too keen to the very quick of being for
either words or tears; for a horseman had turned the crag leading his
broncho. It was the Ranger in his sage green Service suit wearing a
sprig of everlasting in his Alpine hat.

"Why, I've been trying to get you by telephone all day," he said, "but
the wires are cut--"

In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the
brooding storm, the impending horror.

"Has Fordie brought the sheep down?"

"Yes, ages ago; he passed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen
thousand of 'em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to
the bottom. Don't you see how they skinned every branch? That's why
the cattlemen hate 'em! Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now. Why;
anything wrong?"

She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his
hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman's report. She
knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the
same. She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the
quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the
foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own
being,--

"Eleanor, look at me! Look in my eyes! Look up at me--"

She felt the rush of her being to meet and blend and fuse in the flame
of his love. Then, she looked up. His eyes drank hers in one poised
moment of delirious recognition, of tempestuous tenderness. The world
swam out of ken. All but the fluted melody of the blue bird; and she
knew they must always sound together, the trill and the rasp, the blue
bird and the jay, the true and the false, love and its counterfeit.

"We go into this fight together," he said very quietly, "And forever!"
He placed the sprig of everlasting in her hand. "You can count me on
the firing line."

Then he had thrown the reins over his broncho's neck, headed the horse
back up the Ridge and was slithering down the steep slope giving her
hand-hold as of steel-springs. So short was the interval, it could not
be measured in time. Yet it had rivetted eternity. She saw the
rolling clouds of ink writhing up the Valley turning everything to
blackness: yet she did not know it. The little flutter of air changed
to whiplashes and puffs of wind that curled the black hair forward over
her unhatted face in a frame. Wayland looked at her and felt his
masterdom going to those same winds; for the pace had painted her ivory
cheeks, not rose color, b