Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/63

Rh great matter if he for a little lost his way; inevitably he must come to the particular spot he had set his mind upon since he had his general directions. But to a man like Steele, who knew more of the mountains than of city streets, it was a deeply pleasant sensation to find that, even after five years, he could follow on old, once travelled trail.

He reined in his horse, eased himself sideways in the saddle and sat for a little, sending his questing regard this way and that along the rugged, timbered slopes. The trees were big here about him, pine and fir and an occasional cedar, rising upon splendid, tapering boles a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet against the blue sky, filling the cañon with a pleasant duskiness. In the open spaces between the thick trunks the lush grass was dotted with the spring's blue and yellow flowers, threaded with thin streams, trampled by browsing cattle. Stamped cleanly and freshly at the edge of a sand-bedded rivulet where no cattle tracks had obliterated it was the hoof print of a big buck. Steele's eyes brightened. From far off on the mountainside he heard the liquid call of a quail.

"And we build ourselves thick walled houses to shut all of this out!" he muttered. "God, it's good to be back! Bill Steele, listen to me: this time you're going to stay put."

He had quite forgotten to seek his trail. But now, the memory of the bigger, vaster, more solitary woods of the Goblet country upon him, their murmurous voices calling to him across the five years of absence, he again sought the way that led to them. He swerved