Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/322

304 a cottage at first—right beside it," Dan replied. He could go back to his forests, after all. He would n't have to throw away his birthright, fought for so hard; and it seemed to him no other occupation could offer so much as that of the forest rangers,—those silent, cool-nerved guardians of the forest and keepers of its keys.

For a long time Snowbird and he stood together at the edge of the firelight, their bodies warm from the glow, their hearts brimming with words they could not utter. Words always come hard to the mountain people. They are folk of action, and Dan, rather than to words, trusted to the yearning of his arms.

"We 're made for each other, Snowbird darling," he told her breathlessly at last. "And at last I can claim what I 've been waiting for all these months."

He claimed it; and in open defiance to all civil law, he collected fully one hundred times in the next few minutes. But it did n't particularly matter, and Snowbird did n't even turn her face. "Maybe you 've forgotten you claimed it when you first came back too," she said.

So he had. It had completely slipped his mind, in the excitement of his fight with the wolf pack. And then while Lennox pretended