Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/65

Rh mountains which had defied the making of roads. As he rode down to the rim of the thickening forest the whispering of its countless million singing tongues set the strings vibrating in his own heart. Only the crooning of the tree tops, the music of distant water splashing on glistening rocks, the breaking of dead sticks under the shod hoofs of the horse of him who entered the peaceful kingdom, and Steele filled his lungs and felt his blood stir pleasantly.

At last the boom of Thunder River was again in his ears and he was near his journey's end. This ridge, down which he rode slowly, was a long spur about which the river whirled in a six-mile-long horseshoe; he, in crossing it, was taking that short cut which lay between its source and the valley lands below the Corliss home. And yet, with at last the flash of turbulent water in his eyes, there lay the final three miles of broken lands before he came to his camp site at the Goblet. But already he counted the matter accomplished. The way, though uneven, was not to be mistaken. He had but to ride down to the river and turn upward along its course, keeping to the right bank when once he had forded it. In an hour or an hour and a quarter he would be unsaddling, then screwing the sections of his rod together as the first step toward supper.

Supper alone in the big timber! The prospect set him whistling like any boy off for a holiday. Potatoes from his scanty larder, jostling with onions and dried fruit deep within his roll of blankets, to be covered with coals and hot ashes at the rim of his fire, trout to sizzle and sputter and grow brown before exacting eyes, cof-