All that day the chinook blew, working its magic upon the land. When
day broke again with a clearing sky, and the sun peered between the
cloud rifts, his beams fell upon vast areas of brown and green, where
but forty-eight hours gone there was the cold revelry of frost sprites
upon far-flung fields of snow. Patches of earth steamed wherever a
hillside lay bare to the sun. From some mysterious distance a lone
crow winged his way, and, perching on a near-by tree-top, cawed raucous
greeting.

Hazel cleared away the breakfast things, and stood looking out the
kitchen window. Roaring Bill sat on a log, shirt-sleeved, smoking his
pipe. Presently he went over to the stable, led out his horses, and
gave them their liberty. For twenty minutes or so he stood watching
their mad capers as they ran and leaped and pranced back and forth over
the clearing. Then he walked off into the timber, his rifle over one
shoulder.

Hazel washed her dishes and went outside. The cabin sat on a benchlike
formation, a shoulder of the mountain behind, and she could look away
westward across miles and miles of timber, darkly green and merging
into purple in the distance. It was a beautiful land--and lonely. She
did not know why, but all at once a terrible feeling of utter
forlornness seized her. It was spring--and also it was spring in other
lands. The wilderness suddenly took on the characteristics of a
prison, in which she was sentenced to solitary confinement. She
rebelled against it, rebelled against her surroundings, against the
manner of her being there, against everything. She hated the North,
she wished to be gone from it, and most of all she hated Bill Wagstaff
for constraining her presence there. In six months she had not seen a
white face, nor spoken to a woman of her own blood. Out beyond that
sea of forest lay the big, active world in which she belonged, of which
she was a part, and she felt that she must get somewhere, do something,
or go mad.

All the heaviness of heart, all the resentment she had felt in the
first few days when she followed him perforce away from Cariboo
Meadows, came back to her with redoubled force that forenoon. She went
back into the house, now gloomy without a fire, slumped forlornly into
a chair, and cried herself into a condition approaching hysteria. And
she was sitting there, her head bowed on her hands, when Bill returned
from his hunting. The sun sent a shaft through the south window, a