Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/117

Rh you arrived here. And you 're twice as good now as when you came."

Dan nodded. "Twice! Ten times as good! I was a wreck when I came. To-day I climbed halfway up Baldy—within a half mile of Snowbird's cabin—without stopping to rest."

Lennox looked thoughtful. More than once, of late, Dan had climbed up toward Snowbird's cabin. It was true that his guest and his daughter had become the best of companions in the two months; but on second thought, Lennox was not in the least afraid of complications. The love of the mountain women does not go out to physical inferiors. "Whoever gets her," he had said, "will have to tame her," and his words still held good. The mountain women rarely mistook a maternal tenderness for an appealing man for love. It was n't that Dan was weak except from the ravages of his disease; but he was still a long way from Snowbird's ideal.

And the explanation was simply that life in the mountains gets down to a primitive basis, and its laws are the laws of the cave. Emotions are simple and direct, dangers are real, and the family relations have remained unchanged since the first days of the race. Men do not woo one another's wives in the mountains.