"Perhaps it would do your mother good to camp for a while. Can't you persuade her to do so?" "I'm trying to do that--I mean, to stop work; but she says, 'What can we do to earn a living?'" "If nothing happens I hope to spend an hour or two at the Forks next Sunday. I hope to find your mother better." Their words were of this unemotional sort, but in their voices something subtler than the electrical current vibrated. He called to her in wordless fashion and she answered in the same mysterious code, and when she said "Good-bye" and hung up the receiver her world went suddenly gray and commonplace, as if a ray of special sunlight had been withdrawn. The attendant asked, with village bluntness: "It _was_ Ross, wasn't it?" Lee Virginia resented this almost as much as if it were the question of an eavesdropper; but she answered: "Yes; he wanted to know how my mother was." She turned as she reached the street and looked up toward the glorious purpling deeps from which the ranger's voice had come, and the thought that he was the sole guardian of those dark forests and shining streams--that his way led among those towering peaks and lone canons--made of him something altogether admirable. That night her loneliness, her sense of weakness, carried her to bed with tears of despair in her eyes. Lize had insisted on going back to her work looking like one stricken with death, yet so rebellious that her daughter could do nothing with her; and in the nature of fate the day's business had been greater than ever, so that they had all been forced to work like slaves to feed the flood of custom. And Lize herself still kept her vigil in her chair above her gold. Closing her mind to the town and all it meant to her, the girl tried to follow, in imagination, the ranger treading his far, high trails. She recalled his voice, so cultivated, so rich of inflection, with dangerous tenderness. It had come down to her from those lofty parapets like that of a friend, laden with something sweeter than sympathy, more alluring than song. The thought of some time going up to the high country where he dwelt came to her most insistently, and she permitted herself to dream of long days of companionship with him, of riding through sunlit aisles of forest with him, of cooking for him at the cabin--what time her mother grew strong once more--and these dreams bred in her heart a wistful ache, a hungry need which made her pillow a place of mingled ecstasy and pain. VII THE POACHERS One morning, as he topped the rise between the sawmill and his own station, Cavanagh heard two rifle-shots in quick succession snapping across the high peak on his left. Bringing his horse to a stand, he unslung his field-glasses, and slowly and minutely swept the tawny slopes of Sheep Mountain from which the forbidden sounds seemed to come.