“Why, I’ve been trying to get you by telephone all day,” he said, “but the wires are cut—­”

In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the brooding storm, the impending horror.

“Has Fordie brought the sheep down?”

“Yes, ages ago; he passed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen thousand of ’em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to the bottom.  Don’t you see how they skinned every branch?  That’s why the cattlemen hate ’em!  Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now.  Why; anything wrong?”

She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman’s report.  She knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the same.  She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own being,—­

“Eleanor, look at me!  Look in my eyes!  Look up at me—­”

She felt the rush of her being to meet and blend and fuse in the flame of his love.  Then, she looked up.  His eyes drank hers in one poised moment of delirious recognition, of tempestuous tenderness.  The world swam out of ken.  All but the fluted melody of the blue bird; and she knew they must always sound together, the trill and the rasp, the blue bird and the jay, the true and the false, love and its counterfeit.

“We go into this fight together,” he said very quietly, “And forever!” He placed the sprig of everlasting in her hand.  “You can count me on the firing line.”

Then he had thrown the reins over his broncho’s neck, headed the horse back up the Ridge and was slithering down the steep slope giving her hand-hold as of steel-springs.  So short was the interval, it could not be measured in time.  Yet it had rivetted eternity.  She saw the rolling clouds of ink writhing up the Valley turning everything to blackness:  yet she did not know it.  The little flutter of air changed to whiplashes and puffs of wind that curled the black hair forward over her unhatted face in a frame.  Wayland looked at her and felt his masterdom going to those same winds; for the pace had painted her ivory cheeks, not rose color, but the deep flame of the wild flower.  Some day, perhaps,—­no matter; he set his teeth and screwed the whipcord muscles taut; for the moraine stones had begun to roll, and there was a zig-zag flash of lightning that sent fire balls sizzling over the rock.  He braced her to the leap down the steep sliding moraine, and felt the frenzy of joy from her touch.

“There!  We took the jump together!  You didn’t push me over the edge of things,” he said, as their feet touched the pine needle slope.

This time, the lightning came with a ripping splintering rocking echo.