and gold.  The trees on its banks were topped with emerald fire where they caught the light of the sun.  The trail to Miss Blake’s ranch ran along the river on the edge of a forest of pines.  At this hour they looked like a wall into which some magic permitted the wanderer to walk interminably.  Sheila was glad that she did not have to make use of this wizard invitation.  She “cached” her bundle, as Saint Mark had advised, in a thicket near the stream and walked resolutely forward along the trail.  Not even when her pony had left her on The Hill had she felt so desolate or so afraid.

She could not understand why she was here on her way to the ranch of this strange woman.  She felt astonished by her loneliness, by her rashness, by the dreadful lack in her life of all the usual protections.  Was youth meant so to venture itself?  This was what young men had done since the beginning of time.  She thought of Hilliard.  His life must have been just such a series of disconnected experiments.  Danger was in the very pattern of such freedom.  But she was a girl, only a girl as the familiar phrase expresses it—­a seventeen-year-old girl.  She was reminded of a pathetic and familiar line, “A woman naturally born to fears ...”  A wholesome reaction to pride followed and, suddenly, an amusing memory of Miss Blake, of her corduroy trousers stuffed into boots, of her broad, strong body, her square face with its firm lips and masterful red-brown eyes; a very heartening memory for such a moment.  Here was a woman that had adventured without fear and had quite evidently met with no disaster.

Sheila came to a little tumbling tributary and crossed it on a log.  On the farther side the trail broadened, grew more distinct; through an opening in tall, gray, misty cottonwoods she saw the corner of a log house.  At the same instant a dreadful tumult broke out.  The sound sent Sheila’s blood in a slapping wave back upon her heart.  All of her body turned cold.  She was fastened by stone feet to the ground.  It was the laughter of a mob of damned souls, an inhuman, despairing mockery of God.  It tore the quiet evening into shreds of fear.  This house was a madhouse holding revelry.  No—­of course, they were wolves, a pack of wolves.  Then, with a warmth of returning circulation, Sheila remembered Miss Blake’s dogs, the descendants of the wolf-dog that had littered on the body of a dead man.  Quarter-wolf, was it?  These voices had no hint of the homely barking of a watchdog, the friend of man’s loneliness!  But Sheila braced her courage.  Miss Blake made good use of her pack.  They pulled her sled, winters, in Hidden Creek.  They must then be partly civilized by service.  If only—­she smiled a desperate smile at the uncertainty—­they didn’t tear her to pieces when she came out from the shelter of the trees.  There was very great courage in Sheila’s short, lonely march through the little grove of cottonwood trees.  She was as white as the mountain columbine.  She walked slowly and held her head high.  She had taken up a stone for comfort.