Part 12 (1/2)

THE BURRELL CODE

Not until his dying day will Burrell lose the h the untrodden valley, and yet its incidents were never clear-cut nor distinct when he looked back upon them, but blended into one dreah sohtfully distorted and each act deliriously unreal, yet all the sweeter fro with a rush of spirits as untamed as the waters in the course they followed They wandered, hand-in-hand, into a land of illusions, where there was nothing real but love and nothing tangible but joy The touch of their lips had waked that delight which comes but once in a lifetime and then to but few; it was like the moon-madness of the tropics or the deentle frenzy possessed the theht sooner rest and sit beside each other At tihed with the in joyous surprise at this invasion; or, again, the breezes roreet them at the bends in boisterous pleasure

They held to the bed of the stream, for its volume was low and enabled them to ford it from bar to bar Necia had been raised in the open, with the wild places for her playground, and hermerrily onward, as if in playful contest, while the youth had never occasion to wait for her or towas more sure than his, as he found when she ventured out unhesitatingly upon felled logs that lay across swift, brawling depths The wilderness had no mystery for her, and no terrors, so she was ever at his side, or in advance, while her eyes, schooled in the tints of the forest, and , frolade to the inquisitive nodding of a fool hen where it perched high up against the bole of a spruce They surprised ain a drift-wood dam, but she would not let the soldier shoot, and made him pass it by, where it sat amazed till it realized that these were lovers and resu Gradually the stream diminished, and its bowldered bed beca the airs of a leader, the girl commanded him to lay off his pack, at which he pretended to obey ht at his own sub to do?” he inquired

”Mind your own business, sir,” she com-knife, hich she cut and trimmed a slender birch the thickness of his thuht, and said:

”Please! please! What have I done?”

”A great deal! You are a most bold and stubborn creature”

”All pack anie they have”

”You are much too presumptuous, also, as I discovered in your quarters”

”My only presu you”

”That was not presumption,” she smiled; ”it was pre-emption You must be punished”

”I shall run away,” he threatened ”I shall gallop right off through the woods and--begin to eat grass I am very wild”

As she talked she drew from her pocket a spool of line, and took a fly-hook fro-rod, and, creeping out upon a ledge, she whipped the pool below of a half-dozen rainbow trout, which she thrust into his coat while they were still wriggling Then she as quickly put up her gear, and they resu more steeply now, until, when the sun was low, they quit the streah the forest towards the shoulder of an untih up on the edge of the spruce, they selected a mossy shelf and pitched their camp

They had become so intimate by now as to fall into a whimsical mode of speech, and Necia reverted to a childish habit in her talk that brought many a sirl to speak in adjectives, ignoring many of her nouns, and its quaintness had so amused her father that on rare occasions, when the humor was on him, he also took it up She now addressed herself to Burrell in the same manner

”I think we are very smarts to come so far,” she said

”You travel like a deer,” he declared, ad his pack, he stretched his arms and shook out the ache in his shoulders

”Which way does our course lie now, Pathfinder?”

”Right up the side of this big, and then along the ridge In two hours we coinary direction--”which we go down till it joins another streaht there we'll find old 'No Creek's' cabin, so! Won't they be surprised to see us! I think we're very cunning to beat theh, and he cried:

”Oh, girl! Hoonderful you are!”

”It's getting very dark and fierce,” she chided, ”and all the housework must be done”

So he built a fire, then fetched a bucket of water fro the rocks near by He made as if to prepare their s should never cook,” she declared ”That work belongs to littles,”

then forced him to vacate her do wood and boughs

First, however, she showed his upon which the teapot and the frying-pan would sit without upsetting, and how long she wished the sticks of cooking-wood Then she banished him, as it were, and he built a wickiup of spruce tops, under the shelter of which he piled thick, fragrant billows of ”Yukon feathers”