ocks, and the
chaparral still green, she could hardly realize that the Blue Mesa could
be desolate, white, and cold. As yet she had not lived long enough in
the desert to love it as she loved the wooded hills, where to her each
tree was a companion and each whisper of the wind a song.

She often wondered what Lorry was doing, and whether Bondsman would come
to visit her when they returned to their cabin on the mesa. She often
recalled, with a kind of happy wonderment, Bondsman's singular visit and
how he had left suddenly one morning, heedless of her coaxing. The big
Airedale had appeared in Jason the day after Bud Shoop had returned from
Criswell. That Bondsman should know, miles from the town, that his
master had returned was a mystery to her. She had read of such
happenings; her father had written of them. But to know them for the
very truth! That was, indeed, the magic, and her mountains were towering
citadels of the true Romance.

Long before Bronson ventured to return to his mountain camp, Lorry was
riding the hill trails again as spring loosened the upland snows and
filled the canons and arroyos with a red turbulence of waters bearing
driftwood and dead leaves. With a companion ranger he mended trail and
rode along the telephone lines, searching for sagging wires; made notes
of fresh down timber and the effect of the snow-fed torrents on the
major trails.

Each day the air grew warmer. Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty
tangle of last season's mesa grasses. Imperceptibly the dull-hued mesas
became fresh carpeted with green across which the wind bore a subtly
soft fragrance of sun-warmed spruce and pine.

To Lorry the coming of the Bronsons was like the return of old friends.
Although he had known them but a short summer season, isolation had
brought them all close together. Their reunion was celebrated with an
old-fashioned dinner of roast beef and potatoes, hot biscuit and honey,
an apple pie that would have made a New England farmer dream of his
ancestors, and the inevitable coffee of the high country.

And Dorothy had so much to tell him of the wonderful winter desert; the
old Mexican who looked after their horses, and his wife who cooked for
them. Of sunshine and sandstorms, the ruins of ancient pueblos in which
they discovered fragments of pottery, arrowheads, beads, and trinkets,
of the lean, bronzed cowboys of the South, of the cattle and sheep,
until in her enthusiasm she forgot that Lorry had a