creak of saddle or plod of hoof broke the bleak stillness, save when some wandering Apache hunted the wild turkey or the deer, knowing that winter had locked the trails to his ancient heritage; that the white man's law of boundaries was void until the snows were thin upon the highest peaks.

Thirty miles north of this white isolation the low country glowed in a sun that made golden the far b.u.t.tes and sparkled on the clay-red waters of the Little Colorado. Four thousand feet below the hills cattle drifted across the open lands.

Across the ranges, to the south, the barren sands lay shimmering in a blur of summer heat waves; the winter desert, beautiful in its golden lights and purple, changing shadows. And in that Southern desert, where the old Apache Trail melts into the made roads of ranchland and town, Bronson toiled at his writing. And Dorothy, less slender, more sprightly, growing stronger in the clean, clear air and the sun, dreamed of her "ranger man" and the blue hills of her autumn wonderland.

With the warmth of summer around her, the lizards on the rocks, and the chaparral still green, she could hardly realize that the Blue Mesa could be desolate, white, and cold. As yet she had not lived long enough in the desert to love it as she loved the wooded hills, where to her each tree was a companion and each whisper of the wind a song.

She often wondered what Lorry was doing, and whether Bondsman would come to visit her when they returned to their cabin on the mesa. She often recalled, with a kind of happy wonderment, Bondsman's singular visit and how he had left suddenly one morning, heedless of her coaxing. The big Airedale had appeared in Jason the day after Bud Shoop had returned from Criswell. That Bondsman should know, miles from the town, that his master had returned was a mystery to her. She had read of such happenings; her father had written of them. But to know them for the very truth! That was, indeed, the magic, and her mountains were towering citadels of the true Romance.

Long before Bronson ventured to return to his mountain camp, Lorry was riding the hill trails again as spring loosened the upland snows and filled the canons and arroyos with a red turbulence of waters bearing driftwood and dead leaves. With a companion ranger he mended trail and rode along the telephone lines, searching for sagging wires; made notes of fresh down timber and the effect of the snow-fed torrents on the major trails.

Each day the air grew warmer. Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty tangle of last season's mesa gra.s.ses. Imperceptibly the dull-hued mesas became fresh carpeted with green across which the wind bore a subtly soft fragrance of sun-warmed spruce and pine.

To Lorry the coming of the Bronsons was like the return of old friends.

Although he had known them but a short summer season, isolation had brought them all close together. Their reunion was celebrated with an old-fashioned dinner of roast beef and potatoes, hot biscuit and honey, an apple pie that would have made a New England farmer dream of his ancestors, and the inevitable coffee of the high country.

And Dorothy had so much to tell him of the wonderful winter desert; the old Mexican who looked after their horses, and his wife who cooked for them. Of sunshine and sandstorms, the ruins of ancient pueblos in which they discovered fragments of pottery, arrowheads, beads, and trinkets, of the lean, bronzed cowboys of the South, of the cattle and sheep, until in her enthusiasm she forgot that Lorry had always known of these things. And Lorry, gravely attentive, listened without interrupting her until she asked why he was so silent.

"Because I'm right happy, miss, to see you lookin' so spry and pretty.

I'm thinkin' Arizona has been kind of a heaven for you."

"And you?" she queried, laughing.

"Well, it wasn't the heat that would make me call it what it was up here last winter. I rode up once while you was gone. Gray Leg could just make it to the cabin. It wasn't so bad in the timber. But comin' across the mesa the cinchas sure sc.r.a.ped snow."

"Right here on our mesa?"

"Right here, miss. From the edge of the timber over there to this side it was four feet deep on the level."

"And now," she said, gesturing toward the wavering gra.s.ses. "But why did you risk it?"

Lorry laughed. He had not considered it a risk. "You remember that book you lent me. Well, I left it in my cabin. There was one piece that kep'

botherin' me. I couldn't recollect the last part about those 'Little Fires.' I was plumb worried tryin' to remember them verses. When I got it, I sure learned that piece from the jump to the finish."

"The 'Little Fires'? I'm glad you like it. I do.

"'From East to West they're burning in tower and forge and home, And on beyond the outlands, across the ocean foam; On mountain crest and mesa, on land and sea and height, The little fires along the trail that twinkle down the night.'

"And about the sheep-herder; do you remember how--

"'The Andalusian herder rolls a smoke and points the way, As he murmurs, "Caliente," "San Clemente," "Santa Fe,"

Till the very names are music, waking memoried desires, And we turn and foot it down the trail to find the little fires.

Adventuring! Adventuring! And, oh, the sights to see!

And little fires along the trail that wink at you and me.'"

"That's it! But I couldn't say it like that. But I know some of them little fires."

"We must make one some day. Won't it be fun!"

"It sure is when a fella ain't hustlin' to get grub. That poem sounds better after grub, at night, when the stars are shinin' and the horses grazin' and mebby the pack-horse bell jinglin' 'way off somewhere. Then one of them little fires is sure friendly."

"Have you been reading this winter?"

"Oh, some. Mostly forestry and about the war. Bud was tellin' me to read up on forestry. He's goin' to put me over west--and a bigger job this summer."

"You mean--to stay?"

"About as much as I stay anywhere."