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The quaking-asp, balm and various other kinds of small timber that grew along the streams all helped to add to the beauty of the scene. We crossed over to the west side to a cove that ran back some twelve miles from the main valley; here, we decided, was the best place to establish our winter quarters.
Our road had crossed the creek, and we were resting in the shade of a quaking-asp grove, high up on the sides of the Bad Land hills. For miles far below lay the valley through which we had come. Farther on, the mountains with their dense forests were all wrapped in the blue haze of the melancholy days.
Now she had it, now she lost it, as she wound over rugged ridges and through groves of quaking-asp and balm of Gilead trees, always mounting among the hills, her eager horse taking the way without guidance, as keen on the scent as she. It must have taken her an hour to run down that coffee pot.
To swing up and ride ride across the mesa to that dim line of hills where the sun touched the blue of the timber and the gold of the quaking-asp and burned softly on the far woodland trail that led south and south across the silent ranges! Pete snatched a rope from the pack and walked out toward the pony.
In that enchanted region he forgets for a little season the cares and responsibilities of life. A curious legend is told of one of the lakes that lie on the border of this valley. It is small half a mile long and a quarter wide but its depth is fathomless. It is bordered and shadowed by tall and stately pines, quaking-asp and birch trees, and its waters are pure and ice-cold the year round.
"Let 'em go," said Uncle Kit; "no doubt they will go to the quaking-asp grove, and we can git 'em to-morrow." So we returned to camp without any elk. But the next morning we went to the quaking-asp thicket, and there, sure enough, we found the same band of elk, and succeeded in killing five of them.
Not only was the grain trampled so the field looked like a race course, but panel after panel of the fence was down where the quaking-asp posts had snapped like lead-pencils. As Pinkey and Wallie surveyed it in the early dawn Wallie's voice had a catch in it when he said finally: "I guess I'm done farming. They made a good job of it."
And on the tipping land of the mountainside, and the little strips where soil lodged between the rocks, the quaking-asp grew thick and tall. There in a little nook among the trees, where trampling tourists had eaten their luncheon upon a flat stone and left the bags and pickle-bottles behind them, they sat down. At that altitude the sunshine of an afternoon in late August was welcome.
Now all were gone, marked only by little heaps of embers which twinkled a dying glow in the breath of the morning wind. Day was spreading now. From the little swells in the land as she mounted them Frances could see the deeper mist hovering in the low places, the tops of tall shrubs and slender quaking-asp showing above it as if they stood in snow.
In the shade of the forest that edged the mesa, and just back of Fernando's camp, a Ranger trail cuts through a patch of quaking-asp and meanders through the heavy-timbered land toward the Blue range, a spruce-clad ridge of southern hills. Close to the trail two saddle horses were tied. Fadeaway, riding toward his home ranch on the "Blue," reined up, eyed the horses, and grinned.
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