Thus, as the days went by and they were frequently alone together, Martin Leland being often away on the business upon which he and Arthur Shandon had entered with Sledge Hume, the two women were not lonely.

Mrs. Leland accompanied Wanda everywhere to take pictures showing the girl climbing for a lofty bird nest, clinging to the cliffs at the upper end of the valley, crouching hidden among the bushes waiting for a rabbit to hop into the picture, even on the deer "hunt" they had already begun.

So the late summer slipped by more swiftly in its smooth channel than ever, the leaves in the orchard yellowed with the fall, the light green tips upon the fir branches turned dark green, the cattle were driven down to the lower valleys along the creeks, and the first snows of winter dimmed the shortening days.

With the pa.s.sing of the summer, Garth Conway came again to be a frequent visitor at the Echo Creek ranch house. Since the letter from Wayne Shandon in New York he had had but one communication from the man who now owned the Bar L-M. It had been characteristically short, written in London.

"I am leaving the destiny of the cows In your competent hands," Wayne wrote. "I am legally giving you a power of attorney. This authorises you to run the outfit as you judge best. Make what sales you want to to pay the boys and yourself. Bank the money or re-invest for improvements and more cattle. The Lord knows when I'll come back . . .

provided the Devil has told Him."

And then, in a postscript, hastily scribbled he had added,

"I have made my will . . . Imagine me making a will! . . . and if I don't come back at all the outfit is yours. Love to the Lelands."

And then, as a second afterthought, he had scrawled at the top of the note.

"A joke on you in case I shouldn't come back, Garth! I want you to sell some cows and send me another two thousand. But I promise not to do it again."

Garth told his news in the living room where the family had been listening to the music of Wanda's lilting young voice with her mother's piano accompaniment when he came in. Mrs. Leland's smiling face grew clouded and distressed and her eyes turned involuntarily to her husband. Martin Leland sprang to his feet in sudden wrath.

"h.e.l.l's bells!" he shouted angrily. "Two sacrifice sales in less than a year! Four thousand dollars! And what has he done with it? Got drunk, chucked it away across race courses and card tables . . . Would to G.o.d I had done what it was my duty to do, that . . ."

"Martin!" cried Mrs. Leland. "Martin, dear!"

He stopped abruptly and sank back into his chair. For a little while there was silence, heavy and painful. Wanda's eyes grew misty. Not once since that day in the spring had she been disloyal to Red Reckless, whom she had known in his boyhood, who had fought her early battles for her, who had been the plumed knight of her early girlhood.

She told herself now that he had not come back because he could not bear to return yet to the place where he and his brother had spent so many happy days together, that if he was living wildly now, scurrying up and down the world and flinging away his inheritance, it was because he had felt his brother's loss far more than he had let them know, that he was going his pace swiftly to forget what lay behind. And again there rose in her heart the mute prayer that he might come back and be a man and show them all that they had not judged him fairly.

Garth glanced swiftly at the faces of these three people who had heard his news with such varied emotions, and went on to break the silence none of them had noticed.

"Matters are going rather well on the range," he said quietly. "I sold a hundred head at an average of ninety-seven dollars last week and was able to bank the entire nine thousand, seven hundred. Maybe," with a quick smile, "it will be just as well if he doesn't come back in a hurry."

"Oh," cried Wanda impulsively. "That is ungenerous of you! After Wayne says that he is leaving everything to you in his will, too!"

"I don't mean to be ungenerous or yet ungrateful," replied Garth a bit stiffly, flushing under the girl's reproachful eyes. "I only meant . . ."

"Wanda," said her father sharply, "you should be ashamed of yourself!

Garth has not been ungenerous and you have. And he is right. It would be the best thing for Wayne himself as well as for the range if he doesn't come back for a long time. Garth is working hard for the interests of both. And if any one should be grateful to the man who is running his range for him it is that young spendthrift. You are not thinking, Wanda."

The girl bit her lip and turned away. And she did not make the apology her father expected. Dimly it seemed to her that they were all over ready, over eager to condemn the man whose one crime had been mere heedlessness, who was surely hurting no one but himself, but who offended their ideas in refusing to take life seriously and bear the common burden of responsibility.

"After all," said Mrs. Leland a little hurriedly, "Wayne is only a boy.

Oh, he's a man in years, of course, but then some people are fortunate enough to carry their youth with them a long time before it drops off.

And," with a smile, "he says he won't do it again!"

Martin Leland smoked his two pipefuls of strong tobacco and then departed to attend to some correspondence. Mrs. Leland soon slipped away to her book and easy chair and cushions in a corner. Until ten o'clock Wanda and Garth bent together over a big sc.r.a.p book containing the latest additions to the home life of the wild.

Soon afterward even Garth Conway's visits to the Leland home stopped.

November came with many dark days and an occasional flurry of snow.

The ground might at any time now be covered, the pa.s.ses choked with the soft drifts, the valleys hidden. The cattle must be moved down the mountains to the foothills where each year they wintered. The Bar L-M buildings were closed, the heavy wooden shutters put up, the corrals deserted until thaw time. Conway with his men and cattle would not come again until springtime came with them.

And over the Echo Creek ranch the silence of the summer pa.s.sed into the deeper silence of winter. Leland's cattle and men had gone already to his winter range; there was no one at home excepting Mrs. Leland, Wanda, Julia, and Jim who remained to do what little work there was to be done during the term of "hibernating." Martin's interests were too big for him to stay here had he desired to do so; his family would not see him again for the two months or so during which he remained outside.

It was not the first year that the Echo Creek house was not shuttered and closed for the winter. Mrs. Leland had sometimes gone with her husband to spend the storm swept months of the year either at one of his other ranches or in the city, and sometimes she had stayed here.

This winter she had no particular desire to leave her comfortable home for the makeshift of a San Francisco hotel and Wanda was eager to stay.

"You'll be cooped up within ten days like shipwrecks on a raft," Martin Leland said when he managed to make a trip back to the ranch in December. "We're in for a hard winter. I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get in again or you get out before well on into February or March."

He had made a flying trip between storms, hastening from El Toyon to White Rock over the mail route, coming in from White Rock through the still open pa.s.s through the mountains. His one object in coming had been to try to induce his women folk to leave Echo Creek. And the same day, seeing the threat of bad weather, he went out again, on skis and alone.

There were busy days for all four who remained at the ranch house in making preparations for idle, comfortable days to follow. Jim brought vast quant.i.ties of wood from the bas.e.m.e.nt, piling it high in the corner of the living room where it would be convenient for feeding the deep throated fireplace whose rocks would stay warm all night, hot all day, for many weeks. From the yard he brought more wood, piling it in the bas.e.m.e.nt until there were only narrow pa.s.sageways between the slabs and logs and the finer split stove wood. Julia superintended the placing of her kitchen supplies, secreted those little delicacies which she would require at Christmas time, arranged her canned goods and perpetually fussed and rearranged in her storeroom. Meanwhile Mrs.

Leland and Wanda were everywhere at once, overseeing the moving of beds, the shifting of furniture, the making cosy of the home against the siege. And then, howling and shrieking, with deep voice shouting across the pine forests, the winter came in earnest.

Martin Leland had read the signs aright; it was to be a hard winter.

There came a wind storm that lasted without cessation for three days; the branches of the cedars about the house tossed like long arms grappling with an unseen foe; here and there a dead limb was wrenched from a tree trunk and hurled far out to be buried in the snow which began to fall in small, hard flakes almost congealed to hail. Then, the three days gone, the wind died down suddenly, the flakes grew larger, softer, the snow clung tenaciously to the trees and fences and eaves of house and stable. Jim in arctic shoes and mittens, his ears lost under the flaps of his cap, having sighed and bestirred himself from his snug comfort by Julia's stove, got his shovel and went up on the housetop.

While the bleak, chill days rushed by Wanda prepared happily for the fine weather which would come, when the sun reflected back from many feet of fluffy snow would warm the air, when in the high, dry alt.i.tudes the sparkling, Christma.s.sy world would become a rarely beautiful thing, when she could leave the house and penetrate deep into a solitude which was as different from the solitude of the summer forestland as day is from night. She brought down from the attic her own favourite pair of skis and saw that they were fit. The long slender bits of pine, light and graceful with their running grooves glistening, their turned up ends like Turks' slippers, she stood on end in the living room while she gave them a new coat of white sh.e.l.lac. Her snowshoe pole she tested, making sure that it had sustained no injury during its long banishment to the dark places of the attic, and that it could be trusted in the work she would call upon it to do. She gathered the winter out-door things which she had not used for two years, the white sweater that clung close to her slim, pliant body; the white ta.s.seled hat, mitts, leggins, white bloomers. And then, when a blue and white, laughing day came, and the air was clear and warm, the branches of the trees sagging under their diamond p.r.i.c.ked festoons of snow, she left the house, now in truth the White Huntress.

Camera and field gla.s.ses went with her; for lunch a bit of jerked beef and a piece of hard chocolate. For to-day she began her winter work.

Again she was hunting. The forests as she slipped through them were very still and seemed void of all the life that had swarmed here until the snows came. But she would see snow birds, she might find a coyote or a big snow-shoe rabbit. She would take pictures, too, such wintry pictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace of winter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown into strange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps the sweep of a stream seeming ink black against the dazzling white background.

And she thrilled to the crunch of thin crust underfoot which yesterday's thaw and last night's freeze had formed, the whip of the dry air in her face, the exhilaration of the long, swift dash as she glided from the crest of some ridge, a silent, graceful creature, into the hollow beyond. Her body bent a little forward, her snow-shoe pole horizontal as a tight rope walker holds his balancing rod, the white world slid away beneath her, little sinks or humps in the apparent smoothness of the snow demanding the sudden leap which shot the blood tingling through the eager body. For the light skis with their three coats of sh.e.l.lac carried her down the steeper slopes with the wild speed of a bird skimming the winter whitened earth.

This first day she took an old favourite way which led her up a gradual slope straight southward until at last she paused, breathing deeply, upon the crest. Far behind her she could see the smoke of the ranch house rising from a clump of cedars; straight ahead the black line of the river. And now, balancing a moment, gripping her pole firmly, settling her feet securely in the ski-straps, she shot downward, taking the steep dip which would lead after a little into a long curve and so bring her flashing through the trees down to the river three miles away.

Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks glowing, her body warm with the sun's heat and the leaping blood within her, when she straightened up and touching the end of her pole lightly against the snow came to a stop near the river. It was swollen and black, a mighty, shouting thing, the only thing about her whose voice had not been stilled by the snow.

Her eyes turning found close at hand the first tracks she had seen this morning, fresh tracks of a big rabbit.

"I must have frightened him," she thought. "He's gone on upstream."

She turned upstream as the rabbit had done, noiselessly following his trail. And, turned eastward by a rabbit's track, she followed unconsciously, unsuspectingly, the imperious bidding of her fate. Her own life, the lives of two men would have been widely different had Wanda Leland turned westward instead of eastward this morning.

Already she was a mile above the bridge across which the road ran to the Bar L-M. From where she was a stranger might not suppose that man or horse could find a place to cross in many times that distance; for here the river banks were steep cliffs, never lower than ten feet, rising often abruptly to thirty. Between them the water raged, thundering over falls, leaping into deep pools where the sucking eddies were never still.

And as she moved on upstream, further yet from the bridge, the rocky banks grew steeper, drew nearer to each other, until suddenly the plunging river was lost to her, its thunder m.u.f.fled. Wanda could see a thick mat of snow from a great, flat topped rock on the far side curving downward, inward, as if from the eaves of a house, the long icicles like sharp teeth set in a monster's gaping jaw.

Close along the edge of the cliffs the course of the fleeing rabbit led, while Wanda's skis left their parallel smooth tracks in a straight line a score of feet back from the steep bank. She slipped silently through a clump of firs, peered around the branches bent down by the heavy snow, and saw the snow-shoe rabbit where he had stopped for a moment. He was a big fellow, the biggest she had ever seen, crouching low, his round eyes bright and suspicious, as he trusted to his colour to protect him. She brought her camera swiftly out of its case.

"There's a chance to get him, after all," she thought eagerly. "It won't be much of a picture perhaps . . . just a white blur against a white background . . ."

The camera clicked just as the rabbit leaped forward; she thought she had caught him against the dark background of a fir from which much of the snow had fallen. Then, just in front of the frightened animal a little branch of a small pine, suddenly released of its weight of snow, whipped up; a new terror came into the creature's panic stricken breast; he stopped sharply, swerved, lost his head as one of his rattle brained species is likely to do, ran directly toward the girl, swerved again and running straight toward the river, essayed the impossible and met destruction. He leaped far out across the water, attempting a jump that none of his kind could have made safely, and fell short. The furry body described a great valiant arc, shot upward for one flashing second, dropped out of sight.

"Oh, I am so sorry," cried the girl contritely. "You poor little thing."

The woodland tragedy moved her strangely, for she felt that, innocently enough, she had caused it. She moved closer to see if by a happy chance the rabbit had landed upon a rocky shelf far down, hoping that after all she might in some way set him free.

Moving slowly, her camera again in its case, her pole touching the snow, she approached until she could look down. Only the steep wall on the far side, sinking straight and black into the swollen torrent, only a little speck of white far down which might have been a struggling body or a fleck of foam.

"The poor little thing," she said again. "He saw that the far bank is lower than this one, and he was too frightened to guess the distance."