CHAPTER

I. Green fields and Pastures new
II.  Mr. Abbey arrives
III.  Halfway point
IV.  A foretaste of things to come
V. The toll of big timber
VI.  The dignity (?) Of toil
VII.  Some neighborly assistance
VIII.  Durance Vile
IX.  Jack Fyfe’s camp
X. One way out
XI.  The plunge
XII.  And so they were married
XIII.  In which events mark time
XIV.  A close call and A new acquaintance
XV.  A Resurrection
XVI.  The crisis
XVII.  In which there is A further clash
XVIII.  The opening gun
XIX.  Free as the wind
XX.  Echoes
XXI.  An unexpected meeting
XXII.  The fire behind the smoke
XXIII.  A ride by night
XXIV.  “Out of the night that covers me”

CHAPTER I

GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW

The Imperial Limited lurched with a swing around the last hairpin curve of the Yale canyon.  Ahead opened out a timbered valley,—­narrow on its floor, flanked with bold mountains, but nevertheless a valley,—­down which the rails lay straight and shining on an easy grade.  The river that for a hundred miles had boiled and snarled parallel to the tracks, roaring through the granite sluice that cuts the Cascade Range, took a wider channel and a leisurely flow.  The mad haste had fallen from it as haste falls from one who, with time to spare, sees his destination near at hand; and the turgid Fraser had time to spare, for now it was but threescore miles to tidewater.  So the great river moved placidly—­as an old man moves when all the headlong urge of youth is spent and his race near run.

On the river side of the first coach behind the diner, Estella Benton nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the window sill.  It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and dry and still.