Even before he finished speaking her brows arched in protest, and he felt the invisible barrier stiffen hard as a wall.  “We really must hurry, Mr. Tisdale,” she said, rising.  “Though it may be impossible to reach Wenatchee to-night, we must find some sort of house.  And where there is a house, there must be housekeeping and”—­her voice wavered—­“a woman.”

“Of course,” he answered.  “And we have at least two hours of daylight left.  Don’t worry; I am going now to hurry that carriage around.”

He had said “of course,” but while he went back to the buggy, his mind reviewed the sordid shelters he had found in just such solitudes, where a woman’s housekeeping was the exception.  Men in communities employed camp cooks, but most prospectors, ranchers, and cattlemen depended on themselves.  There had been times when he himself had been forced to make bread.  He had learned that first winter he had spent in Alaska with Weatherbee.  At the thought of that experimental mixture, he smiled grimly.  Then, suddenly, he imagined this gently nurtured woman confronted by a night in such a shack as they had occupied.  He saw her waiting expectantly for that impossible chaperon; and, grasping the situation, struggling pluckily to cover her amazement and dismay; he saw himself and Weatherbee nerving each other to offer her that miserable fare.  He hoped they would find a housekeeper at the first house on that mountain road, but that lunch of Lighter’s gave him a sense of security, like a reserve fund, inadequate, yet something against imminent panic.

Miss Armitage did not return to her seat when he was gone.  She fell to pacing the level; to the upper spur and back; to the lower wall and return; then, finally, it was a few yards further to the bend, to discover what progress Tisdale had made.  The buggy was not yet in sight, but the new rope stretched diagonally from beyond the breach in the road to a standing tree on the bluff above her, and he was at work with the hatchet, cutting away an upright bough on the fallen pine.  Other broken limbs, gathered from the debris, were piled along the slide to build up the edge.  When his branch dropped, he sprang down and dragged it lengthwise to reinforce the rest.  Presently he was on the log again, reaching now for the buggy tongue, he set his knee as a brace on the stump of the limb, his muscular body bent, lifted, strained.  Then the front wheels rolled up across the bole; he slipped to the ground and grasped the outer one, steadying it down.  After a moment, when he had taken in the slack of the line, the remaining tires slowly followed, and he began to ease the vehicle along the patched roadway.  The rain of rock was renewed; fragments of granite shifted under the bulkhead of boughs; the buggy heeled lower, lower; then, at the final angle, began to right while the rope strung taut.  The narrowest point was passed, and Tisdale stopped a breathing space.