like undertakers who had made a truce with death by making a business of it.  But these deciduous trees, that had rioted in green through spring and summer, wrapped themselves in robes to die, the thinner the more royal; the maples in scarlet, the swamp-oak in purple—­bloody purple where the sun smote on its upper boughs.  Already the robes had worn thin, and their ribs showed.  Leaves strewed the flat rock where Ruth stood, looking down.

She was not thinking of the leaves, nor of the fall of the year.  She was thinking that her lord would be hungered.  She went back to her cooking-pot under the cliff overhung with heath and juniper.

Herself fearless—­or less fearful than other women—­she did not for some time let her mind run on possible accidents to him.  He was a man, and would arrive, though tired and hungered.  Not until the sun sank behind the upper pines did any sense of her own loneliness assail her.  Then she bethought her that with night, if he delayed, the forest would wrap her around, formless, haunted by wild beasts.  The singing of birds, never in daylight utterly drowned by the roar of the fall, had ceased about her; the call of the hidden chickadees, the cheep-cheep of a friendly robin, hopping in near range of the cooking-pot, the sawing of busy chipmunks.

These sounds had ceased; but she did not feel the silence until, far up the valley behind her, a loon sent forth its sole unhappy cry.  It rang a moment between the cliffs.  As it died away she felt how friendly had been these casual voices, and wondered what beasts the forest might hold.

She went back to the cabin, lit a lamp, and lifted one of the guns off its rack.  She charged it—­well she had learnt how to charge a gun.

Twilight was falling.  The fire burned beneath the cooking-pot; but, seated on the flat stone with the gun laid across her knees and the fall sounding beneath her, she had another thought—­that the fire, set in an angle of the rock, and moreover hidden around the house’s corner, was but a poor signal.  It shed no ray down the glen.

She would light another fire on the flat stone.  In the dusk she collected dry twigs, piled stouter sticks above them, covered the whole with leaves, and lit it, fetching a live brand from under the cooking-pot.  The flame leapt up, danced over the leaves, died down and again revived.  When assured that it was caught, she sat beside it, staring across the flame over the valley now swallowed in darkness, still with the gun laid across her knees.

“Ruth!  O Ruth!”

His voice came up over the roar of the fall—­which, while he stumbled among the boulders below, had drowned his footsteps.

“Dear!  Ah—­have a care!”

“Yes; hold a light. . . .  It must be dangerous here.”

She snatched a brand from the fire.  She had collected a fresh heap of twigs and leaves in the lap of her gown, groping in the dusk for them; and his first sight of her had been as she stood high emptying them in a red stream to feed the flames.  A witch she seemed, pouring sacrifice on that wild altar, while the light of it danced upon her face and figure.  Having gained the ledge of the second cascade, he anchored himself on good foothold and stared up, catching breath before he hailed.