The Claim Jumpers

"That's how I get up," explained the girl. "Now you go back around the

corner again, and when I'm ready I'll call."

Bennington obeyed. In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air

summoning him to approach and climb.

He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight

feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller

of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated.

"Hi!" he called, "how did you get up this?"

He looked across the intervening space expectantly, and then, to his

surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously.

"I--I," stammered a small voice after a moment's hesitation, "I guess

I--shinned!"

A light broke across Bennington's mind as to the origin of the two dark

streaks on the gown, and he laughed. The girl eyed him reproachfully

for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarrassed

manner. Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder. He shinned up the

tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the

bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was

a matter of no great difficulty. In another instant he stood upon the

top of the dike.

It was, as he had anticipated, nearly flat. Under the pine branch,

which might make a very good chair back, grew a thick cushion of moss.

The one tree broke the freedom of the eye's sweep toward the west, but

in all other directions it was uninterrupted. As the girl had said, the

tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating,

rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping

the foot of a great round boulder-mountain. Here and there a darker

spot suggested a break for a mountain peak; rarely a fleck of white

marked a mountain road. Back of them all--ridge, mountain, cavernous

valley--towered old Harney, sun-browned, rock-diademed, a few wisps of

cloud streaming down the wind from his brow, locks heavy with the age

of the great Manitou whom he was supposed to represent. Eastward, the

prairie like a peaceful sea. Above, the alert sky of the west. And

through all the air a humming--vast, murmurous, swelling--as the

mountain breeze touched simultaneously with strong hand the chords, not

of one, but a thousand pine harps.

Bennington drew in a deep breath, and looked about in all directions.

The girl watched him.

"Ah! it is beautiful!" he murmured at last with a half sigh, and looked

again.

She seized his hand eagerly.

"Oh, I'm so glad you said that--and no more than that!" she cried. "I

feel the sun fairy can make you welcome now."