Then she said good-by, leaving him with heart throbbing and nerves tingling to his finger tips. Ah, how dear she was! What mad folly to think he could forget her! Every glance of her eye, every tone in her soft Scotch voice, every motion of hand and body, how familiar they all were! Like the faint elusive perfume from the clover fields of childhood, they smote upon his senses with intoxicating power. Standing there tingling and trembling, he made one firm resolve. Never would he see her again. Tomorrow he would make a long-planned trip to the city. He dared not wait another day. To-morrow? No, that was Sunday. He would spend one full happy day in that ravine seeking to recatch the emotions that had thrilled his boy's heart on that great night five years ago, and having thus filled his heart, he would take his departure without seeing her again.
It was the custom of the people of the ranch to spend Sunday afternoon at the Mission. So without a word even to French, calling his dogs, Captain and Queen, Kalman rode down the trail that led past the lake and toward the Night Hawk ravine. By that same trail he had gone on that memorable afternoon, and though five years had passed, the thoughts, the imaginings of that day, were as freshly present with him as if it had been but yesterday. And though they were the thoughts and imaginings of a mere boy, yet to-day they seemed to him good and worthy of his manhood.
Down the trail, well beaten now, through the golden poplars he rode, his dogs behind him, till he reached the pitch of the ravine.
There, where he had scrambled down, a bridle path led now. It was very different, and yet how much remained unchanged. There was the same glorious sun raining down his golden beams upon the yellow poplar leaves, the same air, sweet and genial, in him the same heart, and before him the same face, but sweeter it seemed, and eyes the same that danced with every sunbeam and lured him on. He was living again the rapture of his boyhood's first great passion.
At the mine's mouth he paused. Not a feature remained of the cave that he had discovered five years ago, but sitting there upon his horse, how readily he reconstructed the scene! Ah, how easy it was! Every line of that cave, the new fresh earth, the gleaming black seam, the very stones in the walls, he could replace.
Carefully, deliberately, he recalled the incidents of the evening spent in the cave: the very words she spoke; how her lips moved as she spoke them; how her eyes glanced, now straight at him, now from under the drooping lids; how she smiled, how she wept, how she laughed aloud; how her face shone with the firelight playing on it, and the soul light radiating through it. He revelled in the memory of it all. There was the very spot where Mr. Penny had lain in vocal slumber. Here he had stood with the snowstorm beating on his face. He resolved to trace step by step the path he had taken that night, and to taste again the bliss of which he had drunk so deep.
And all the while, as he rode down the gorge, underneath the rapture of remembering, he was conscious of an exquisite pain. But he would go through with it. He would not allow the pain to spoil his day, his last day near her. Down by the running water, as on that night, underneath and through the crowding trees, out to where the gorge widened into the valley, he rode. When hark! He paused.
