"Old Man," he said, "You must be pretty lonesome up here, and I'm
glad to meet you."

For a while he sat against it--resting. He had no particular
purpose that day--no particular destination. His saddle-bags were
across the cantle of his cow-boy saddle. His fishing rod was tied
under one flap. He was young and his own master. Time was hanging
heavy on his hands that day and he loved the woods and the nooks
and crannies of them where his own kind rarely made its way.
Beyond, the cove looked dark, forbidding, mysterious, and what was
beyond he did not know. So down there he would go. As he bent his
head forward to rise, his eye caught the spot of sunlight, and he
leaned over it with a smile. In the black earth was a human foot-
print--too small and slender for the foot of a man, a boy or a
woman. Beyond, the same prints were visible--wider apart--and he
smiled again. A girl had been there. She was the crimson flash
that he saw as he started up the steep and mistook for a flaming
bush of sumach. She had seen him coming and she had fled. Still
smiling, he rose to his feet.




III


On one side he had left the earth yellow with the coming noon, but
it was still morning as he went down on the other side. The laurel
and rhododendron still reeked with dew in the deep, ever-shaded