Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/212

 had drawn him from his lair. The last to pass was a stoop-shouldered, hollow-chested stripling, singing “Hold the Fort, for I am Coming.”

These are the only human beings, outside our own families, that I saw from the last of January until near the middle of April. Tom tells a rather mythical story of seeing emerge from the melancholy yews down in the canyon a shadowy hound, followed by a brown-corduroyed man, who called up to him, “I reckon you hain’t seen no stray Angorys up this way lately?” As this story lacks verification, we think Thomas, by overlong living in the woods, is beginning to “see things.”

In those gloomy days darkness descended upon us about four in the afternoon, making woefully long evenings. At first we were glad, as it gave us a chance to read our Christmas books and the piles of magazines and papers saved up from the busy season. After that for a while we enjoyed re-reading our favorites among the old books. Then came a time when the “restless pulse” of ennui could not be quieted even by good literature.

I’ll just lift the curtain and give you a glimpse of one of our winter evenings, which will be a fair sample of the other hundred or two. Open wide your eyes and look across the rainy night away up into the dark fir forests of Oregon. Do you see a faint light shining and wavering among the wet leaves? Well, that glimmer is from a student lamp in front of the big stone