Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/66

50 to bubble and send forth its tempting aroma from a treasured, spoutless and very black coffee pot. And the coffee pot itself? It awaited him at Hell's Goblet!

"For I'll bet a man the shirt off my back," was Steele's contented thought, "that the stuff I cached there five years ago hasn't so much as come under the prying eyes of a chipmunk. By the Lord, I'm getting home!"

Bigger and bigger, ever taller and more darkly august grew the trees as he rode on down into the narrow valley, duskier the woodland gloom, sweeter the spring air sprinkled with woodsy incense. When an unseen deer went crashing through the brush and struck out, splashing mightily, through the river just beyond a thick clump of red willows, Steele nodded his head in acceptance of a sound he could have expected and looked forward to with an agreeable sense of the fitness of things. Only some eight or nine miles from the Corliss ranch house, little more than half that distance from the Little Giant where men sweated and thundered the silences with blasts of dynamite and black powder, here was the wilderness in untroubled supremacy. It seemed to him that here the forestland possessed a conscious entity, a sentient personality that it breathed as he himself breathed, taking its bright joy from the sense of living, that its mighty breath touched his hair and enfolded him in an ineffable caress.

"It's because I'm ripe for it," thought Steele.

He rode swiftly along the grass-grown trail where speed was possible, slowly when must be, eager now to come to his camp site before the true dusk of day's end