"Go it, little ones! Make time! Split the wind! Show y'r heels!
Tear the air to tatters! there!" And he whirled the whip with the
skill of all the old Adam stirring within him, while the buckboard went
forward with a bounce.

"We can't take the wagon up yon Ridge trail--"

"No, but I can climb straight up and not mind the switch back, if
you'll wait."

He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing
out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the zig-zag
by climbing almost straight.

Quizzically, the old man gazed after her; the first hundred feet were
easy, a mossed slope with padded foot-hold. Then came steep ground
slippery with pine needles; but the mountain laurel and ground juniper
gave hand grip; and she swung herself up past the third tier of the
switch back where the Ridge arose a rock face and trees with two
notches and one blaze marked the lower bounds of the National Forests.
Here he saw her run along the bridle trail marked by one notch and one
blaze: then, she was swinging over moraine slopes to the fifth bench of
the trail. There she disappeared round a jut of rock--he remembered a
mountain spring trickled out at this place bridged by spruce poles.
Then he noticed that the cumulous clouds which had been flashing sheet
lightning all afternoon, were massing and darkening and lowering closer
over the Valley, with zig-zag jags of live fire down to the ground and
sounds more like the crack of a whip or splinter of wood than thunder.
The cliff swallows dipped almost to the grass; and the flowers were
hanging their heads in miniature umbrellas. All the trembling poplars
and cotton-woods seemed to be furled waiting. Then, the lower side of
the slate clouds frayed in the edge of a sweepy garment to sheets and
fringes of rain. A little tremor ran through the leaves. The horses
laid back their ears.

"We'll get it," said the old man tightening the reins.

She had paused for breath round the buttress of a gray crag when she
noticed the churn of yeasty blackness blotting out the Valley and felt
the hushed heat of the air. A jack rabbit went whipping past at long
bounds. The last rasp of a jay's scold jangled out from the trees.
Then, she heard from the hushed Valley, the low flute trill of a blue
bird's love song. Ever afterwards, either of those bird notes, the
scurl of the jay or the golden melody of the blue warbler, brought her
joyous, terrible thoughts,