Like all people who are limited to one hobby, and who pursue one line of study for years regardless of other interests, Professor Carnes took little notice of anything outside of his especial work. If Mary had been a new kind of bug he would have studied her with profound interest, spending days in learning her peculiarities, and sparing no pains in classifying her and assigning her to the place she occupied in the great plan of creation. But being only a human being she attracted his attention only so far as she contributed to the success of his work.
He would go tramping through the woods wherever she led, only vaguely aware of the fact that she had enlisted half a dozen small boys in her service, and that she was turning them into enthusiastic young naturalists before his very eyes. She was not doing this consciously, however. Her motive for inviting them on these expeditions, was simply to include Norman and his friends in her own enjoyment of the summer woods. It was so easy to turn each excursion into a picnic, to build a fire near some spring and set out a simple lunch that seemed a feast of the gods to voracious boyish appetites.
The goodly smell of corn, roasting in the ashes, or fresh fish sizzling on hot stones gave a charm to the learning of wood-lore that it never could have possessed otherwise. At first with the heedlessness of city-bred boys, they crashed through the under-brush with unseeing eyes, and unhearing ears, but it was not long until they had learned the alertness of young Indians, following by signs of bark and leaf and fallen feather, trails more interesting than any detective story.
Gradually the old professor, aroused to the fact that they were valuable assistants, began to take some notice of them. They awakened memories of his own barefooted boyhood, and sometimes when he had had a particularly successful morning, he threw off his habitual abstraction, and as Mary reported to Jack, was "as human as anybody."
It seemed, too, that at these times he saw Mary in a new light; saw her as the boys did, fearless as one of themselves, tireless as a squaw, and a happy-go-lucky comrade who could turn the most ordinary occasion into a jolly outing. Her knack of inventing substitutes when he had left some necessary article at home filled him with mild wonder. He came to believe that her resources were unlimited;
One morning, early in September, he forgot his memorandum book and pencil, and did not discover the fact until he was ready to note some measurements which he could not trust to memory. It was no matter, she assured him cheerfully, as he stood peering helplessly around over his spectacles and slapping his pockets in vain.
"You know Lysander says, 'Where the lion's skin will not reach it must be pieced with the fox's,' I'll find some kind of a substitute for your pencil, somewhere."
After a few moments' absence she came up the hill again with some broad sycamore leaves which she laid on a flat rock. "There!" she exclaimed. "You dictate, and I'll write on these leaves with a hair-pin. Hazel Lee and I used to write notes on them by the hour, playing post-office back at the Wigwam."
Several times during the dictation he looked at her as if about to make some personal remark, then changed his mind. What he had to say needed more explanation than he felt equal to making, and he decided to send Mrs. Levering as his spokesman. Being a relative, she understood the situation he wanted to make plain, and he felt she could deal with the subject better than he. So that afternoon, Mrs. Levering came over on his errand. Mrs. Ware and Mary were sewing, and she plunged at once into her story.