e pasture with its log fence. Mike was
going across to his cabin, still running awkwardly.

Marion ploughed through the drifts in the edge of the timber and
slowed thankfully to a walk when she reached the corner of the fence.
Across the flat the cabin stood backed against the wall of heavy
forest. Hank would not dare come any farther--or if he did he would be
careful not to offend. She walked on more slowly, pulling herself back
to composure before she went in to face the critical, censuring eyes
of Kate.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

TROUBLE ROCKS THE PAN, LOOKING FOR GRAINS OF GOLD

Up on the peaks Jack was touching the heights and the depths of his
own nature, while the mountains stood back and waited, it seemed to
him, for the final answer. He had lived with them too long and too
intimately to disregard them now, uninfluenced by their varying moods.
He watched them in sunlight when they were all shining white and
violet and soft purple, with great shadows spread over their slopes
where the forests stood deepest; and they heartened him, gave him a
wordless promise that better times were to come. He saw them swathed
with clouds, and felt the chill of their cold aloofness; the world was
a gloomy place then, and friendship was all false and love a mockery.
He saw them at night--then was he an outcast from everything that made
life worth while; then was he almost ready to give up.

When he had waited until the sun was low, and Marion did not come or
send him a signal from the little knoll behind the cabin, he told
himself that he was just a whim of hers; that he merely furnished her
with a little amusement, gave her a pleasant imitation of adventure;
that if something more exciting came into her dull life there in the
Basin, she would never bother with him again. He told himself
cynically that she would merely be proving her good sense if she
stopped meeting him or sending those brief little messages; but Lord,
how they did put heart into a fellow!--those little dots of
brightness, with now and then a wider, longer splash of radiance,
which she told him meant "forevermore"; or, if it were very long and
curved, as when she waved the glass over her head, it meant a laugh,
and "here's hoping."

But when she did not come, or even run up the hill and send him the
one-two-three signal which meant she could not meet him that day, he
faced the long night feeling that the world held not one friend upon
whom he could depend.