LIKE THE BOY HE WAS Down the balsam and manzanita slope toward the little valley where she lived, Jack stared hungrily during many an empty, dragging hour.

Until the darkness had twice drawn down the black curtain that shut him away from the world, he had hoped she would come.

She had been so friendly, so understandingly sympathetic--she must know how long the days were up there.
On the third day Hank came riding up the trail that sought the easiest slopes.

He brought coal-oil and bacon and coffee and smoking tobacco and the week's accumulation of newspapers, and three magazines; but he did not bring any word from Marion Rose, nor the magazines she had promised.

When Hank had unsaddled the horses to rest their backs, and had eaten his lunch and had smoked a cigarette in the shade of a rock, his slow thoughts turned to the gossip of his little world.
He told of the latest encounter with the crabbed fireman on Claremont, grinning appreciatively because the fireman's ill temper had been directed at a tourist who had gone up with Hank.