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The redwoods grew close here and the space between was filled with bluish gloom shot with long arrows of the westering sun. The trail ran crookedly among the clutching roots. Stumbling near-sightedly among them, he lost it wholly and so came by accident upon what otherwise he might have missed. Where the forest sheered away from a blank, stony ledge sticking out of a hill, there was a clear space with some small ferns and a seeping spring. In the soft earth about it he found prints of feet he thought to be mine, and beside it, broad and strong, the heavy feet of men. It was by now nearly dark, and Herman was so genuinely alarmed and so poor a woodman that he knew no better than to dash back among the redwoods hunting wildly for the trail and shouting, “Mona! Mona!” for all the wood to hear.

What had really happened to me was alarming enough to think of, though in truth I had not been very much alarmed by it at the time. The morning after my writing to Herman had been one of those pricking days that come in the turn of the seasons. Such a sparkle on the approaching water, such a trumpeting from the hills, the high vault full of flying cloud, that I struck with great confidence into the trail some distance beyond Broken Tree.