“Keep right on doing that,” he urged, pointing at the sketch on the ground. “It’s worth while. You’re doing fine.”
With that he trudged away. The bushes quietly closed behind him. The little mouse came out, the chipmunk whisked in a yellow streak from somewhere back to his bowlder, the creek sang placidly on. Still the girl stood looking at the spot where the man had disappeared.
“He minded me!” she murmured, a soft glow coming and going in her cheeks. “He minded me—and I bet he’d sooner fight than eat. And he said ‘Marryin,’ too, not ‘Miss.’ But—but Steve——”
All at once she leaned against the hemlock tree. And the mouse and the chipmunk stood still and stared about, seeking a sound which blended into the gurgle of the creek but was not of it; a new, sad sound which they never had heard before. It was the sobbing of a girl.
CHAPTER XI
AT THE BRIDGE
At the edge of the water, beside a little bridge spanning the Kill, Douglas sat on a stone and leisurely chewed at a sandwich. It was an hour since he had bidden Marion good-bye and resumed his wandering way up the stream; and now, though noon was not quite at hand, he felt that this was the time and the place to eat. The flat-topped stone was a comfortable seat, the sun poured its welcome warmth around him, the pure water flowing past furnished both drink and finger-bath, and somewhere among the leaves a phœbe-bird sang to him its sweetly simple little plaint.
So, healthily hungry and pleasantly tired by his morning ramble to this point, he basked and ruminated as if it made no difference whether he continued his upward course along the brook or stayed where he was until dark. For that matter, it made none. He was his own man and master, free to come or go or start or stop as fancy decided; and if he should change his careless purpose of the morning—to follow the stream upward to its birthplace in high Lake Minnewaska—no consequences would follow. What he did not do to-day he could do to-morrow, or leave forever undone. It mattered not, so long as one more care-free day was added to his life.
He knew, of course, that soon these golden days must end. Just as the gray chill of November and the ensuing cold of winter would presently terminate this dreamy season of the harvest-time, so the necessity of doing his share of the work of the world must eventually drive him forth from the Traps and back to the hurly-burly of the towns. But the bleak time of the snows still was weeks away; and so, he hoped, was the day when he must desert this wild corner of the hills. Meanwhile, like the squirrels which roved about in search of supplies to tide them through the bitter time approaching, he rambled and gathered into the storehouse of Memory many a mind-picture to feed his nature-loving soul when he should again be walled within the clanking city.
Every day since the ending of the “line storm” he had traveled the Traps. Time and again he had spent an entire day threading his way over, under, and around the myriad bowlders lying at the foot of Dickie Barre’s precipice: some towering on end to the height of their parent rock itself, bearing mute witness to the terrific power of the ice of the glacial age, hiding among them masked chasms seldom seen by human eyes; some leaning together as if placed by the hands of some Indian giant whimsically building a rock wigwam; and countless blocks of every size and shape, overlying one another at every angle, as if battered from the face of the butte by the hammer of a mad Thor.
In the long cliff itself he had found gloomy caverns and crevices which he did not enter, but which, he suspected, were by no means unknown to certain men of the Traps. The days were too short and his progress through the chaos too slow and arduous to devote time to an extended exploration of those holes. So he had viewed their exteriors with a shrewd smile and passed on. And, though no sound from within those gloomy portals ever floated to him, perhaps it was as well that he did pass on.