will be a long while before you see her again, and if you meet her in the cities she's not going to remember you. You'd find her quite a different kind of young woman there. When are you going?" "At sundown. I'd go now, but I want a few hours' rest and sleep." Jimmy looked at him with sudden concern in his face. "Then I'll be good and lonely to-night," he said. "Say, do you think I could take out the fiddle now and then to keep me company? I guess I could play it, like a banjo, with my fingers." "No," said Brooke, drily, "that's the one thing you can't do." He flung himself down in his straw-filled bunk, dressed as he was, for he had floundered through tangled forest since the dawn crept into the sky; and[Pg 35] the shadows of the cedars lay long and black upon the river when he opened his eyes again. Jimmy was busy at the little stove, and in another few minutes the simple meal, crudely served but barbaric in its profusion, was upon the table. Neither of the men said very much during it, and then Jimmy silently helped his comrade to gird his packs about him. The sun had gone, and the valley was dim and very still when they stood in the doorway. [Pg 35] "Good luck!" said Jimmy. "You'll come back by-and-by?" Brooke smiled curiously as he shook hands with him. "If I'm ever a rich man, I may." Then he went out into the deepening shadows, and floundering waist-deep through the ford, plodded up the climbing trail with his face towards the snow. It grew a trifle grim, however, when he looked back once from a bare hill shoulder, and saw a feeble light blink out far down in the hollow. Jimmy, he knew, was lying, pipe in hand, beside the stove, and, after all, the lonely ranch had been a home to him. A man without ambition who could stifle memory might have found the life he led there a pleasant one. Bountiful Nature fed him, the hills that walled the valley in shut out strife and care, and now he was homeless altogether. He had also just six dollars in his pockets, and that sum, he knew, will not go a very long way in Western Canada. As he gazed, the fleecy mist that rolled up from[Pg 36] the river blotted out the light, and the man felt the deep stillness and loneliness as he had not done since he first came there. That sudden eclipse of Jimmy's light seemed very significant just then, for
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