Seldom any smoke went up now from the cabin under the
Dolphin's nose. Occasionally there rose a blue thread of it far up
on the thinly forested crest of San Jacinto where the buck, bedded
in the low brush between the bosses of the hills, kept a look out
across the gullies from which Greenhow attempted to ambuscade him.
Day by day the man would vary the method of approach until almost
within rifle range, and then the wind would change or there would
be the click of gravel underfoot, or the scrape of a twig on stiff
overalls, and suddenly the long oval ears would slope forward, the
angular lines flow into grace and motion and the game would begin
again.
Greenhow killed many deer that season and got himself under suspicion
of the game warden, but never THE deer; and a very subtle change
came over him, such a change as marks the point at which a man
leaves off being hunter to become the hunted. He began to sense,
with vague reactions of resentment, the personality of Power.
It was about the end of the rains that the DITCH TENDER who was
also an orchardist, took the Homesteader's daughter to ride on his
unoccupied Sunday afternoon. He had something to say to her which
demanded the wide, uninterrupted space of day. They went up toward
the roots of the mountain between the green dikes of the chaparral,
and he was so occupied with watching the pomegranate color of her
cheeks and the nape of her neck where the sun touched it, that
he failed to observe that it was she who turned the horses into
the trail that led off the main road toward the shack of the Pot
Hunter.
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