Mary nodded. They walked a hundred yards along the open backbone. To the left blue-black water mirroring the shore trees, the distant hills, walled on three sides with bold, ravine-split cliffs, gleamed in a deep hollow. They plunged downward through dense thickets. The patch discovered itself anew to their hurrying feet. In ten minutes, panting a little with the speed of their descent, they stood on a rock shelf thrusting into the Granite Pool, a little lake hidden in the Valdez hills. There was neither inlet nor outlet. It was half a mile broad, mysteriously fed by hidden springs, full of cutthroat trout rarely disturbed in their aqueous heaven.
In the Granite Pool Rod Norquay and Mary Thorn had a special, proprietary interest, quite apart from the fact that one side of Oliver Thorn's land touched its shore, and elsewhere its cliffy borders were ringed about by the Norquay holdings. Their interest was not one of physical ownership. They had discovered it for themselves. They were the first, so far as they knew, to cast a line in those deep, still waters. They had given it a fitting name. Even the trail, cleverly blinded, had been the work of their hands, assisted by Mary's father. Except Indians and timber cruisers, a ubiquitous and taciturn clan, few people knew that such a lake nestled in the hills so close to the Euclataw. These two, who had haunted it through the summers of four years, kept their knowledge to themselves. The Granite Pool was their own; the way thereto and the angler's joy therein a secret they refused to share. Oliver Thorn humored them in this; it pleased him that two children should have such a sanctuary. Rod evaded divulging the source of the baskets of trout he carried home,—justifying himself by the sure knowledge that if all Hawk's Nest knew, vandal parties under Grove's leadership would invade trail and lake, make fish hogs of themselves in the Granite Pool, profaning its beautiful solitude in the name of sport.
A raft was moored to the shelving rock. They got aboard and cast loose, jointing up their rods as the raft drifted down on a patch of lily pads among which faint splashes sounded intermittently, followed by concentric ripples that spread away till they were lost on the surface of the dark water.
"They're still feeding, thank goodness," Rod observed.
Mary nodded, busy with her gear. She rose, flicked a Royal Coachman forty feet on her third cast and struck a twelve-inch trout. Whereupon they both became galvanized by that curious suppressed excitement which is a heritage from remote periods when man secured his daily food with his own hands, or went hungry.
At four in the afternoon they had taken their leave of the Pool, climbed to the ridge, and were sitting on a down tree trunk, looking from that vantage at a steam tug far below with a great boom of logs trailing astern. She passed through the lower rapids in the brief slack. Rod's creel lay at his feet, heavy with their catch. He watched the raft of logs move slowly up the channel. Then his eyes turned to the girl, rested upon her with definite appraisal.
Rod had been looking at Mary Thorn more or less casually ever since he was a leggy boy in knickers and she a slim elf in abbreviated gingham dresses. But he had never been so conscious of her as now. So late as yesterday he had regarded her without personal awareness of sex. How was it, he wondered, that a few words from his father, a cryptic hint or two, could make everything different? Nothing had happened. Yet he knew that a different quality had entered their companionship. A boy and a girl could play together without thinking of themselves as male and female. A man and a woman couldn't. His father had warned him that he was a man and should comport himself accordingly. As if a man's natural instinct was to run amuck! Perhaps that was the truth. Rod smiled uneasily at the notion. He was not precisely an unsophisticated youth, but he could scarcely comprehend that there is only a shadowy border between the frank, sexless affections of childhood and the uneasy glow of maturing passion. He had never nursed a libidinous thought about Mary Thorn. And yet—
His eyes rested on her with a new sort of gauge. She sat staring down Cardero Channel, her hands in her lap, not so much intent on some distant object as deep in one of those long, thoughtful silences into which she now and then retired,—a characteristic that Rod liked because it was something he himself often did. Her hair was a brown smoothness about her head, tied back with a narrow ribbon. She was very pretty, Rod decided critically, prettier than any girl he knew. But something more than superficial prettiness attracted him. He didn't know what. It eluded him. She had a woman's bosom and neck. Her body was made up of harmonious contours. Her expression, absent, reflective, gave him the feeling that he looked at maturity and wisdom. It surprised him to think that such an aspect of her had never struck him before.
Looking at her, he suddenly felt a queer, constricted feeling in his breast. He desired all at once to touch her, to rest his fingers lightly on that delicately tinted skin. She would laugh at him. He wondered if she would. He wondered what she thought about, locked up in herself like that. What went on in her mind that brought tiny puckers of concentration in her forehead? Was she as suddenly acutely conscious of him, in a disturbing physical sense, as he was of her? And he wondered futilely why he should be troubled by such unaccustomed thoughts and sensations now, when so late as yesterday they two had sprawled together on the mossy benches of Little Dent, laughing and chattering like two boys bent on innocent adventure in the world of boyish action.
Now there was certainly a mischief working in his blood that was not innocent. He knew it. It made him quiver. There was a ferment in his mind as well as in his body. Was this what Spence meant when he discoursed solemnly on the arrival of youth at man's estate? The pitfalls of uncontrolled passion. The ineradicable animal in man. Spence always spoke of the most intimate relation between a man and a woman in guarded terms. He conveyed the idea that it should be a matter of rational choice,—on the man's side. Spence never discussed the woman's part; he ignored the woman. The man, then, according to the Spencian ethic, carried on his sexual life according to his innate character. If he was inherently brutish he sought sexual satisfaction promiscuously. The ideal, sanctioned by society, therefore ethically sound, was love, matrimony, the ultimate family, achieved progressively with mature deliberation to balance emotion. Mr. Spence did not inform Rod that this ideal progression depended on a great many uncertain factors. Perhaps he did not know. But Rod had accepted his tutor for several years as an oracle on culture in general, as well as in its specific branches, and it was difficult for him to turn a deaf ear when the oracle spoke of ethics,—in spite of the fact that Rod's own observation, the conclusions of a fairly acute if youthful mind, stirred doubts.