Gordon respected her shyness and moved warily to establish his contact.
He let the talk drift to impersonal topics as they picked their way out
from the town along the mossy trail. The ground was spongy with water.
On either side of them ferns and brakes grew lush. Sheba took the porous
path with a step elastic. To the young man following she seemed a
miracle of supple lightness.
The trail tilted up from the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw.
A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by
ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered
the trail with sunlight and shadow.
They were ascending steadily now along a pathway almost too indistinct
to follow. The air was aromatic with pine from a grove that came
straggling down the side of a gulch to the brook.
"Do you know, I have a queer feeling that I've seen all this before,"
the Irish girl said. "Of course I haven't--unless it was in my dreams.
Naturally I've thought about Alaska a great deal because my father lived
here."
"I didn't know that."
"Yes. He came in with the Klondike stampeders." She added quietly: "He
died on Bonanza Creek two years later."
"Was he a miner?"
"Not until he came North.
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