At this season of the year the first glow of day usually found the Ottos at breakfast, and for half an hour the sun had been shining on the top of Pyramid Mountain.

He was eager to tell her what had passed between him and Keller.

He laughed softly when he confessed to himself how madly he wanted to see her.
He always liked to come up to the Otto home very early of a morning, or in the dusk of evening.

Very frequently he was filled with a desire to stand outside the red-and-white striped walls of the tent-house and listen unseen.

Inside there was always cheer: at night the crackle of fire and the glow of light, the happy laughter of the gentle-hearted Scotchwoman, and the affectionate banter of her "big mountain man," who looked more like a brigand than the luckiest and most contented husband in the mountains--the luckiest, quite surely, with the one exception of his brother Clossen, who had, by some occult strategy or other, induced a sweet-faced and aristocratic little woman to look upon his own honest physiognomy as the handsomest and finest in the world.