She rested both hands on her saddle horn and rose in her stirrups. For a long time her black eyes gazed down the precipice below them, while the wind whipped wisps of hair about her forehead. Oliver waited, drunk with the thought of his nearness to her. "Watchman of the Dead!" she murmured at last. Oliver started. "Two years ago," she went on softly, "I met the second Watchman of the Dead. You are the third. The first was murdered in this forest. His name was Bolivio, and he made silver-mounted saddles and hair-tasseled bridles." Oliver scarce dared to breathe for fear of breaking the spell that seemed to have come over her. She did not look at him. She continued to gaze into her beloved cañon and at her beloved hills beyond. "Oh, where shall I begin!" she cried at last. "Where is the beginning? A man would begin at the first, I suppose, but a woman just can't! But I won't be true to the feminine method and begin at the end. I won't be a copy-cat. I'll begin in the middle, anyway." A smile flickered across her red lips; but still she gazed away from him. "Two years ago," she said, "I met the dearest man." Oliver straightened, and lumps shuttled at the hinges of his jaws. "I was riding White Ann on one of my lonely wanderings through the woods. I met him on the ridge above the Old Ivison Place and the river. "After that I met him many times, in the forest and elsewhere; and the more I talked with him the more I liked him. He was my idea of a man." Oliver, too, was now gazing into the cañon, but he saw neither crags nor trees nor rushing green river. "And he grew to like me," her low tones continued. "We talked on many subjects, but mostly of what we've been talking about today. "He was an idealist, this man. He was comparatively wealthy, but there are things in life that he placed above money and its accumulation. By and by he grew to like me more and more, and finally he told me point blank that I was his ideal woman; and then he grew confidential and told me all about himself--his past, present, and what he hoped for in the future. And in my hands he placed a trust. Please God, I have tried to keep the faith!" She threw back her head and followed the flight of an eagle soaring serenely over Lime Rock. And with her eyes thus lifted she softly said: "That man was Peter Drew--your father." Oliver's breast heaved, but he made no sound. Once more her eyes were sweeping the abyss. "That's the middle," she said. "Now I'll go back to the beginning and tell you what Peter Drew entrusted to my keeping. "Thirty years ago Peter Drew, who then called himself Dan Smeed, was the partner of Adam Selden. They mined and hunted and trapped together throughout this country.