Before the year had swelled and blossomed into full mid-summer she had a pupil. It was her mother. Mother and daughter had always been more to each other than the terms commonly imply, very nearly all that they should connote. They had been friends. Here where the solitudes were mighty and vast, where long miles and hard trails lay between homes and where women were few, they had had but themselves to turn to when need or desire came for the company of their own sex. Mrs. Leland had remained young, in part because hers was a happy, sunny nature, in part because she had had the fires of youth replenished from the superabundant glow of girlhood in her daughter.
But now that the summer came with monotony and silence, now that Arthur Shandon came no more, that Wayne seemed to have forgotten the range country, that Garth Conway was busy every day with the entire management of a heavily stocked cattle outfit, there were long, quiet days at the Echo Creek.
"Wanda," Mrs. Leland said one day, a little wistfully. "Can't I come with you and take a peep first hand into the homes of your wild friends? I'll be very still, I'll stay with Shep and Gypsy if you want me to."
Wanda, at once contrite and happy, was filled with apologies and explanations. She had had no thought that her mother would find an interest in her "play." But if she would come, if she would like to come, oh, she would show her the most wonderful discovery.…
So mother and daughter rode out together that day with lunch and camera, and that night worked together in Wanda's attic studio over a highly satisfactory film. The older woman's interest became as steady, as enthusiastic in a deeply thoughtful way, as Wanda's. She learned to love each day's adventure as warmly as did her daughter, she came to have the same tender joy in the unexpected discovery of some new phase of the home life of the wild.
"In all of your hunting you are missing something, my White Huntress," she said one day. "Something which I have discovered!"
Wanda smiled brightly at her over the top of a new picture, pleased with her mother's interest no less than with the print in her hands.
"What is it, mamma?"
"I am not going to tell you yet. But to-morrow when we go out for the oriole's nest, I am going to take your old kodak!"
As they rode the five or six miles to the spot where they were to do the morning's "hunting" Wanda wondered what it was she had missed that her mother had noticed. But she promptly forgot about it when she climbed the great pine which, for her mother's purpose, was so happily situated close to a cliff. She noted with a bright nod of approval as she edged far out upon a horizontal limb that her mother had made her own way up to the cliff top. Long she waited that morning, patient and happy and still, her camera set in front of her, before she got the exposure she wanted. And she did not hear the other click of the other machine, did not know that her mother had been as patient and as contented waiting to get the picture she wanted of Wanda as Wanda had been in snapping the bird and the nest and the young, hungry mouths at the threshold.
That afternoon they developed and printed, each her own pictures. And when Mrs. Leland had finished she showed Wanda what she had done. There was the picture of Wanda, far out upon the great limb, eager and watchful, her camera ready, the oriole's nest swinging before her, the mother bird just dropping down to it. And below and beyond were the ground, looking immeasurably distant, the fir and pine branches, the forest of trees.
"You see, Wanda, what you have overlooked?" Mrs. Leland's eyes were unusually bright. "You have dozens of pictures that are wonderful, pictures that you strove for for weeks, months at a time! One looks at your picture and sees that it is wonderful, but does not understand how wonderful. You cling to a branch or a tree trunk or the side of a cliff, fifty or a hundred and fifty feet of space below you, and take your picture. People look at the picture and do not see that the wonderful thing, the interesting thing, is how you got it!"
"But …" began Wanda.
"But," Mrs. Leland laughed happily, "just listen to me a moment, miss. You are going on with your pictures and I am going to follow you very humbly and take other pictures to show how you get them. We'll send both sets to your magazines and you'll see if mine aren't snapped up just as quick as yours!"
So the relationship of mother and daughter which had grown into that of a warm, intimate friendship now developed into closer, more intimate companionship. Together they found bright, brimming days that otherwise might have been dull and empty.
Wanda came to realise that a woman who is forty may be, in all essentials, as young as a girl of twenty, and that the added score of years while it brings truer insight and perhaps a steadier heart does not quench ardour or deaden the emotions.
"Mamma," she said one day, looking up brightly from the development of a film from her mother's kodak, "you are just a girl yourself!"
And Mrs. Leland was just girl enough to flush, and youthful enough to laugh as musically as her daughter.
Thus, as the days went by and they were frequently alone together, Martin Leland being often away on the business upon which he and Arthur Shandon had entered with Sledge Hume, the two women were not lonely. Mrs. Leland accompanied Wanda everywhere to take pictures showing the girl climbing for a lofty bird nest, clinging to the cliffs at the upper end of the valley, crouching hidden among the bushes waiting for a rabbit to hop into the picture, even on the deer "hunt" they had already begun.
So the late summer slipped by more swiftly in its smooth channel than ever, the leaves in the orchard yellowed with the fall, the light green tips upon the fir branches turned dark green, the cattle were driven down to the lower valleys along the creeks, and the first snows of winter dimmed the shortening days.
With the passing of the summer, Garth Conway came again to be a frequent visitor at the Echo Creek ranch house. Since the letter from Wayne Shandon in New York he had had but one communication from the man who now owned the Bar L-M. It had been characteristically short, written in London.
"I am leaving the destiny of the cows In your competent hands," Wayne wrote. "I am legally giving you a power of attorney. This authorises you to run the outfit as you judge best. Make what sales you want to to pay the boys and yourself. Bank the money or re-invest for improvements and more cattle. The Lord knows when I'll come back … provided the Devil has told Him."
And then, in a postscript, hastily scribbled he had added,
"I have made my will … Imagine me making a will!… and if I don't come back at all the outfit is yours. Love to the Lelands."
And then, as a second afterthought, he had scrawled at the top of the note.
"A joke on you in case I shouldn't come back, Garth! I want you to sell some cows and send me another two thousand. But I promise not to do it again."
Garth told his news in the living room where the family had been listening to the music of Wanda's lilting young voice with her mother's piano accompaniment when he came in. Mrs. Leland's smiling face grew clouded and distressed and her eyes turned involuntarily to her husband. Martin Leland sprang to his feet in sudden wrath.
"Hell's bells!" he shouted angrily. "Two sacrifice sales in less than a year! Four thousand dollars! And what has he done with it? Got drunk, chucked it away across race courses and card tables … Would to God I had done what it was my duty to do, that …"
"Martin!" cried Mrs. Leland. "Martin, dear!"
He stopped abruptly and sank back into his chair. For a little while there was silence, heavy and painful. Wanda's eyes grew misty. Not once since that day in the spring had she been disloyal to Red Reckless, whom she had known in his boyhood, who had fought her early battles for her, who had been the plumed knight