When Joan was awakened her room was shrouded in gray gloom. A bustle
sound from the big cabin, and outside horses stamped and men talked.
She sat alone at breakfast and ate by lantern-light. It was
necessary to take a lantern back to her cabin, and she was so long
in her preparations there that Kells called again. Somehow she did
not want to leave this cabin. It seemed protective and private, and
she feared she might not find such quarters again. Besides, upon the
moment of leaving she discovered that she had grown attached to the
place where she had suffered and thought and grown so much.
Kells had put out the lights. Joan hurried through the cabin and
outside. The gray obscurity had given way to dawn. The air was cold,
sweet, bracing with the touch of mountain purity in it. The men,
except Kells, were all mounted, and the pack-train was in motion.
Kells dragged the rude door into position, and then, mounting, he
called to Joan to follow. She trotted her horse after him, down the
slope, across the brook and through the wet willows, and out upon
the wide trail. She glanced ahead, discerning that the third man
from her was Jim Cleve; and that fact, in the start for Alder Creek,
made all the difference in the world.
When they rode out of the narrow defile into the valley the sun was
rising red and bright in a notch of the mountains. Clouds hung over
distant peaks, and the patches of snow in the high canons shone blue
and pink. Smith in the lead turned westward up the valley. Horses
trooped after the cavalcade and had to be driven back. There were
also cattle in the valley, and all these Kells left behind like an
honest rancher who had no fear for his stock. Deer stood off with
long ears pointed forward, watching the horses go by. There were
flocks of quail, and whirring grouse, and bounding jack-rabbits, and
occasionally a brace of sneaking coyotes. These and the wild
flowers, and the waving meadow-grass, the yellow-stemmed willows,
and the patches of alder, all were pleasurable to Joan's eyes and
restful to her mind.
Smith soon led away from this valley up out of the head of a ravine,
across a rough rock-strewn ridge, down again into a hollow that grew
to be a canon. The trail was bad. Part of the time it was the bottom
of a boulder-strewn brook where the horses slipped on the wet, round
stones. Progress was slow and time passed. For Joan, however, it was
a relief; and the slower they might travel the better she would like
it. At the end of that journey there were Gulden and the others, and
the gold-camp with its illimitable possibilities for such men.