TIMBER LINE

CHAPTER I
A CABIN ON THE CASCADA

Capped in snow, their flanks of felspar rock robed in glistening drifts, the Coronado Peaks swept to towering altitudes above the dark green of the forests. Keen, fresh, heady as wine, was the air in those high places, and each minute crevasse, each ridge, was etched clearly in the sparkling winter sunlight.

But there was no eye to see the glories outspread before these sister queens of the Rockies. The eagles which soared above them through the blue of summer had departed to lower altitudes with the first icy breath of winter, and even now were nesting in canyon crags, where as early as March their Spartan young would hatch. The grizzly of the Holy Ghost would not stir from his deep cave and still deeper lethargy for another month, and it was too far above timber line for the lobo and his followers to find food.

The sun was sinking rapidly. Over the ridges a sharp light wind whistled. But below in the forests there was a hush, deeper than the hush of summer, for now there was no scurrying about of small creatures, the hum of insect life was lacking, and even the trees slept.

Yet beneath the low branches of a cluster of fir trees a life-and-death struggle was going on. A large wolf, gaunt beneath a splendid, tawny coat, strove in silent agony, his lips twisted back from his white tusks, to free himself from the icy steel thing that had held him all day. He made not a sound to break the stillness. This was instinctive caution, for so dulled with pain had his hearing become that he did not even notice the approach of a human being.

On a ridge above the fir and spruce stand a figure had appeared, and now stood outlined against the turquoise sky and snowy peaks; a girl, dressed in furry woolens of white and green, snowshoes in hand. She looked across the rim of the world and in a moment, as though a master stage director had so managed, her figure was bathed in a rosy light that changed the glacier-like heights above to flame-colored damask.

The lobo gnawed with concentrated fury at his imprisoned foot. The girl had turned, poising a moment on the ridge before starting downward. A long blue shadow was cast before her. With a wrench the wolf tore away from the trap and without delay limped off on three feet, disappearing among the boles of pine and fir. In the jaws of the trap dangled a large bloody paw.

Now the sun sank behind the great peaks. It would be dark all too soon. The girl stooped quickly to fasten on her snowshoes, then made toward the darkening shelter of the spruce. A snowy ptarmigan, sole dweller on those arctic heights since the red fox had captured his mate, fluttered before her. Now she saw the gleam of the trap and the dark trickle of blood staining the snow. She clasped her hands and caught her breath with a gasp.

“Oh, oh! Damn, curse them! I knew it, I knew it!”

Kneeling down, the girl pulled at the trap’s trophy. The paw was caught fast. She tried to open the formidable jaws of the thing, but it was impossible. Only a steel bar wielded by a man’s strength could open it. She rose to her feet, tears springing, and started off rapidly down the mountain, making her way easily through the open forest and over meadows where within a few weeks she would be picking alpine flowers.

For half a mile the girl sped lightly over the snow, her snowshoes barely breaking the crust. Coming to a spot that was evidently familiar she cast about for a moment, then in the dimming light pounced upon another trap. It was cleverly concealed on the far side of a log and set with a frozen hare for bait. With her forest staff she struck the trap spring smartly. It clicked with an ugly snap which made her jump back. Then she came close and stooped over it. Yes, it was sprung all right.

“There,” said she softly to herself and to the forest, “there’ll be nothing more caught in that trap.” A moment later she was again darting through the trees. The increasing darkness urged her to greater speed, but as she emerged from the gloom of the forest into a barren open space the air was once more filled with rosy light. The afterglow of the setting sun had commenced at the foot of the mountain and was slowly creeping upward. The world seemed to palpitate electrically with delicate colors, mauve, green, orchid, and the spotless snow reflected and radiated the light.

The girl sped along the white crest, avoiding those stretches where barren rock thrust forth. Her flying figure could scarcely have been seen against the snow, but now and again it was silhouetted against a background of somber pine, flashing from one point to another, scarf whipping out behind.

A quarter of a mile away, on a hog’s-back running parallel to but lower than the height which the girl was traveling, a man was scanning the far slopes through a field glass. The figure darted across the radius of his fixed gaze. With an exclamation he swept the slope until he caught the moving object again. For a moment only he focused on the flashing figure, for it disappeared over the crest and down toward the Santo Spirito canyon. The man rubbed his lens impatiently and looked again.

“Am I seeing things?” he grumbled, half amused. “A flying wraith of the mountains? Is it an ice maiden, or what?”

After all, who could it be, all alone, way up here in this wilderness? He’d inquire down below. Garen Shepherd, a young irrigation engineer, dug his spiked walking-stick into the treacherous surface and started down the trail—an hour or so, and even the prolonged afterglow, the amazing snow-light, would be gone. He had barely time to get back to the canyon of the Amarillo and Benty’s Lodge, where he was staying.

Below, in the canyon of the Santo Spirito, it lacked but three minutes of nightfall. When the dying afterglow reached a certain point the canyon would be suddenly submerged in darkness. Damon O’Neill, the forest ranger of the Coronado slopes, led his mare into the log stable back of his cabin. He blanketed her against a bitter night, so bitter that even the chatter of the Cascada, the noisy stream that flowed at the bottom of the canyon, was sealed up and silenced in a prison of ice. He buckled the straps deftly, patted the sorrel mare’s nose, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

As he stood on the cabin steps, peering nervously about and gazing where the upper mountain still glowed with light, the white figure for which he was looking emerged from the spruce. With a shout and a few sliding steps the girl reached the cabin just as the canyon was slipping into night.

“Dawn! You just made it. Where’ve you been so late?”

“Snowshoeing up on the divide, Dad. It was glorious. Don’t worry. I keep my eye on the time.” She was unstrapping her snowshoes, while her father gathered an armful of wood from the pile beside the door. She hung the shoes on a nail against the cabin, opened the door for her father, and followed him inside. In a moment squares of light twinkled out from the cabin windows. All about the little log house fir and pine rose like clustered cathedral spires. All the universe was dark except for the far stars—and for pairs of shining eyes that came and went through the forest.

Inside the cabin it was warm and close. Damon kicked the logs smoldering in the wide stone fireplace and threw on light fuel till they blazed high. In a small kitchen adjoining the one big living-room a little cook-stove gave out waves of warmth and the smell of supper, of spruce pitch and resin burning, of wet woolen things drying.

Dawn had taken off her outer wraps and her heavy boots. She slipped into felt house shoes and an old green sweater and skirt. She hurried about laying the table, filling the coffee pot, and handing her father a fresh towel after his noisy ablutions. The cabin was very pleasant, the main room long, and eighteen or twenty feet wide. Against the log walls hung heavy Indian rugs, but so snug and well built was Damon O’Neill’s cabin that the rugs never swelled with drafts, no matter how the wind might howl outside. The floors too were strewn with well-worn Navajo blankets. The furniture was rough, made by hand—before the fire a rustic seat, a long table with two benches at one side, some chairs, a chest, a wood box at the other, and five shelves of worn books.

Dawn turned the wick lower in the kerosene lamp and they sat down to supper; beans and chili, brown bread and steaming canned tomatoes, stewed apricots deluged with canned cream. They ate in silence. Damon O’Neill seemed tired, but Dawn appeared not to notice it, though she cast him covert glances. When he took his place before the fire she came as usual and sat on a little hassock at his knee. He drew her head down and puffed at his briar pipe in contentment, putting his stockinged feet on top of Shep, the white collie that slept before the fire.

“You tired, Damon?”

“No. Just sleepy from the cold. Thinkin’ about a young lady I know, too.” He patted the girl’s tousled auburn hair, his brows knitting. “What’s troublin’ you, Dawn? Lonesome? Well, I guess it’ll be school for you next year, Missie.”

“School! Who should I be lonesome for when I’ve got you for company! I tell you, I’m mad. Daddy, if you must know. You’d find it out anyway; you always do. I found another lobo’s paw in a trap this afternoon. Up on the divide. Not very far below timber line.”

Damon O’Neill shook his head in annoyance. He did not answer for a few moments.

“Too bad. Hate to see it. It’s all wrong,” he said. “But these predatory animal fellows’ve got their orders. It’s been a hard winter for the stockmen, and it’s going to be a harder summer down below. They think they had it bad last year, but,” he predicted, “it was nothing compared to what they’re going to get.”

“You think there’s going to be another drouth, Damon?” queried Dawn anxiously.

“Drouth? No. And that would never affect us up here to amount to anything. The forest will always draw its own water, Dawn, never forget that. But down below it’s different. Yet as a matter of fact,” he went on, “for the past seven years they’ve had more rainfall in this country than for a quarter century past.

“But there’ll be little grass just the same. Dust will fly in their pastures and the folks down below will be bleating, ‘Drouth, drouth.’ They’ve not sowed; so they can’t reap. They’re greedy, those fellows, but can’t see it. Overstocked, that’s the trouble; the range eaten up, and cattle dying for lack of food. And what with losses from the wolves and lions—” Damon puffed for a while silently.

“And so they’re killing off all the wild things that interfere with cattle or eat anything cattle might eat.” Dawn shuddered. “I’d feel awful if they ever caught the old Custer wolf. They’d never get him to take poison bait, would they, Damon? He’s too smart, isn’t he? He wouldn’t even let one of his pack touch poison bait, would he? If they were starving he wouldn’t take a chance.”

“I guess that’s right,” agreed her father. “He knows about traps too. Can smell one under a snow drift. He’s got almost human reasoning, that lobo.”

“I reckon that couldn’t have been his paw in the trap this afternoon then?”

“Not likely. And old Grizzly”—Damon leaned his head contentedly against the balsam pillow on the chair’s back—“that bear can spring a trap easier than a man. Hinray Dorsay claims he crept up on the bear one time. It was traveling along through light feathery snow and its foot struck the outer rim of a trap. It stopped, then dainty and cunning as if he’d thought it out, struck straight at the spring—”

“And?” Dawn prompted breathlessly, although she had heard the tale twenty times before from old Hinray himself.

“And sprung the teeth of the trap, click!”

The white collie whimpered and yelped softly in his sleep before the fire, wrapped in primeval visions of the chase. Outside a far, lone wail came up the canyon.

“But, Dad,” Dawn pressed, “can’t the Government see that the big animals wouldn’t kill hardly any stock if they had enough of the small game they’re used to?”

“The scheme of Nature is all upset,” Damon replied slowly, “and it’s going to take some time to straighten it out again. They never can get back to where they were. But that’s to be expected to a certain extent when man enters into the scheme.—It’s hard for us of the forest to stick up for the animals when they pile up such records as the Magdalena wolf’s a few summers ago. Remember?”

Dawn nodded. “Seventy-two sheep killed in two weeks. A hundred and fifty head of cattle in six months.”

“Yet we need the animals.” Damon shook his head. “We need them all here in the forest, and in the end only harm can come, I believe, from this business of killing off all one kind of creature and favoring another. They never learned a thing from the slaughter of the passenger pigeon, though when they’d wiped ’em clean out there came a hemlock blight that near destroyed hundreds of miles of forests.

“We kill off vultures, eagles, hawks and goshawks, cat, wolf, and lion, and leave the range free for rabbits to breed, and gophers, and prairie dogs to gnaw at roots, and all the grain-eatin’ creatures to fill their craws with seed for next year’s range.—That’s not going to better Nature’s scheme of things. No, sir, not yet awhile.” Damon O’Neill was off on his favorite topic, but Dawn remembered something that she had been saving up to tell him.

“Damon, what do you think? I’ve found the great pine of the Silverstake. No, let me tell you about it. You know that forty where McGuire’s homestead stops? Follow that ridge up about a mile to where it faults; it drops there maybe twenty-five feet. But the same vein shows up in a ledge that rises several hundred feet away.” Dawn had turned round on her hassock to face her father, her eyes round with excitement. “The ledge is broad, tilted—and the same stratum runs right through it, all right. It’s the mother vein, a part of the main mountain, I’m sure.”

“Vein of granite?” Damon reached out to tweak Dawn’s ear. She paid no heed, brushing him off.

“And it’s on a corner of the spot you always said was the old survey boundary of the Indian Reservation grant. The Little Falls of the Holy Ghost come out of the mountain not far above it and a little inside the line. And, Father, I know where it comes from! I’ve seen the source!” She sat back solemnly to note the effect on her father.

Damon opened his eyes wide, but it was only to mock her. He laughed for the first time that week. “I might have known you’d get up to the source some day. Oh, last summer, was it? Why didn’t you tell me then? I guess there’s not half a dozen rangers, including myself, ever made the climb; and no one else except the Pueblo Indians from down below fifteen or twenty miles.

“But what has that to do with the Silverstake, and what makes you think you’ve located the old tree?”

“Because, Daddy, it was when I was standing by the pool where the water seems to gush out of the mountain that I first saw the white quartz of the faulted vein where it cropped up along the mountain side. I thought to myself then, ‘Here’s where the Indians must have stood and seen that vein beneath them, and then found silver.’ I was trying to fix it in my mind so that I could find that ledge with the quartz vein again when I came down. That was a hard job.” Damon nodded sympathetically. “But I couldn’t fix on any landmark.

“Then today it just came to me. I was standing on the end of that ridge where it faults, looking away over the mountain side, following the ridge along, because the snow sticking to it outlined it almost like the quartz had from above—though I hadn’t thought much about it since summer—and suddenly my eyes picked out a great tree, higher than all the rest, a pine among fir and hemlock. It stood out from the rest, it was so green. They were covered with snow, but the top branches of this big pine didn’t hold any. It was an old tree, Damon. Could it be the Silverstake?”

“Might be,” replied Damon. “It’s been sixty, seventy-five years, since that pine was blazed, according to the old survey report. They say it bore a ‘witness’ of the old Indian grant, and of the location of an old claim on the Silverstake, beneath. There’s a record in the archives of the state that speaks of the Reservation witness too.

“But no one thought of it for fifty years. Then this business came up about the water rights of the Pueblos, and their Reservation boundaries. The attorney representing them was a damn clever scoundrel that was at the same time representin’ a political gang. This gang wanted to take over the Reservation for themselves, ‘throw it open for the use of the citizens of the state,’ meanin’ themselves. The attorney got a resurvey made. He got a measure introduced openin’ up the Indian Reservation to the public; but the new boundaries never were accepted, so fortunately that held them up for a while.

“It’s bein’ contested now. The Indians didn’t know about it at first, nor did the Forest Service. You remember, dear. They couldn’t find any witness stake or tree that marked the survey of the original grant. No trace. And how could they? It might have been struck by lightnin’, or blown over, or possibly cut down.

“Anyway, it’s always remained a mystery, that old blaze. It’s a pity, too”—Damon knocked the ashes out of his pipe preparatory to turning in for the night—“because I staked me a claim up there. You were a little thing not more than four or five years old. You never heard me speak of it? Well, no one else has either. Scotch enough in me for that!” Damon chuckled.

“Well, that’s it. Right inside the forty, in the National Forest Reservation, that being open to any one. I was looking to verify the Indians’ original grant, and I found me a silver mine. Much good is it likely to do me!

“But to this day I’d swear there was silver ore in that quartz. I got a fair sample out of the bed of the stream below the falls a way. Must have washed down from an outcropping of the vein above. But there was no use doing anything with it; I hadn’t the money or the time for prospecting, and then the uncertainty as to the claim came up, and I knew if I turned it over to the Pueblos it would likely be grabbed from them.

“I had the sample assayed and dreamed about it awhile—what we’d do when you got to be a big girl, with the proceeds from our mine.” He laughed a bit wryly. “I never told any one about it. Thought I might as well get the right location myself. I couldn’t even find the outcropping on the exposed vein, though. I’m no miner. I’m a forester.”

“What would we do if we had a mine?” Dawn mused. “I’d get Whitey Shep a silver-studded collar, and Piñon a silver-mounted Cordoba leather saddle, and you that set of books you’ve never got and would have time to read.” Dawn laughed happily. “And we’d go to the Canadian woods, and to—”

“To bed, girl, to bed. It’s all of nine o’clock.” Damon rose abruptly and turned toward the door. He lifted his hand awkwardly to brush a sudden mist from his eyes. At times vague but nevertheless poignant misgivings about his girl wrung him.

“We didn’t mount the blue columbine tonight, Damon.” Dawn reminded him sleepily of her neglected studies. She still lolled before the fire, her cheeks flushed, her eyes dreamy, her strong young body relaxed in the heat. “I’ve three hundred specimens to mount. The alpine blossoms will soon be coming; it will be spring before we know it.”

“That’s right,” Damon agreed in a cheerful tone. He was fumbling on the shelf for his flashlight. “We got talking, and no lessons. To tell the truth I was tired. I was down at Benty’s cabin all day. One of the Government trappers was there. He’s going the rounds of his traps in the morning. And two of the engineers from the Irrigation Service. They’re up looking over water sources, calculating snow depth, and how much rainshed and snow water are likely to come down in the spring. The young chap went up the mountain alone.”

“Oh, Damon—” Dawn sat up quickly—“why didn’t he stay here? Did you tell him about me? Oh, Dad, it’s such fun to see some one once in a while! I like those Irrigation men. They understand about forests and trees.”

“She wants company,” Damon thought. “Trees and animals, they’ve had to take the place of folks to her.”

Out of the silence that surrounded the warm little cabin above the Cascada sounded a sharp, eerie yapping. It was answered by a far and mournful howling, a full-throated wolf song that rose and swelled. There was a moment of utter quiet, broken only by the ticking of Damon’s wrist watch. Then, just outside the cabin apparently, there came a sudden barking.

“The coyotes are growing worse every winter, spite of everything,” Damon said. “They’ve had to come up into the mountains for food. I’d better get out to Little Sorrel. I should have put a new fastening on that door. She might kick it down.” He took a burning stick from the fireplace, and stepped outside, pulling his fur cap over his ears, but not stopping for a blazer.

Dawn reluctantly pulled herself up from before the fire. She pushed aside a thick Indian rug curtaining a doorway which led into her little bedroom and looped it over a nail. In the cold room she undressed quickly, knelt in her nightgown and bare feet a moment, then opened her window a crack, fastened it by a stout iron hook, and sprang into bed.

Tomorrow she would look again for the Silverstake Pine. If her chestnut pony’s foot was healed she would ride him. Perhaps they would meet the engineer. In less than a minute she was asleep, deep in the long dreamless slumber of mountain nights.

Damon O’Neill sat long before the fire. He came in from securing the stable door, looked into his daughter’s room, saw that she was asleep, and sank into his chair again.

A fine girl. What a puny little thing she’d been when he brought her to the mountains. “Take her out west,” the clinic specialist had said. “Sunshine, altitude.” This was the way he’d found. Study, a year of practical training, and Damon O’Neill emerged a forest ranger.

Before he could get the baby up here into the sunshine she had been starving herself, clenching her tiny teeth on the spoon forced between her lips. It was the thought of all that, everything that had happened before and after his wife’s death, that had kept him up here. Two wretched years in the east, while his wife was dying of tuberculosis, had filled him with a hatred of cities. Poverty and want had left him with a deep-seated fear of ever being without money in the bank. The mountains had given him a life that was worth living, and security.

“I’ll stick by the mountain,” he swore. “It saved Dawn for me, and a forest full of trees is better company than most cities full o’ humans. Folks may say I’m not doing right by her, but she’s to go to school a year on the money in the bank, some of it, an’ the rest shall be saved for her.”

Damon reached deep into his pocket and pulled out a chunk of white quartz. A bright silvery vein ran through it; a pretty thing.

“By Golly, if Dawn ever did find the Silverstake witness tree!”

CHAPTER II
THE NYMPH AND THE SHEPHERDS

Two veterans of the Cordilleran slopes could have borne witness to the changes that the coming of white men had wrought in a century. One was a great yellow pine whose growth-rings would have shown that it had been a sapling long before the first Spaniards came. The pine was blasted now, its once towering crown leveled almost to the height of the trees about it. Only its girth was evidence of what a mighty tree the yellow pine had been.

The other veteran was a golden eagle whose years were close to the century mark. In his youth he had soared above endless plains that were as green and undulating as the far-off ocean. Now they were a desert all the year. As the green retreated the eagle too retreated farther and farther into the mountains. Yet even here food had grown somewhat scarce of late. And the eagle’s pinions were becoming less powerful with every season. He could no longer soar for hours at a time hundreds of feet above the peaks, poising almost motionless in the sky, sailing without a wing-beat down over blue abysses.

Now he often perched upon the great blasted tree. It stood near falling water on a sunny slope that looked up to the Coronado Peaks, unchanging, familiar.

Time and again Dawn had passed within a few hundred feet of the great tree without knowing it. Time and again the golden eagle had cast a fleeting shadow over Dawn’s trail and more often than not she had thought it a cloud.

As spring thawed the slopes she tried again to find the Silverstake pine and again she visited the source above the waterfall. Dawn could never have explained how much the spot meant to her. Nor could any one who had not her love for the mountain have understood. This spot, unconquered for so long! It was hers by right of discovery. She shared old secrets long guarded by the Indians.

But now the spring ranges were opening up, and Dawn was very busy helping Damon. She came in one day after a long morning’s ride to far-lying western pastures to find old Hinray Dorsay, their friend, and one of the most faithful of the rangers, seated on the steps of the aspen log cabin, combing his long mustaches. There was trouble on the range—trespassing before the pastures were in condition. Hinray’s knowledge was wide and infinitely practical, drawn from Bible and almanac, experience and government bulletins.

Goats had eaten the bark off the young trees on a whole hillside, Dawn told him. “The Rocky Mountain sheep never did that, did they, Hinray?” she asked. “But then they were native dwellers in the mountains.”

“No,” Hinray pronounced as he moved from the cabin steps to a place in the sun, “no, goats ain’t indignant to these mount’ns, and trees is. Consequence, the two don’t git along.”

Dawn’s ready laughter melted the wrath with which she had been complaining to the old ranger of the invasion of the forest. “Well,” she gasped, “we’re indignant, if the goats aren’t, I guess! Oh, Hinray, you’re funny, and smart.”

Hinray appeared gratified. “Take stock,” he went on; “cattle stock, I mean. They trim the grass and let the young trees alone. I told Superintendent what would happen iffen he gave a permit to Gonzales to graze them goats and sheep on the range. Well, I guess you’ve saw Bald Mountain meadow this spring?”

Dawn nodded. “Daddy’s furious. But that isn’t the worst. Gonzales and his herders simply will not keep in their own pasture. They roam all over the mountain. If I find ’em outside that fence again—” She struck her quirt through the air with sudden fury at the desecration.

Hinray nodded and pointed a horny forefinger over her shoulder. Dawn sprang to her feet and looked up. On the trail above them a rider appeared. He waved before he was hidden by the trees.

“It’s Daddy!” Eagerness and pleasure erased her momentary passion. She stood in the sun, her thick short hair touched with golden light. Hinray looked fondly and admiringly at the robust young figure. “Soople as a mountain cat,” he thought; “sinewy, yet purty as a tiger lily.”

“A big gal for fifteen,” he said aloud. “Seems like yestiddy, Dawn, that your father brought you up to the Santo Spirito. Never thought you’d take hold. Sickly as a spruce seedlin’ transplanted in August. Used to lay out in the sun right where yore paw’d set you; never seemed to want to move. All eyes, yore teeny hands as trassparent.” He reminisced, not thinking whether Dawn heard him or not. But she came and sat down on the log beside the grizzled ranger.

“I don’t even remember, Hinray. I don’t seem to remember anything ever but being up here. Yet I was three years old when we came. Tell me about Dad. Is he just the same?” She looked up to where the trail, which lost itself for a way through an aspen grove, reappeared on the last stretch down to the cabin.

“Just the same?” Hinray pulled out his pipe and stuffed it critically. “Don’t know as he’s any different really. He’s easier in the heart, that’s plain. He was awful silent and seemed like he had a grouch against some one in those days. But then, no wonder.

“He had a old Mexican señora to mind you all day while he was away; but he found the old woman wanted to chew up yore food herself for you, like a pigeon does for its young. He had a hard time dissuadin’ her. After that he tried to tend to feedin’ you hisself—out o’ a book. Howsoever that might ’a’ been, you started to thrive with the old señora and grew so fat you useter hammer with a spoon on the little table I made you, for more food.

“I recollect comin’ in one day when you was about six years old and findin’ you keepin’ house for yore paw. Dryin’ dishes with an apron on, stirrin’ the oatmeal so’s it wouldn’t scorch.”

“Yo-ho, yo-hoo,” Damon O’Neill’s greeting rang out as he came at a trot down the little clearing toward the cabin on the Rio Cascada. Dawn shouted and ran to meet him, catching a stirrup and running along beside the sorrel mare. Damon swung down, pulled Dawn to him, and kissed her.

“Dinner ready?” He was unsaddling the mare and would turn her loose to graze.

“Yes,” Dawn said as they went into the cabin, whither Hinray had preceded them. “Hinray got it, that’s why. He came just in time to make the biscuits. I was making them, honestly, Damon. But Hinray said he’d rather make ’em himself than eat mine!”

“Dawn sot the table, though,” Hinray testified, coming in from the kitchen with a plate of smoking biscuits and a pan of steaming potatoes. “And it sure does a rough-and-ready ranger good to set to a decent civilized table once in a while. Specially after bein’ out cruisin’ or reconnoitrin’. I like a femin-ine touch,“ he complimented.

As a matter of fact the cabin was wholly masculine. Boots, spurs, lay around the floor; yet it was Damon, not Dawn, who made Shep gnaw his bones outside. Pipes and bags of tobacco were laid where convenient, but coats and sweaters were hung neatly against the wall, and on a wide space above a large desk hung a map of the Reservation, a map colored in sections and studded with many pegs.

Hinray could be heard busy with the wash-basin, after which he carefully combed his long, sandy mustaches and the one upstanding lock on the top of his bald head. Then they sat down. Spring had come, and there were Mariposa lilies in the center of the table. It was covered with a pale yellow oilcloth much admired by Hinray, who speared his boiled potatoes reverently after Dawn had served herself.

“Glad it ain’t beans. Beans, beans, is all I get. I’ll take my starch in potatoes and corn. By the way, Chief”—he turned toward Damon while he rapidly halved and buttered half a dozen biscuits—“you seen how they’re producin’ paper from corn stalks? That ought to go a long ways toward easin’ up on the spruce and hemlock, eh?”

Damon nodded. He had been eating silently.

“It’s not cutting the timber that’s worrying me,” he said at length; “it’s the damn range and grazing privilege. I don’t know what’s come over these fellows. There’s a new bunch of cattle over on the Corona. Heard about it this morning from one of the campers down below and rode over, but they’d moved to the other side of the canyon.

“I’ve had no word from headquarters nor from the owners. Not a sign of a grazing permit. I’m going over in the morning and demand the name of the owners. I’ll probably have to put them off.

“McGuire is the right kind of homesteader,” Damon pursued. “His land is his home, and we can give him as much rented winter range, and free grazing too, as his stock calls for. He keeps his stock supplied with a part of their winter feed, but Gonzales tries to get practically all his range off the forest preserves. I’m convinced he’s not operating entirely for himself.

“He can’t understand yet why he shouldn’t put a hundred head of cattle on a pasture that’s got only enough range for twenty-five. Then he tried to run in two hundred head early this spring while the little trout lily and the bladderpod were still in bloom and before any of the wheat grasses were more than an inch high, and what happened?”

“He lost fifteen head from young larkspur,” Dawn supplied significantly, “and the foothill death-camas, which are worse poison of course, especially in the early spring. And they cropped down the sprouting mountain brome, the blue grass, and all the forage that should have come to seed in June and July, and ground it into the earth before we discovered them, so that there’ll be little or no crop this summer.

“Dad, did you ever find out what the plant was that poisoned that lower range late last autumn?” Dawn had finished her dinner and was sitting on a bench by the door, mending a hole in the toe of the stocking she had on, holding her foot up conveniently as she talked. “Nothing like that ever happened on that range before.”

“It was a late season,” Damon mused, “and frost had something to do with altering the plant chemically. The plant simply produced something that didn’t agree with the cattle. I took those poor Picuris Indians off that range and gave them good pasture up above, free. They’re dependent mainly on forest range, and on the water and drainage of the northwest slopes, and if any homesteader has a right to what the forest has to offer surely those Pueblos have. Though Gonzales raised an awful kick at their getting free firewood and a few hundred feet of new roof-poles.

“They were certainly grateful; they are a fine lot, the Jemez and Picuris fellows.”

“Mebbe some letter about that new stock might ’a’ bin in the mail this morning,” said Hinray. “I heard that the little Mexican feller who’s been carryin’ it up couldn’t get past the lower Cascada. It’s higher even than usual.”

“That might be,” Damon assented, “but until I get orders over my head I’m going after them. Dawn, you like to ride over to Gonzales’ pasture after dinner and see how he’s behavin’? I can’t go this afternoon. I hear there’s goats coming up sometime this week.”

“Sure.” Dawn nodded emphatically, the light of battle in her eye. This was a great game. “Goats! Piñon can smell ’em a mile.”

“How come you call that horse o’ yours ‘Little Nut,’ Piñon?” asked Hinray. “He’s as well growed as any mountain horse I ever see.”

“Because when we first saw him, down in Benty’s corral,” Dawn explained, “he was as little and sweet as a pine nut. The prettiest little colt I ever saw—wasn’t he, Damon?—frisking around. I wanted him so badly I was afraid to speak of it for fear Dad wouldn’t say yes, or that Benty had already sold him to some one else, or that maybe he would not want to part with him himself. I couldn’t sleep all that night thinking, ‘Benty’ll never, never sell him, never in this world. I wouldn’t if he was mine.’

“But the next day we went back, and I rid him—yes, I know, Dad; ‘rode,’ then. He was less’n a year old. And Benty said yes. Then Dad gave him to me for my tenth birthday. So we grew up together. He taught me how to swim, didn’t you, honey?” The sound of hoofs daintily placed came from the doorway. A chestnut pony put his head, a surprisingly shapely and beautiful head, in through the door.

Dawn swept the dinner dishes to the kitchen table, covered them with a cloth. She seized her old brown felt hat and was outside in a moment, saddling Piñon. She vaulted into the saddle from the stoop, the motion seeming to sweep both horse and rider around and up the trail.

Damon grinned. “Quick work. She’s been a wonderful help to me this spring and summer. Deserves an assistant’s billet. This range trespass business is getting my goat—but not the other fellow’s!” O’Neill smiled feebly at the jest. “Seriously, Hinray, there’s something queer about it.

“There’s so much work to be done this spring. There’s a bad fire-trap in that half-dead timber on Rocky Canyon Point. And orders last month to verify that survey of last summer that cuts into the Indian Reservation. Do you know, Hinray, I’ve gone over that forty half a dozen times and always come out the same. I come within two feet of the old survey of the original Reservation grant.”

“Tree there?” Hinray asked with raised eyebrows.

“Blazed witness, you mean? No,” Damon O’Neill replied slowly. “No, that secret, and one of my own, are hidden in the forest, Hinray. In the heart of one tree on the whole mountain.”

“And it’s a shame,” Hinray nodded, “because I heard when I came up from the city that politics was surely going to open up these mount’ins an’ their perquisites to one gang, ‘stead of what’s lawful to whosoever applies first for homestead, timber or range. Iffen we could only find the old blazed tree!“

“Dawn thought she had found it last winter,” Damon answered quietly, “and when I went out with her a few days later the snow had melted in a sudden thaw and we couldn’t pick it out; everything was green. Last month I went over the ground and thought I located it—a great yellow pine. Cut into her?” Damon shrugged. “We’ve orders not to touch a stick of timber on the entire slope there till the boundary matter’s decided.”

“And the spruce beetle is got into the west slope too,” was Hinray’s doleful rejoinder by way of commiseration. “First time I’ve saw it up here.” He puffed a moment, then took out his pipe, shook it carefully, and remarked with embarrassment, “But it ain’t about the spruce beetle’s I’m worrying. I reckon I ought to tell you, Chief, that the animal fellers, Predit’ry Bureau, you know, are hintin’ that we’re causin’ them some trouble up here. ‘Stead of coöperatin’.”

Damon noted that Hinray loyally said “we.” “What do you mean, Hinray?” he asked. “That’s either a serious charge or it’s nothing.”

“Claims he don’t get results trappin’ and exterminatin’ like he should,” Hinray explained apologetically. In his embarrassment he took out his pocket comb and began combing his mustaches. “Says his poison baits is somehow removed and his traps is sprung.”

“Nonsense!” Damon disposed of the charge briskly. “Impossible! I’ll consider such a thing when we hear about it officially, Hinray.” Then fearing that Hinray might feel his information had been too lightly received, he added, “I’ve known bear to drag bait off before eating it, and this may be one of the cases where some remarkable lobo has sprung a trap.

“Those fellows take themselves very seriously, Hinray. Of course we coöperate loyally. Though the Creator alone knows I hate to see the animals go! They’ve had to annihilate all the little beasties that used to feed the wolf and coyote and bear, and have you noticed, Hinray, what a pest those little fellows, the prairie dogs, the squirrels, gophers, all seed-eaters, got to be when they weren’t kept down naturally? Seed destroyed, bark eaten.”

“Sure,” assented Hinray gloomily, “and now they’re gone, some other pest’ll follow. They’s an awful lot of life in the forest that the laboratory ain’t taken account of yet, but Nature knew how to keep ’em down.”

“Well, so long, Hinray. I have to get back and complete my map tonight; timber estimate, fire hazards, burned-over areas, the best site for an auto camp on the lower branch of the Amarillo.”

“Them’s more’n ranger’s duties, Damon,” said Hinray warmly; “you’ll be gettin’ a supervisor’s diploma.”

Damon flushed and shook his head. “I don’t seek any office work, Hinray. I’m not aiming to get away from the forest. I wouldn’t change a saddle for a swivel chair or a throne.”

Hinray nodded. “I’ll be off.” He picked up pack and saddle bags, got his horse that grazed near, and rode away.

Dawn was riding up the trail to the Corona meadows. Piñon stepped jauntily. Whitey bounded ahead, to one side, and around them. Now and again the collie would leap to the chestnut pony’s back and balance on the saddle before his mistress.

Dawn was singing lustily, with a sweet boyish voice. It was spring, early June in the Rockies, just three months since she had floundered through the drifts, or swept over the frozen summits on her snowshoes. The forest still bore the bright, varnished look of new buds, and shiny baby leaves, unsullied, untouched by bug or blight. The spruce wore two ravishing shades of green—the silvered bluish color that distinguishes it from the other trees of the forest, and the light leaf-green of its new tips.

The trail that Dawn followed was steep but unusually smooth, a well-made path built by her father and Hinray Dorsay. She was on a mission that suited her: to guard the mountain meadows. She came to the top of the trail and reached a level path winding through an aspen glade, where brilliant bits of darting color proved to be hummingbirds, and the mountain bluebirds flitted like detached bits of sky. The spotted twin fawns of the rare white-tailed doe held motionless within their laurel covert. In a cave’s mouth a pair of lion cubs tussled in the sun, noiselessly; but the cave where each year two grizzly cubs had rolled was still more silent. Scraps of hide and a few bones near the entrance where the cubs had whined for two days and nights, growing hungrier and hungrier, told Dawn their fate.

The brilliant Rocky Mountain woodpecker and the golden-crowned kinglet flashed through the trees. Delicate fern uncurled in the little copses and meadows which Piñon’s feet threaded daintily. Bluets and bloodroot, late anemone, jeweled the fine grass and the brink of the torrential streamlet. It was a fairy land uplifted to the sky. The tips of its pointed firs were often in the clouds.

Dawn greeted each old acquaintance joyfully. The young leaves danced and trembled on the trees, so that the air seemed in an ecstasy of movement. From the berry bushes the warbling vireo lifted his voice, the bright-throated scarlet tanager dallied with his golden-breasted mate. Soon they would be on the wing to lower climes, but for this brief season the enchantment of the aspen grove was theirs.

Now the copse was behind Dawn and she had still higher to climb. She was above the heavy forest, and the barren mountain thrust through before her. The trail dropped to a narrow shelf which skirted the mountain. Above her the shallow-rooted hemlock found precarious hold in the fissures of rock and on the thinly covered surfaces. Below, the mountain fell away into a vast valley which was only a cup in the system of the great range.

The trail wound up through a dark and heavy rim of trees that stopped abruptly: timber line. Dawn, Piñon, and the collie traversed the flat rocky height silently, solemnly, and it was not till they dropped down and down, over rough going for even a mountain pony, and emerged on a sunny crest, that Whitey’s tail again wagged and Piñon frisked. Below them lay the meadow of the Corona. Dawn gasped. It was crowded with white stock.

“Goats!”

Who had put goats up here? This was what Dad had heard of. Could such a permit have been allowed over his head? He himself would never hear of opening up this part of the range, so far outside the Gonzales’ pasture, with its new and tender growth, so carefully guarded since the terrible fire six years ago.

“It can’t be Gonzales. He hasn’t that many goats, and we would have heard if he had bought goats. It must be some newcomer. Well, here’s where they move on! Come on, Piñon, Whitey, go get ’em!”

With a shout she was racing down the slopes, her knees pressing close Piñon’s warm, shiny sides. The horse took the steeps superbly. When a fissure yawned suddenly in the earth before them he took that too without hesitation, as readily as a bird the air, sailing across a ten-foot jump all in his stride.

Below them the goats were beginning already to run, baa-ing nervously, trampling one another, climbing into trees, up on rocks. There were perhaps two hundred of them, and no shepherd was about. Dawn rode back and forth around their flanks, trying to turn their heads, get them started in the other direction. Whitey was barking back and forth, nipping heels here and there.

“Herd them, Whitey, herd them! Chase ’em out, Whitey! Attaboy!”

The collie was delighted and raced forward and back across one end while Dawn and Piñon herded the other. In five minutes the goats had turned their beards and were persuaded to advance down the mountain in the opposite direction, amidst a bleating and ma-aaa-ing that filled the air.

As they fled they left the sloping meadow a pulp behind them. The mountain grass that remained uneaten was ground into the soft rich earth; not a flower starred the once lovely lawn; the young trees were almost stripped of leaves and even of bark as high as a grown goat could reach. A swarm of locust might have swept it, save that then the earth would not have been plowed up by the hundreds of sharp little hoofs.

Last autumn Dawn had come upon this meadow full of piles of poisoned prairie dogs and gophers, their soft, limp little bodies heaped five and six feet high. This devastation was even worse. What would happen now was that the rainfalls would furrow through this soil and tear their way down the eastern slopes to cut old Johnny Marston’s homestead crops to ribbons and then dry up in the desert. Dad had described it all too often. And hadn’t they seen?

She rode full tilt after the routed flocks. The slopes over which they retreated were as bad as the meadow. There was no shepherd about. The flocks had been turned loose to go where they would. Steadily, persistently, Piñon and the white collie pressed back and forth behind the bleating trespassers. Up over a slope, where the vegetation changed to a sparse undergrowth of cedar, down through tall pine, they retreated at least a mile, when they came to a fence, the pasture. The gate was down. Outrage! The bearded old billy and the bellwethers went scurrying through, assisted by Shep, while Dawn pelted the stragglers, still snatching at distracting leaves, with the stones which she had loaded into her saddle pouch.

When the last goat had passed through the gate she rode in, dismounted, and was pushing it to when two herders, a Mexican man and boy, came riding through the pines from the west end of the pasture.

“What you do?” the man demanded angrily. “What business herding the goats?”

“They’re out of pasture, and you know it. You work for Gonzales? No? For whom then? Quien? Well, you’d better know!” Dawn grew more and more defiant. “That pasture above is ruined. Little you care, though. It is not open for grazing. Sabe?”

She had drawn near to Piñon and now mounted quickly. The Mexican herders sat on their horses facing her, silently, inimically. Suddenly the man dismounted and walked quickly toward the gate. Quick as a flash Dawn wheeled Piñon and reached the gate with a bound. She stooped and passed about the posts the stout chain that dangled there, endeavoring to fasten it with a padlock. Her fingers trembled so that she could not adjust the lock.

The Mexican broke into a run, yelling. He was cursing and threatening her. Dawn struggled to slip the padlock through the links and snapped it to just as the Mexican reached out to it. Digging her heels into Piñon’s belly Dawn tore down the slope with Whitey a lap ahead. The two herders regained their horses and were close upon her heels.

The enclosure was fenced right down to the shores of a little mountain lake. There was no way of getting out of the pasture except to jump the fence, which the herders might also do. As there were two of them they might cut off her retreat. That wouldn’t be exactly disastrous—she could throw away the key to the padlock, which she still carried; but it would be ignominious, and the possibility did not enter into Dawn’s plans.

Piñon had outdistanced the other horses and now emerged from a fringe of underbrush that skirted Snow Lake on its eastern shore. The bank was so steep that the chestnut pony was sliding on all fours. Dawn pulled up his head and held him in for a moment while she examined the shore. Just as the goat herders broke through the bushes, scrambling afoot and flinging imprecation ahead of them, she pressed her heels into the pony’s flanks and gave him his head.

Without a moment’s hesitation he plunged into the cold water, swimming easily, head and neck outstretched. There was nothing but silence from the shore they left behind them. The icy little lake, fed by melting snows, the natives regarded with superstition and fear. Dawn could feel the sharp cold of the water even through her oiled boots. The collie had lingered a moment on the shelving shore. Now, with a look of resignation, he plunged in after them.

To a young man sitting on the far side of the lake this drama presented a striking picture. The dark green of the forests had parted for a nymph in fawn color, astride a sleek dark horse, and a bounding white shepherd dog, whose sharp barking came startlingly over the water.

The young man watched them emerge from the shadow cast by forest and peak upon the mirroring lake, and move silently through placid sapphire waters, disturbing them only with the ribbon-like ripples that flowed from Piñon’s neck.

Garen Shepherd was fascinated. Now he remembered the white figure flying over the snow last winter! The pony and rider were already near the bank. The chestnut rose up out of the water suddenly as his feet touched bottom. He lost the treacherous footing, submerged, and rose again. Emerging on a tiny, white-pebbled beach, he stood politely while his rider slipped from his dripping neck. Her laughter echoed with a thin clarity across the tiny lake and back again, to the discomfiture of the outrun, outwitted men on the other shore.

Dog and horse were shaking themselves efficiently, and the girl retreated to the rock. She almost stumbled over Garen Shepherd, who had risen, hat in hand, pipe removed from his mouth, smiling broadly. She had not seen him, and was more taken aback by this encounter than she had been by that with the trespassing herders.

“Who are you?” Dawn demanded, almost panic-stricken.