that's Mrs. Bradley--and give her your letter.Stop!"He drew a carpenter's pencil from his pocket, scrawled two or three words across the open sheet and tossed it back to the stranger."See you at tea!Excuse me--Mr. Mainwaring--we're short-handed--and--the engine--"But here he disappeared suddenly.
Without glancing at the note again, the stranger quietly replaced it in his pocket, and struck out across the fallen trunks towards the silver-fir.He quickly found the trail indicated by Bradley,although it was faint and apparently worn by a single pair of feet as a shorter and private cut from some more travelled path.It was well for the stranger that he had a keen eye or he would have lost it; it was equally fortunate that he had a mountaineering instinct,for a sudden profound deepening of the blue mist seen dimly through the leaves before him caused him to slacken his steps.The trail bent abruptly to the right; a gulf fully two thousand feet deep was at his feet!It was the Great Canyon.
At the first glance it seemed so narrow that a rifle-shot could have crossed its tranquil depths; but a second look at the comparative size of the trees on the opposite mountain convinced him of his error.A nearer survey of the abyss also showed him that instead of its walls being perpendicular they were made of successive ledges or terraces to the valley below.Yet the air was so still, and the outlines so clearly cut, that they might have been only the reflections of the mountains around him cast upon the placid mirror of a lake.The spectacle arrested him, as it arrested all men, by some occult power beyond the mere attraction of beauty or magnitude; even the teamster never passed it without the tribute of a stone or broken twig tossed into its immeasurable profundity.
Reluctantly leaving the spot, the stranger turned with the trail that now began to skirt its edge.This was no easy matter, as the undergrowth was very thick, and the foliage dense to the perilous brink of the precipice.He walked on, however, wondering why Bradley had chosen so circuitous and dangerous a route to his house, which naturally would be some distance back from the canyon.
At the end of ten minutes' struggling through the "brush," the trail became vague, and, to all appearances, ended.Had he arrived?The thicket was as dense as before; through the interstices of leaf and spray he could see the blue void of the canyon at his side, and he even fancied that the foliage ahead of him was more symmetrical and less irregular, and was touched here and there with faint bits of color.To complete his utter mystification, a woman's voice, very fresh, very youthful, and by no means unmusical, rose apparently from the circumambient air.He looked hurriedly to the right and left, and even hopelessly into the trees above him.
"Yes," said the voice, as if renewing a suspended conversation, "it was too funny for anything.There were the two Missouri girls from Skinner's, with their auburn hair ringleted, my dear, like the old 'Books of Beauty'--in white frocks and sashes of an unripe greenish yellow, that puckered up your mouth like persimmons.One of them was speechless from good behavior, and the other--well! the other was so energetic she called out the figures before the fiddler did,and shrieked to my vis-a-vis to dance up to the entire stranger--meaning ME, if you please."
The voice appeared to come from the foliage that overhung the canyon, and the stranger even fancied he could detect through the shimmering leafy veil something that moved monotonously to and fro.
Mystified and impatient, he made a hurried stride forward, his foot struck a wooden step, and the next moment the mystery was made clear.He had almost stumbled upon the end of a long veranda that projected over the abyss before a low, modern dwelling, till then invisible, nestling on its very brink.The symmetrically-trimmed foliage he had noticed were the luxuriant Madeira vines that hid the rude pillars of the veranda; the moving object was a rocking-chair, with its back towards the intruder, that disclosed only the brown hair above, and the white skirts and small slippered feet below, of a seated female figure.In the mean time, a second voice from the interior of the house had replied to the figure in the chair, who was evidently the first speaker:--
"It must have been very funny; but as long as Jim is always bringing somebody over from the mill, I don't see how I can go to those places.You were lucky, my dear, to escape from the new Division Superintendent last night; he was insufferable to Jim with his talk of his friend the San Francisco millionaire, and to me with his cheap society airs.I do hate a provincial fine gentleman."
The situation was becoming embarrassing to the intruder.At the apparition of the woman, the unaffected and simple directness he had previously shown in his equally abrupt contact with Bradley had fled utterly; confused by the awkwardness of his arrival, and shocked at the idea of overhearing a private conversation, he stepped hurriedly on the veranda.
"Well? go on!" said the second voice impatiently."Well, who else was there?WHAT did you say?I don't hear you.What's the matter?"
The seated figure had risen from her chair, and turned a young and pretty face somewhat superciliously towards the stranger, as she said in a low tone to her unseen auditor, "Hush! there is somebody here."
The young man came forward with an awkwardness that was more boyish than rustic.His embarrassment was not lessened by the simultaneous entrance from the open door of a second woman, apparently as young as and prettier than the first.
"I trust you'll excuse me for--for--being so wretchedly stupid," he stammered, "but I really thought, you know, that--that--I was following the trail to--to--the front of the house, when I stumbled in--in here."
