“The call of the wild!” He spoke lightly and yet he glimpsed a soul really stirred; saw that for the moment, if for no longer, the great solitudes held her enthralled.  More seriously he added:  “It’s the blood of your ancestors.  It is just getting a chance to make itself heard.  The racket of Market Street drowns it out.”

She nodded thoughtfully.  They did full justice to their lunch, finished with her purchases for dessert, quite as he had prophesied, and lazed through the nooning hour.  Gloria lay on a yielding mat of pine-needles, her eyes grave as her spirit within her was grave, moved by influences at once vague, restless, and tremendous.  This was not her first day in the woods, and yet she felt strangely that it was.  He had spoken of her “ancestors.”  She knew little of her mother’s and her father’s forbears; she had never been greatly concerned with individuals whom she had never known.  In a way she had been led to think, by her own mother, however so innocently, that she was “living them down.”  They had been of a ruder race that had lived in a ruder day.  In San Francisco, to Miss Gloria Gaynor in a pretty new gown, one of a cluster of dainty girls, those grandparents had seemed further away than the one step of removal between them and her nearer blood.  To-day they came near her, very near, indeed, for the hour that she lay looking up at the sky.  Not many words passed between her and King; he sat, back to tree, and smoked his pipe and was quite content with the silence.

She started out of a reverie to find King standing up, his body rigid as he stood in the attitude of one who listens, his head a little to one side, his eyes narrowed.

“Wait for me,” he said.  “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

She sat up and watched him.  He went back to the sloping granite slab, over it, down among the alders, and out of sight.  For a moment she heard him among the bushes; then as all sound made by him died away there was only the purl of the creek and the eternal murmur of the pines.  Now it seemed to her more silent than before, even when King had sat wordlessly near her.  And yet, incongruously, whereas the silence was deepened by utter solitude, the voices of running water and stirring trees rose clearer, louder, more insistent.  A falling pine-needle, striking all but noiselessly at her side, made her turn swiftly.

Only now did she hear that other sound, which King had detected.  It was the thud of horses’ hoofs; with it came men’s voices faintly.  King had gone that way, Gloria stood up, smothered under a sense of aloneness She resented his going; she was on the verge of calling to him; her heart began to beat faster.  She wasn’t afraid ... she didn’t think she was afraid....