joyously.

"Get on, Marne," he cried. "We're overdue in Alder."

Marne switched her tail impatiently and canted back a long ear to listen,
but she did not increase her pace; for Marne had only one gait, and if Vic
occasionally thumped her, it was rather by way of conversation than in any
hope of hurrying their journey.



Chapter II. Grey Molly

If her soul had been capable of enthusiasm, Marne could have made the trip
on schedule time, but she was a burro good for nothing except to carry a
pack well nigh half her own weight, live on forage that might have starved
a goat, and smell water fifteen miles in time of drought. Speed was not in
her vocabulary, and accordingly it was late afternoon rather than morning
when Gregg, pointing his course between the ears of Marne, steered her
through Murphy's Pass and came out over Alder. There they paused by mutual
consent, and the burro flicked one long ear forward to listen to the
rushing of the Doane River. It filled the valley with continual murmur, and
just below them, where the brown, white-flecked current twisted around an
elbow bend, lay Alder tossed down without plan, here a boulder and there a
house. They seemed marvelously flimsy structures, and one felt surprise
that the weight the winter snow had not crushed them, or that the Doane River
had not sent a strong current licking over bank and tossed the whole village
crashing down the ravine. One building was very much like other, but Gregg's
familiar eye pierced through the roofs and into Widow Sullivan's staggering
shack, into Hezekiah Whittleby's hushed sitting-room, down to the moist, dark