Ina found her favorite seat on a rock at the extreme point of the elevated bench, out of sight from the tents and affording unrestricted view in all other directions.

“I can’t go to Forlorn River,” she soliloquized. “I want to see Ben—oh, how I want to! … I love him. And perhaps—probably—surely he doesn’t love me…. I didn’t seem to feel he did. My heart would have told me…. I mustn’t go to him. Still I’ll fight for him—just the same.”

The golden sunlight receded from the wooded cape and little cabin across the lake where Ben Ide lived; and to Ina there seemed to be a similarity between that passing and her mood of the moment. She changed every day, every hour. She was growing toward something—perhaps a great sadness.

The spectacle before her was sad as well as grand. Twilight was stealing out from under the sage mountains behind her, down across the basin, dark and melancholy in its barrenness, while there was still a mantle of gold and rose, turning purple, on the vast reaches of open country leading up to the heavy cloud banks in the sky. The day had been hot and that country, rendered a desert by the years of drought, showed the ghastly lifelessness of sun–baked earth and seared sage. Forlorn River wound away between the hills, a thread of fire growing pale, dying out in the dim purple. Soon it would be lost in the sands. Narrow strips of black lined some of the deep valleys. A stillness, an austerity, pervaded the scene, filling Ina with a sense of the magnitude of the earth and the inscrutableness of nature. She was only a living, palpitating atom in all that immensity.

She realized fully now how this wild country had taken hold of her imagination and heart. She wanted to stay there most of the time, if it was livable. She felt that she preferred strife with the elements, with a hard lonely wilderness, to misunderstanding and dependence, to the dislikes and hatreds of people, to life such as she imagined her sister Kate had embraced.

“I have pioneer blood, so Uncle Charlie always said,” she mused. “All I need is the pioneer!”

She laughed at this, but not mirthfully. All that was necessary to round out her life, make it full and happy and productive, was for Ben Ide to come over here and take her back as his wife to that little gray cabin facing the west. As she looked, the last glow of light receded from it. Was Ben there gazing across the lake? Surely he knew she was at this newest of the Blaine ranches.

“Oh, I must not dream this way,” she whispered, rousing herself. “It’s madness. He’ll never know—and if he did he’d never come.”

* * * * *

Next day she had the same struggle all over again, and so it went on for days, augmented by the loyal and loving Marvie, who nagged at her to come with him to see Ben. She was driven to impatience with him.