"You don't know. No one ever knows when they start out in these mountains. Promise me, Bruce--to keep watch every minute. Remember there's nothing--_nothing_--that Simon won't stoop to do. He's like a wolf. He has no rules of fighting. He'd just as soon strike from ambush. How do I know that you'll ever come back again?" "But I will." He smiled at her, and his eyes dropped from hers to her lips. His heart seemed to miss a beat. He hadn't noticed these lips in particular before. The mouth was tender and girlish, its sensitiveness scarcely seeming fitting in a child of these wild places. He reached out and took her hand. "Good-by, Linda," he said, smiling. She smiled in reply, and her old cheer seemed to return to her. "Good-by, Bwovaboo. Be careful." "I'll be careful. And this reminds me of something." "What?" "That for all the time I've been away--and for all the time I'm going to be away now--I haven't done anything more--well, more intimate--than shake your hand." Her answer was to pout out her lips in the most natural way in the world. Bruce was usually deliberate in his motions; but all at once his deliberation fell away from him. There seemed to be no interlude of time between one position and another. His arms went about her, and he kissed her gently on the lips. But it was not at all as they expected. Both had gone into it lightly,--a boy-and-girl caress such as is usually not worth thinking about twice. He had supposed it would be just like the other kisses he had known in his growing-up days: a moment's soft pressure of the lips, a moment's delight, and nothing either to regret or rejoice in. But it was far more than this, after all. Perhaps because they had been too long in one another's thoughts; perhaps--living in a land of hated foes--because Linda had not known many kisses, this little caress beneath the pine went very straight home indeed to them both. They fell apart, both of them suddenly sobered. The girl's eyes were tender and lustrous, but startled too. "Good-by, Linda," he told her. "Good-by--Bwovaboo," she answered. He turned up the trail past the pine. He did not know that she stood watching him a long time, her hands clasped over her breast. XIII Miles farther than Linda's cabin, clear beyond the end of the trail that Duncan took, past even the highest ridge of Trail's End and in the region where the little rivers that run into the Umpqua have their starting place, is a certain land of Used to Be. Such a name as that doesn't make very good sense to a tenderfoot on the first hearing. Perhaps he can never see the real intelligence of it as long as he remains a tenderfoot. Such creatures cannot exist for long in the silences and the endless ridges and the unbeaten trails of this land; they either become woodsmen or have communication with the buzzards.