They possessed something of the solemnity belonging to the parent range
of the Rockies beyond. For they were almost primeval. The woman might
have belonged to them, her dark beauty so harmonized with its
surroundings. Yet for all her coloring, for all the buckskin she wore
for upper garment, there was nothing in her nature of the outlands
which now claimed her. She was of the cities. She was bred and
nurtured in the civilized places. The life about her was another life.
It was crude and foreign to her. It claimed her by force of
circumstance against every instinct and emotion.
Her searching ceased, and her eyes fixed their steady regard upon a
gray-brown object moving amongst the myriad of black stanchions which
supported the tousled roof of melancholy green foliage above her. With
an almost imperceptible movement one buckskin clad arm reached slowly
out toward the small sporting rifle which leaned against an adjacent
tree-trunk. Her whole poise was tense and steady. There was in her
attitude that hard decision which one associates only with the
experienced hunter.
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