“We’ll see how it comes out,” he muttered, grimly, but already the hope grew in his heart that the clay would stand the test.
Throughout the spring Gard busied himself with building a cabin. He needed a place in which to keep his stores from prowling creatures. A brown bear had secured a good part of the last deer he had shot—secured it while it was drying on branches of the mesquite—and the birds and small beasts of the chaparral took toll of all his scanty supplies. Then, too, he took a man’s delight in construction, and the building of the cabin had come to be a labor of love, as well as of necessity.
The walls of the structure were of desert stones laid up in mud. For the roof he brought skeleton stalks of suhuaro. Later he meant to plaster these with adobe, into which he should work straw, and the coarse gramma grass of the region.
He worked upon the building at odd times, as the summer went on, taking increasing joy in bringing it to completeness. He mascerated prickly-pear cactus in water and soaked the earthen floor with the resulting liquor, pounding it down afterwards until it was hard and smooth as cement. He made his door of ocotilla-stalks laid side by side and woven with willow-withes. In the same way he contrived a shutter for the window, and he constructed a second, smaller, fireplace, within the cabin.
“When we have distinguished visitors, Jinny,” he told the little burro, “We’ll kindle a fire for them here.”
He still used the larger hearth outside. He had learned, after many trials, to kindle a fire with the aid of flint and steel, and was no longer dependent upon matches.
When his shelter was complete he contrived furniture for it, for the sheer pleasure of construction. Lacking boards, or the means to manufacture them, he wove his table-top of arrow-weed and tough grasses from the cañon. It was beginning to be a source of delight to him to contrive solutions for each new problem of his hard existence.
One night, in the early autumn, Gard was wakened by a fearful crash of thunder. He sprang from his bed, to find Jinny already huddled against him. All about them was the roar of the sudden storm.
The pool had overflowed, and swept across the glade in a broad stream, pouring down the defile in a whelming tide. The heavens seemed to have opened, torrentially; Gard’s bed was beaten down, and the fire was flooded. Gard himself was almost thrown to earth by the thrashing rain ere he could reach the cabin, into which he darted, Jinny close at his heels.
The shelter was built against huge boulders, out of the track of the flood from the pool, but the mud and thatch roof leaked like a sieve. It served, however, to break the fierce violence of the storm, and they huddled there miserably till the worst should be over.