“That’s it!  But I couldn’t say it like that.  But I know some of them little fires.”

“We must make one some day.  Won’t it be fun!”

“It sure is when a fella ain’t hustlin’ to get grub.  That poem sounds better after grub, at night, when the stars are shinin’ and the horses grazin’ and mebby the pack-horse bell jinglin’ ’way off somewhere.  Then one of them little fires is sure friendly.”

“Have you been reading this winter?”

“Oh, some.  Mostly forestry and about the war.  Bud was tellin’ me to read up on forestry.  He’s goin’ to put me over west—­and a bigger job this summer.”

“You mean—­to stay?”

“About as much as I stay anywhere.”

Dorothy pouted.  She had thought that the Blue Mesa and the timberlands were more beautiful than ever that spring, but to think that the neighboring cabin would be vacant all summer!  No cheery whistling and no wood smoke curling from the chimney and no blithe voice talking to the ponies.  No jolly “Good-mornin’, miss, and the day is sure startin’ out proud to see you.”  Well, Dorothy had considered Mr. Shoop a friend.  She would have a very serious talk with Mr. Shoop when she saw him.

She had read of Waring’s fight in the desert and of his slow recovery, and that Waring was Lorry’s father; matters that she could not speak of to Lorry, but the knowledge of them lent a kind of romance to her ranger man.  At times she studied Lorry, endeavoring to find in him some trace of his father’s qualities.  She had not met Waring, but she imagined much from what she had heard and read.  And could Lorry, who had such kind gray eyes and such a pleasant face, deliberately go out and kill men as his father had done?  Why should men kill each other?  The world was so beautiful, and there was so much to live for.

Although the trail across the great forest terraces below was open clear up to the Blue Mesa, the trails on the northern side of the range were still impassable.  The lookout man would not occupy his lonely cabin on Mount Baldy for several weeks to come, and Lorry’s work kept him within a moderate radius of the home camp.

Several times Dorothy and her father rode with Lorry, spending the day searching for new vistas while he mended trail or repaired the telephone line that ran from Mount Baldy to the main office.  Frequently they would have their evening meal in Bronson’s camp, after which Lorry always asked them to his cabin, where Dorothy would play for them while they smoked contentedly in front of the log fire.  To Dorothy it seemed that they had always lived in a cabin on the Blue Mesa and that Lorry had always been their neighbor, whom it was a joy to tease because he never showed impatience, and whose attitude toward her was that of a brother.