In the gray light that is the ghost of morning, a fantastic procession went slowly down the headlong slope of Dead Man’s Mile. The tall doctor strode ahead with his swinging lantern, and behind him came the two men he had brought, carrying John Herrick between them upon a litter of blankets. Nancy, following them clung fast to her pommel and was glad the saddle was so deep that she could not well fall out of it, no matter how much the doctor’s pony, upon which she was mounted, swayed and slid down the path. For guidance, he was left almost as much to himself as was the extra horse following at the end of the line, whose nose was so close to the tail of the pony that Beatrice rode, and whose footsteps were guided by the second lantern that bobbed and jerked from her saddle-bow.

“It was the next thing to impossible to climb up in bright daylight,” Beatrice thought. “How can we ever go down in the dark, with a helpless person to carry?”

But the doctor had declared that further delay meant too much danger to John Herrick, and that the attempt must be made. Down they went, past the rocky shelf where the girls had found him, past the dizzy precipice where Beatrice had dropped the ax and had so nearly followed it, over barriers that looked impassable, down steep declivities that were nothing but wells of blackness and hidden danger. A word of direction from the doctor, a breathless squeak from Nancy once when her horse lurched suddenly beneath her, the steady scuffle of the ponies’ feet—those were the only sounds. They had passed the icy shallows of the tumbling stream, they had looped over the jutting shoulder of smooth rock where there was scarcely a foothold: there was a long, stiff-legged jump for each pony, and they were down.

Through the rustling underbrush of the lower slope, the main trail leading downward from Gray Cloud Pass was firm under their feet.

“Looks like Broadway, don’t it, after that squirrel track back yonder?” observed one of the men, as they stopped to rest for a little. The other man went to catch Nancy’s pony which had been turned loose before the storm and which now came, stamping and snorting, through the dark, drawn by the lantern light and by the desire for company of its own kind.

It was possible to carry the litter between two horses now, so that the doctor mounted, left one man to follow on foot, and ordered them all to press forward. A moving shadow in the darkness proved to be John Herrick’s black mare, who had managed to scramble to her feet and stood, with head drooping and one leg helpless, beside the path.

“We can’t stop for her now,” the doctor said. “I will send some one back to see if there is anything to be done.”

The poor creature was left behind, although Beatrice leaned from her saddle to touch the soft anxious nose that was thrust out to her, and although a pleading whinny could be heard long after the darkness had swallowed up the suffering pony.

They went on steadily and quickly now, with Beatrice nodding in her saddle from unbelievable weariness. They were fording a stream; they were threading the grove of aspen-trees; they had reached the last mile of their journey. The whispering leaves were all speaking together in the morning breeze; the birds were beginning to sing; the darkness had faded so that the light of Beatrice’s lantern had shrunk to the pale ghost of a flame. She looked back to see the bare granite slope above her turn from gray to rose, and to see the stark summit of Gray Cloud Mountain shine in sudden silver radiance as the sunrise touched it.

Almost immediately she saw the men ahead of her stop, dismount, and lean over the litter.

“He is awake, and I think he wants you,” one of them said to Nancy, but she listened and shook her head.

“He is not really conscious,” she answered, “and it is my Aunt Anna that he is asking for.”

It was a week, a dragging, interminable week, before any one was able to know just what were to be the results of that fateful expedition up the slopes of Gray Cloud Mountain. Nancy, stiff and aching in every muscle from so much unwonted riding, was the first to recover and to set about her housekeeping. Beatrice had sprained her knee in that perilous moment when she dropped the ax over the mountain-side, but she had scarcely noticed the mishap until, slipping from the saddle at her own door, she found herself unable to walk into the house. For three days she was almost helpless; by the end of seven, however, she was able to get about and help Nancy and Christina with their work.

Christina had come to stay at the cabin so that the girls might not be alone, for Aunt Anna had moved to John Herrick’s house. It seemed at first that she had found her brother only in time to part with him again, for through four terrible days he lay so ill that not even Dr. Minturn could have much hope. Perhaps no one knew until that dreadful time how brave Aunt Anna could be. It was she who was cheerful; it was she who was hopeful and kept up the courage of the others; it was her tired, white, but smiling face upon which John Herrick’s eyes first fell when he opened them to consciousness again.

The three girls were standing in the door and Dr. Minturn was with them, but it was only his sister that John Herrick saw.

“Anna,” he said, “I have had a bad dream, I think.”

“Yes,” she nodded gravely. “We have all been dreaming, but at last we are all awake.”

His eyes went to the window where, in the hot sun of brilliant noonday, the moving tree-tops showed their densest green and the far mountains stood blue against a bluer sky. He looked doubtful for a moment, as though he had expected to find himself in his old home, in that room where the rain in the chimney had lulled him to sleep through childhood nights. When he remembered all that had happened since, would he shrink away again into that isolation he had made for himself? They could actually see, from the changes in his face, just how the flood of memories rose and swept over him, recalling everything, from his accident on the hill back to that day when he had vowed to shut the door of home behind him forever. At last he turned to his sister again and smiled.

“I thought I could never forgive all of you,” he said, “and it was you, this whole long time, who should have forgiven me. Through all these years I have been remembering how I went away, how I looked into that row of serious faces, and thought I read doubt in every one of them. Yes, Anna dear, I know you believed in me still; I know you called after me; but I vowed it was too late. I heard your voice as I closed the door: it has followed me ever since, but I would not listen. Can you forgive me?”

The girls slipped away and Dr. Minturn closed the door.

“He’ll do,” he said gruffly. “He won’t need any of us to cure him now.”

A man who has spent the last ten years in the free open and the bracing air of the Rocky Mountains does not linger long upon a sick bed when once he has begun to recover. John Herrick was sitting up in a week’s time and was able to limp about the house at the end of ten days. As his strength grew, so did Aunt Anna’s, so that step by step they came along the road of health together.

“Isn’t she wearing herself out nursing him?” Beatrice asked Dr. Minturn anxiously, but he only laughed.

“It never harms people to do what they like most in the world,” he answered. “I can hardly tell which of the two is getting well the faster. They have no further need for me, so I will be getting back to Miriam. I can leave the whole affair in your capable hands, Miss Beatrice.”

Beatrice laughed, yet flushed with pleasure that the doctor should voice such confidence in her. She could not help feeling a little thrill of pride when she thought how well things were turning out. Even the black mare was hobbling about the corral, giving promise that she could be ridden almost as soon as John Herrick would be able to mount her. There was still the affair in the village to be made clear, but of that Beatrice had thought very little lately, and not at all of Dabney Mills.

A growing restlessness on Christina’s part was the first reminder of what was going on about them.

“I don’t want to go,” she explained when, on Aunt Anna’s returning to the cabin, Christina announced that she was needed at home; “but I am anxious when I am away from Thorvik. I never know what new things he is thinking up.”

She had waited to wash the evening dishes, lingering over them as though she were unwilling to finish, but she had said a reluctant good-by at last and had gone away down the hill. Beatrice sat on the doorstep looking after her, and lingered long after she was gone, watching the darkness deepen between the tree trunks, and the fireflies moving to and fro. It had been an over-busy day with the result that she was very tired. It was surely the worst possible moment that Dabney Mills could have chosen to come striding through the dark, whistling with irritating shrillness.

“There are all sorts of rumors about John Herrick’s being hurt,” he began at once, “so I came up to see if I could get the real facts. I tried to interview the old doctor when he was down in the village, but I didn’t have much satisfaction. Now, you will have no objection to telling me a few things, I feel sure.”

On that very spot, Beatrice thought, he had been told once, twice, it was difficult to say how many times, that his............