ad, still with her hands steadying her
as they clung to the bark, her moccasined feet curving to the limb on
which she stood. And now she could just touch with the tips of her
fingers the broad branch above.

Then she did the thing which would have been simple enough had she
stood on the ground instead of balancing high in air; she measured the
few inches in distance, she drew her fingers lingeringly from the bark,
holding them still above her head, she tautened the muscles of her
splendid young body to the work they were called upon to do, bent her
knees little by little, and then fearless still but agitated, she
leaped upward, and grasped the elusive branch.

For a moment she swung there, secure now and confident, and then, as
she had gained the first step in her climb so now she made this one. A
slow tensing of biceps, a drawing up of the pendulous body, the quick
flash of a heel thrown over the limb, and she lay upon it, laughing
softly. It was good and glorious to be young, to have a body that
obeyed one's will, to have a steady heart.

Presently she began once more to clamber upward, her way comparatively
easy now. Thus at last she came to the branch upon which, as on a
bridge, the little brown bear had crossed to the ledge of rock. And
together there came to her a distinct disappointment and a pleasurable
surprise.

Again the cub had slipped away from her; perhaps by now he was half a
mile away and tumbling his awkward and terrified way among the crags.

From below the ledge had seemed to be four or five feet wide; now she
saw that it was nearer ten. The conformation of the rocks, beetling
above it, had led her to imagine that a straight wall of cliff rose
abruptly just at the back of the ledge. In reality they overhung the
rudely level space like out-jutting eaves over the sun-deck that might
have been carved to his taste by some old cliff dweller in front of his
solitary retreat. For there was a cavern here under the frowning brow
of granite, different from the many caves of which the girl knew in the
rugged mountains only in that it was so roomy and at the same time so
secret a place.

Before she left her resting place, she saw the way the cub had gone.
Leading upward from the extreme end of the ledge, at the right, there
was a deep seam or crevice in the granite, almost filled and choked
with fallen rocky debris from above, but affording a trail that even a
man might travel to the top of the cl