ds, he turned towards Alder. The piled water shook the
dam, topped it, burst it into fragments, and rushed into freedom; he
must go to Alder, have a drink, shake hands with a friend, kiss Betty
Neal, and come back again. Two days going, two days coming, three days
for the frolic; a week would cover it all. And two hours later Vic Gregg
had cached his heavier equipment, packed his necessaries on the burro,
and was on the way.

By noon he had dropped below the snowline and into the foothills, and
with every step his heart grew lighter. Behind him the mountains slid
up into the heart of the sky with cold, white winter upon them, but here
below it was spring indubitably. There was hardly enough fresh grass
to temper the winter brown into shining bronze, but a busy, awakening
insect life thronged through the roots. Surer sign than this, the
flowers were coming. A slope of buttercups flashed suddenly when the
wind struck it and wild morning glory spotted a stretch of daisies with
purple and dainty lavender. To be sure, the blossoms never grew thickly
enough to make strong dashes of color, but they tinted and stained the
hillsides. He began to cross noisy little watercourses, empty most of
the year, but now the melting snow fed them. From eddies and quiet pools
the bright watercress streamed out into the currents, and now and
then in moist ground under a sheltering bank he found rich patches of
violets.

His eyes went happily among these tokens of the glad time of the
year, but while he noted them and the bursting buds of the aspen,
reddish-brown, his mind was open to all that middle register of calls
which the human ear may notice in wild places. Far above his scale were
shrilling murmurs of birds and insects, and beneath it ran those ground
noises that the rabbit, for instance, understands so well; but between
these overtones and undertones he heard the scream of the hawk,
spiraling down in huge circles, and the rapid call of a grouse, far off,
and the drone of insects about his feet, or darting suddenly upon his
brain and away again. He heard these things by the grace of the wind,
which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and again shut off all
except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often whisked away every
murmur and left Gregg, in the center of a wide hush with only the creak
of the pack-saddle and the click of the burro's accurate feet among the
rocks.

At such times he gave his full attention to the tra