This he found to be difficult.  His course lay along the top of the ridge where the obstructions were many.  There were outcrops, boulders, ravines, broken twigs, old leaves, and dikes, all of which had to be surmounted or avoided.  They were all aggravating, but the dikes possessed some intellectual interest which the others lacked.

A dike, be it understood, is a hole in the earth made visible.  That is to say, in old days, when mountains were much loftier than they are now, various agencies brought it to pass that they split and cracked and yawned down to the innermost cores of their being in such hideous fashion that chasms and holes of great depth and perpendicularity were opened in them.  Thereupon the interior fires were released, and these, vomiting up a vast supply of molten material, filled said chasms and holes to the very brim.  The molten material cooled into fire-hardened rock.  The rains descended and the snows melted.  Under their erosive influence the original mountains were cut down somewhat, but the erstwhile molten material, being, as we have said, fire-hardened, wasted very little, or not at all, and, as a consequence, stands forth above its present surroundings in exact mould of the ancient cracks or holes.

Now, some dikes are long and narrow, others are short and wide, and still others are nearly round.  All, however, are highest points, and, head and shoulders above the trees, look abroad over the land.

When Bennington came to one of these dikes he was forced to pick his way carefully in a detour around its base.  Between times he found hobnails much inclined to click against unforeseen stones.  The broken twig came to possess other than literary importance.  After a little his nerves asserted themselves.  Unconsciously he relaxed his attention and began to think.

The subject of his thoughts was the girl he had seen just twenty-four hours before.  He caught himself remembering little things he had not consciously noticed at the time, as, for instance, the strange contrast between the mischief in her eyes and the austerity of her brow, or the queer little fashion she had of winking rapidly four or five times, and then opening her eyes wide and looking straight into the depths of his own.  He considered it quite a coincidence that he had unconsciously returned to the spot on which they had met the day before—­the rich Crazy Horse lode.

As though in answer to his recognition of this fact, her voice suddenly called to him from above.

“Hullo, little boy!” it cried.

He felt at once that he was pleased at the encounter.

“Hullo!” he answered; “where are you?”

“Right here.”

He looked up, and then still up, until, at the flat top of the castellated dike that stood over him, he caught a gleam of pink.  The contrast between it, the blue of the sky, and the dark green of the trees, was most beautiful and unusual.  Nature rarely uses pink, except in sunsets and in flowers.  Bennington thought pleasedly how every impression this girl made upon him was one of grace or beauty or bright colour.  The gleam of pink disappeared, and a great pine cone, heavy with pitch, came buzzing through the air to fall at his feet.