Corduroy

FOR the first time in her life--she had been alive twenty-two vivid and zestful years--Virginia Valdés McVeagh, nicknamed, descriptively, “Ginger,” felt something like reverence...

BY three o’clock Estrada had mended the road and propped the bridge and gotten the four machines under way. Ginger saw them off very patiently. They were volubly grateful and ex...

DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere...

THE world continued to be otherwise uninhabited and to glow rosily for almost a fortnight. Ginger’s Aunt Fan received a very satisfactory letter from Jim Featherstone; the Wolco...

IT was thus that Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole owner and proprietor of Dos Pozos, saddle-wise from babyhood, cool and competent as any man among them, presented her betrothed to...

GINGER could understand bullets; she could understand a broken arm or leg or collar bone; a broken neck was entirely comprehensible to her. But she could not understand fainting...

She put it, rather stumblingly, into words. Dr. Mayfield had made her realize how unjust she had been to Dean Wolcott with regard to his riding, and that had made her understand...

MONTEREY; _Monterey_.... Dean Wolcott liked the look and the sound of the word. Directly the train deposited him there he liked the place itself. His one impression of Californi...

BEFORE he went back to San José Dr. Mayfield took keen satisfaction in introducing Dean Wolcott to the precipitous trails and the secret fastnesses of the wild land he loved, an...

HE stumbled over the threshold and found himself in an amazing room. He was to observe, later on, that two partitions had been knocked out to make three cubby-holes into a livin...

THE middle of July Ginger’s Aunt Fan began writing her and begging her earnestly to come to San Francisco and visit her at the St. Agnes. She was lonely and blue, she wrote, and...

DEAN WOLCOTT had many times--on his solitary rides, in his cabin, after the Scout had gone to sleep--rehearsed his next meeting with Ginger McVeagh, planned it, pictured it, set...

AT supper time she told them, graphically, and with full and generous credit to the Ranger, about the mountain lion and the fawn, and was entirely amiable about repeating in det...

THEY had expected the riding party back for luncheon on Saturday, but they did not come, and Ginger was unhappily sure that it was her Aunt Fan who was retarding the procession....

THE new Forest Ranger for the Big Sur District and Elmer Bunty, his Scout, rode rapidly away from the doctor’s camp on the night of the fire alarm. They spoke sharply and concis...

AT first, when she set out on the trail for Marble Peak, Ginger hurried a little. She had a guilty fear that the doctor might have read her mutinous purpose in her face and ridd...

“We’ll be all right as long as the flash holds out, but it needs a new battery, and the new battery is in the saddlebags at White Pines.” He shook off the mantling fatigue. “We’...

GINGER came to him in the morning, riding over the crest of the hill with the sunrise. It was as if she had found the new day, somewhere in the black misery of the night, and gi...