It was a difficult situation. No one wanted to leave a middle-aged woman alone in that wild cañon, with a vast, rugged wilderness between her and the comforts of life. But Mary remained tyrannically obdurate, so they decided that they would think the matter over during the two or three days which it would take Andy and Shirttail Henry to go for more provisions and return.
Early next morning the two set off on the back trail. The doctor busied himself at making a more or less permanent camp for Mary, provided they decided in the end to accept her ultimatum. Charmian spent hours at bringing her diary up to date. Mary, though in pain and obliged to move about with caution, feigned a limp and kept busy in order to deceive Charmian.
The afternoon of the third day of Henry and Andy’s absence brought boredom to all three. The sky still was clear as crystal, with no suggestion of clouds; and down in the cañon it was warm while the sun remained overhead. Mary was confined to camp, of course, but she insisted that Charmian and Shonto go on a short trip of exploration either up or down the gorge.
The pair set off about two o’clock. The cañon floor was a mass of nigger-head boulders, through which snaked the rushing green creek. The walls were all but perpendicular in places and of a height close to two hundred and fifty feet. Few trees grew near the floor of the cañon, but there were numberless entanglements of driftwood from which to draw upon for fuel.
The birds were singing their praise of the comforting sunlight. Delicate ferns, unmolested by the frost, waved their green fronds above stones set in the cañon walls, their stems upreared from soft, vari-coloured mossbanks as lustrous and yielding as Oriental rugs and sparkling with diamonds of dew. A pensive languor pervaded the cañon, a sort of armistice between the mellow sun warmth and the gorge’s lifelong heritage of clammy coldness. It made these human beings moody. The warmth was the gipsy warmth of early springtime, when the smells of earth are sweetest, as, deep down within the soil, the sleepy seeds begin to rub their eyes and stretch in their great awakening to a short life of ceaseless struggles. The pair were moody because they realized that it was not spring, that the half-hearted promise of the sun was altogether insincere. And while they were susceptible to the indolence of this tantalizing afternoon, the false warmth stirred their blood and kindled their imaginations to deeds of high emprise and thoughts of life as it ought to be, but never is. They were filled with vague feelings of unrest; they spoke but little and dreamed ambitious girlish and boyish dreams.
“Let’s sit down,” said Charmian, when they were a mile or more from camp.
An ancient bleached pine log had drifted into a little nook of rocks, where it was upheld from the floor by short, broken-off, horizontal limbs to a convenient height for a seat. It looked like a great white thousand-legged worm with porcupine quills in its back, said Charmian, as she seated herself between two of the upper-side stumps of limbs.
“What a day!” she continued. “I never was more ambitious in my life, Doctor, but I just want to sit here and ambish with my eyes half closed. I didn’t know one could be lazy and ambitious at the same time. I imagine dope must affect one something like this. Gee, but I could slay pirates on the Spanish Main this afternoon—that is, if they’d move the Spanish Main up here to this log and I could keep from gaping long enough to draw my cutlass. Don’t know that I’d want to kill pirates, either—I’d rather be a pirate myself and murder honest people. But either would be an effort—unless I could sit here and slay ’em with the evil eye.”
She made an arm-rest of one of the stumpy branches and sank her round chin in one hand. The posture pushed up one ruddy cheek and caused her red lips to show a pout, and that odd little upward flirt at one corner lent them an unconscious smile. The long dark lashes, so delicately upturned at the end, drooped downward. Her profile stood out clean-cut against the flimsy light of the winter sun. Her throat showed soft and dimpled and dusky. Her hoard of hair had loosened and slipped downward in artistic disarray. She relaxed, eyes half closed, and her sinuous body slackened as it settled into unrestrained repose. Her full bosom rose and fell as softly and smoothly as the oily ground swell of a lazy tropic bay.
Inman Shonto likened womanly beauty to that of flowers. He knew lily girls and primrose girls, daisy girls and violet and pansy girls, even sunflower girls. But here was a rose girl—a great passionate American beauty rose, bold in colouring, strong and stanch, upright and unafraid, dominant, outstanding amid the other flowers, but owner of all the loveliness and grace of the lesser blossoms, as delicate of texture and as compelling in its tenderness.