"Why?" she exclaimed. "Why does a bird want to fly? Up there at the top of that tree you'd be almost in the sky. You'd be looking down on everything but the clouds themselves. When I was a little girl—" she announced suddenly, "they had a hard time persuading me that I couldn't fly. They had to keep watching me, because I'd climb up on things and try to fly down."
"Have you plumb outgrown that idee?" he inquired, somewhat drily. "Because I'm not cravin' to help you fly offen that mountain top."
Her laugh rippled out like bird notes as she replied with large scorn of fourteen years: "That was when I was a child."
After a moment she added appealingly: "The last time I saw you, General Prince said that when I came to these hills, you'd be 'charitable' to me."
"I aims to be," he asserted stoutly, "but it wouldn't skeercely be charitable to be the cause of your breakin' an arm or"—he paused an instant before adding with sedateness—"or a limb."
But Anne had her way. She always had her way, and some days later they looked down on an outspread world from the crest of Slag-face. Boone had not been long in discovering that this slender girl was driven by a dauntless spirit that made of physical courage a positive fetish, so he had pretended weariness himself from time to time and demanded a breathing spell.
The sky overhead was splendidly soft and blue, broken by tumbling cloud masses, which, it seemed, one could almost reach out and touch.
From the foreground where they sat flushed and resting, with moss and rock and woodland about them, the prospect went off into distances where mountain shadows fell across valleys, and other ridges were ranked row on row. Still more remote was the vagueness of the horizon whose misty violet merged with the robin's-egg blue of the sky.
The girl stood, leaning against the tree, and her violet eyes were full of imaginative light.