f.a.n.n.y was not quite sure whether the pang she felt was relief or consternation.

At Estes village the blond G.o.d handed her over to a twin charioteer who would drive her up the mountain road to the Inn that nestled in a valley nine thousand feet up the mountain. It was a drive f.a.n.n.y never forgot.

Fenger, Ted, Haynes-Cooper, her work, her plans, her ambitions, seemed to dwindle to puny insignificance beside the vast grandeur that unfolded before her at every fresh turn in the road. Up they went, and up, and up, and the air was cold, but without a sting in it. It was dark when the lights of the Inn twinkled out at them. The door was thrown open as they swung up the curve to the porch. A great log fire glowed in the fireplace. The dining room held only a dozen people, or thereabouts--a dozen weary, healthy people, in corduroys and sweaters and boots, whose cleanly talk was all about climbing and fishing, and horseback rides and trails. And it was fried chicken night at the Inn. f.a.n.n.y thought she was too utterly tired to eat, until she began to eat, and then she thought she was too hungry ever to stop. After dinner she sat, for a moment, before the log fire in the low-ceilinged room, with its log walls, its rustic benches, and its soft-toned green and brown cushions. She forgot to be unhappy. She forgot to be anything but deliciously drowsy.

And presently she climbed the winding stair whose newel post was a fire-marked tree trunk, richly colored, and curiously twisted. And so to her lamp-lighted room, very small, very clean, very quiet. She opened her window and looked out at the towering ma.s.s that was Long's Peak, and at the stars, and she heard the busy little brook that scurries through the Inn yard on its way from the mountain to the valley. She undressed quickly, and crept into bed, meaning to be very, very miserable indeed.

And the next thing she knew it was morning. A blue and gold October morning. And the mountains!--but there is no describing a mountain.

One uses words, and they are futile. f.a.n.n.y viewed them again, from her window, between pauses in dressing. And she meant, privately, to be miserable again. But she could only think, somehow, of bacon and eggs, and coffee, and m.u.f.fins.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Heyl's place. f.a.n.n.y stood before it, key in hand (she had found it in the mail box, tied to a string), and she had a curious and restful feeling, as if she had come home, after long wanderings. She smiled, whimsically, and repeated her lesson to herself:

"The fire's laid in the fireplace with fat pine knots that will blaze up at the touch of a match. My books are there, along the wall. The bedding's in the cedar chest, and the lamps are filled. There's tinned stuff in the pantry. And the mountains are there, girl, to make you clean and whole again...."

She stepped up to the little log-pillared porch and turned the key in the lock. She opened the door wide, and walked in. And then she shut her eyes for a moment. Because, if it shouldn't be true----

But there was a fire laid with fat pine knots. She walked straight over to it, and took her box of matches from her bag, struck one, and held it to the wood. They blazed like a torch. Books! Along the four walls, books. Fat, comfortable, used-looking books. Hundreds of them. A lamp on the table, and beside it a pipe, blackened from much use. f.a.n.n.y picked it up, smiling. She held it a moment in her hand, as though she expected to find it still warm.

"It's like one of the fairy tales," she thought, "the kind that repeats and repeats. The kind that says, 'and she went into the next room, and it was as the good fairy had said.'"

There's tinned stuff in the pantry. She went into the tiny kitchen and opened the pantry door cautiously, being wary of mice. But it met her eye in spotless array. Orderly rows of tins. Orderly rows of bottles.

Coffee. Condensed milk. Beans. Spaghetti. Flour. Peaches. Pears.

Off the bedroom there was an absurdly adequate little bathroom, with a zinc tub and an elaborate water-heating arrangement.

f.a.n.n.y threw back her head and laughed as she hadn't laughed in months.

"Wild life in the Rockies," she said aloud. She went back to the book-lined living room. The fire was crackling gloriously. It was a many-windowed room, and each window framed an enchanting glimpse of mountain, flaming with aspens up to timber-line, and snow-capped at the top. f.a.n.n.y decided to wait until the fire had died down to a coal-bed.

Then she banked it carefully, put on a heavy sweater and a cap, and made for the outdoors. She struck out briskly, tenderfoot that she was. In five minutes she was panting. Her heart was hammering suffocatingly. Her lungs ached. She stopped, trembling. Then she remembered. The alt.i.tude, of course. Heyl had boasted that his cabin stood at an alt.i.tude of over nine thousand feet. Well, she would have to get used to it. But she was soon striding forward as briskly as before. She was a natural mountain dweller. The air, the alt.i.tude, speeded up her heart, her lungs, sent the blood dancing through her veins. Figuratively, she was on tip-toe.

They had warned her, at the Inn, to take it slowly for the first few days. They had asked no questions. f.a.n.n.y learned to heed their advice.

She learned many more things in the next few days. She learned how to entice the chipmunks that crossed her path, streak o' sunshine, streak o' shadow. She learned to broil bacon over a fire, with a forked stick.

She learned to ride trail ponies, and to bask in a sun-warmed spot on a wind-swept hill, and to tell time by the sun, and to give thanks for the beauty of the world about her, and to leave the wild flowers unpicked, to put out her campfire with scrupulous care, and to destroy all rubbish (your true woodsman and mountaineer is as painstakingly neat as a French housewife).

She was out of doors all day. At night she read for a while before the fire, but by nine her eyelids were heavy. She walked down to the Inn sometimes, but not often. One memorable night she went, with half a dozen others from the Inn, to the tiny one-room cabin of Oscar, the handy man about the Inn, and there she listened to one of Oscar's far-famed phonograph concerts. Oscar's phonograph had cost twenty-five dollars in Denver. It stood in one corner of his cabin, and its base was a tree stump just five hundred years old, as you could tell for yourself by counting its rings. His cabin walls were gorgeous with pictures of Maxine Elliott in her palmy days, and blonde and sophisticated little girls on vinegar calendars, posing bare-legged and self-conscious in blue calico and sunbonnets. You sat in the warm yellow glow of Oscar's lamp and were regaled with everything from the Swedish National Anthem to Mischa Elman's tenderest crooning. And Oscar sat rapt, his weather-beaten face a rich deep mahogany, his eyes bluer than any eyes could ever be except in contrast with that ruddy countenance, his teeth so white that you found yourself watching for his smile that was so gently sweet and childlike. Oh, when Oscar put on his black pants and issued invitations for a musical evening one was sure to find his cabin packed. Eight did it, with squeezing.

This, then, was the atmosphere in which f.a.n.n.y Brandeis found herself.

As far from Haynes-Cooper as anything could be. At the end of the first week she found herself able to think clearly and unemotionally about Theodore, and about Fenger. She had even evolved a certain rather crude philosophy out of the ruins that had tumbled about her ears. It was so crude, so unformed in her mind that it can hardly be set down. To justify one's own existence. That was all that life held or meant. But that included all the lives that touched on yours. It had nothing to do with success, as she had counted success heretofore. It was service, really. It was living as--well, as Molly Brandeis had lived, helpfully, self-effacingly, magnificently. f.a.n.n.y gave up trying to form the thing that was growing in her mind. Perhaps, after all, it was too soon to expect a complete understanding of that which had worked this change in her from that afternoon in Fenger's library.

After the first few days she found less and less difficulty in climbing.

Her astonished heart and lungs ceased to object so strenuously to the unaccustomed work. The Cabin Rock trail, for example, whose summit found her panting and exhausted at first, now seemed a mere stroll. She grew more daring and ambitious. One day she climbed the Long's Peak trail to timberline, and had tea at Timberline Cabin with Albert Edward Cobbins.

Albert Edward Cobbins, Englishman, erstwhile sailor, adventurer and gentleman, was the keeper of Timberline Cabin, and the loneliest man in the Rockies. It was his duty to house overnight climbers bound for the Peak, sunrise parties and sunset parties, all too few now in the chill October season-end. f.a.n.n.y was his first visitor in three days. He was pathetically glad to see her.

"I'll have tea for you," he said, "in a jiffy. And I baked a pan of French rolls ten minutes ago. I had a feeling."

A magnificent specimen of a man, over six feet tall slim, broad-shouldered, long-headed, and scrubbed-looking as only an Englishman can be, there was something almost pathetic in the sight of him bustling about the rickety little kitchen stove.

"To-morrow," said f.a.n.n.y, over her tea, "I'm going to get an early start, reach here by noon, and go on to Boulder Field and maybe Keyhole."

"Better not, Miss. Not in October, when there's likely to be a snowstorm up there in a minute's notice."

"You'd come and find me, wouldn't you? They always do, in the books."

"Books are all very well, Miss. But I'm not a mountain man. The truth is I don't know my way fifty feet from this cabin. I got the job because I'm used to loneliness, and don't mind it, and because I can cook, d'you see, having shipped as cook for years. But I'm a seafaring man, Miss. I wouldn't advise it, Miss. Another cup of tea?"

But Long's Peak, king of the range, had fascinated her from the first.

She knew that the climb to the summit would be impossible for her now, but she had an overwhelming desire to see the terrifying bulk of it from a point midway of the range. It beckoned her and intrigued her, as the difficult always did.

By noon of the following day she had left Albert Edward's cabin (he stood looking after her in the doorway until she disappeared around the bend) and was jauntily following the trail that led to Boulder Field, that sea of jagged rock a mile across. Soon she had left the tortured, wind-twisted timberline trees far behind. How pitiful Cabin Rock and Twin Sisters looked compared to this. She climbed easily and steadily, stopping for brief rests. Early in the week she had ridden down to the village, where she had bought climbing breeches and stout leggings. She laughed at Albert Edward and his fears. By one o'clock she had reached Boulder Field. She found the rocks glazed with ice. Just over Keyhole, that freakish vent in a wall of rock, the blue of the sky had changed to the gray of snow-clouds. Tenderfoot though she was, she knew that the climb over Boulder Field would be perilous, if not impossible. She went on, from rock to rock, for half an hour, then decided to turn back. A clap of thunder, that roared and crashed, and cracked up and down the canyons and over the peaks, hastened her decision. She looked about her.

Peak on peak. Purple and black and yellow ma.s.ses, fantastic in their hugeness. Chasms. Canyons. Pyramids and minarets. And so near. So grim.

So ghastly desolate. And yet so threatening. And then f.a.n.n.y Brandeis was seized with mountain terror. It is a disease recognized by mountain men everywhere, and it is panic, pure and simple. It is fear brought on by the immensity and the silence of the mountains. A great horror of the vastness and ruggedness came upon her. It was colossal, it was crushing, it was nauseating.

She began to run. A mistake, that, when one is following a mountain trail, at best an elusive thing. In five minutes she had lost the trail.

She stopped, and scolded herself sternly, and looked about her. She saw the faint trail line again, or thought she saw it, and made toward it, and found it to be no trail at all. She knew that she must be not more than an hour's walk from Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward, and his biscuits and tea. Why be frightened? It was absurd. But she was frightened, horribly, harrowingly. The great, grim rock ma.s.ses seemed to be shaking with silent laughter. She began to run again. She was very cold, and a piercing wind had sprung up. She kept on walking, doggedly, reasoning with herself quite calmly, and proud of her calmness. Which proves how terrified she really was. Then the snow came, not slowly, not gradually, but a blanket of it, as it does come in the mountains, shutting off everything. And suddenly f.a.n.n.y's terror vanished. She felt quite free from weariness. She was alive and tingling to her fingertips.

The psychology of fear is a fascinating thing. f.a.n.n.y had reached the second stage. She was quite taken out of herself. She forgot her stone-bruised feet. She was no longer conscious of cold. She ran now, fleetly, lightly, the ground seeming to spur her on. She had given up the trail completely now. She told herself that if she ran on, down, down, down, she must come to the valley sometime. Unless she was turned about, and headed in the direction of one of those hideous chasms. She stopped a moment, peering through the snow curtain, but she could see nothing. She ran on lightly, laughing a little. Then her feet met a projection, she stumbled, and fell flat over a slab of wood that jutted out of the ground. She lay there a moment, dazed. Then she sat up, and bent down to look at this thing that had tripped her. Probably a tree trunk. Then she must be near timberline. She bent closer. It was a rough wooden slab. Closer still. There were words carved on it. She lay flat and managed to make them out painfully.

"Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest, and died alone, April 26, 1893."

f.a.n.n.y had heard the story of Sarah Cannon, a stern spinster who had achieved the climb to the Peak, and who had met with mishap on the down trail. Her guide had left her to go for help. When the relief party returned, hours later, they had found her dead.

f.a.n.n.y sprang up, filled with a furious energy. She felt strangely light and clear-headed. She ran on, stopped, ran again. Now she was making little short runs here and there. It was snowing furiously, vindictively. It seemed to her that she had been running for hours. It probably was minutes. Suddenly she sank down, got to her feet again, stumbled on perhaps a dozen paces, and sank down again. It was as though her knees had turned liquid. She lay there, with her eyes shut.

"I'm just resting," she told herself. "In a minute I'll go on. In a minute. After I've rested."

"Hallo-o-o-o!" from somewhere on the other side of the snow blanket.

"Hallo-o-o-o!" f.a.n.n.y sat up, h.e.l.loing shrilly, hysterically. She got to her feet, staggeringly. And Clarence Heyl walked toward her.

"You ought to be spanked for this," he said.

f.a.n.n.y began to cry weakly. She felt no curiosity as to his being there.

She wasn't at all sure that he actually was there, for that matter.

At that thought she dug a frantic hand into his arm. He seemed to understand, for he said, "It's all right. I'm real enough. Can you walk?"

"Yes." But she tried it and found she could not. She decided she was too tired to care. "I stumbled over a thing--a horrible thing--a gravestone.

And I must have hurt my leg. I didn't know----"

She leaned against him, a dead weight. "Tell you what," said Heyl, cheerfully. "You wait here. I'll go on down to Timberline Cabin for help, and come back."

"You couldn't manage it--alone? If I tried? If I tried to walk?"

"Oh, impossible." His tone was brisk. "Now you sit right down here."

She sank down obediently. She felt a little sorry for herself, and glad, too, and queer, and not at all cold. She looked up at him dumbly. He was smiling. "All right?"

She nodded. He turned abruptly. The snow hid him from sight at once.

"Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest and died alone, April 26, 1893."

She sank down, and pillowed her head on her arms. She knew that this was the end. She was very drowsy, and not at all sad. Happy, if anything.