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few inches apart. These had been converted into a ladder by the nailing across of rustic rounds. "That's how I get up," explained the girl. "Now you go back around the corner again, and when I'm ready I'll call." Bennington obeyed. In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air summoning him to approach and climb. He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated. "Hi!" he called, "how did you get up this?" He looked across the intervening space expectantly, and then, to his surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously. "I--I," stammered a small voice after a moment's hesitation, "I guess I--_shinned_!" A light broke across Bennington's mind as to the origin of the two dark streaks on the gown, and he laughed. The girl eyed him reproachfully for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarrassed manner. Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder. He shinned up the tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was a matter of no great difficulty. In another instant he stood upon the top of the dike. It was, as he had anticipated, nearly flat. Under the pine branch, which might make a very good chair back, grew a thick cushion of moss. The one tree broke the freedom of the eye's sweep toward the west, but in all other directions it was uninterrupted. As the girl had said, the tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating, rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping the foot of a great round boulder-mountain. Here and there a darker spot suggested a break for a mountain peak; rarely a fleck of white marked a mountain road. Back of them all--ridge, mountain, cavernous valley--towered old Harney, sun-browned, rock-diademed, a few wisps of cloud streaming down the wind from his brow, locks heavy with the age of the great Manitou whom he was supposed to represent. Eastward, the prairie like a peaceful sea. Above, the alert sky of the west. And through all the air a humming--vast, murmurous, swelling--as the mountain breeze touched simultaneously with strong hand the chords, not of one, but a thousand pine harps. Bennington drew in a deep breath, and looked about in all directions. The girl
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