His chin propped upon his hands, the young nobleman moodily considered.
“Well, do then as thou deemest best,” he told her finally.
And from that moment there began for the little princess a time so wonderful that for all the rest of her life she remembered each separate hour as though it had been some beautiful word in a poem learned by heart.
With deft fingers she piled her softest doeskins for his bed.
“But what wilt thou do, tell me, if I rob thee of thy nest?” he asked, watching her with amused eyes as she worked.
“I go always to the village to sleep,” she answered simply, and so left him.
But in the morning while yet the red of sunrise burned above the great peak Orazaba, she returned, bearing upon her head an olla of carved stone filled with water from a mountain spring. This in smiling silence she set before him and disappeared. Within the hour, however, she was back again and this time, kneeling on the ground, she laid at his feet the ripe fruit of the manzanita tree, lying like small red apples, dewy fresh, upon a wild-grape leaf.
“Ala—ate, see! Are they not good?” she asked triumphantly.
And so from day to day she ministered to him. Many a time as he sat, listless and moody, within his hiding-place, a handful of wild strawberries, steeped in the warm sweetness of the hills, would be pushed beneath the leafy branches that concealed the door. Sometimes she brought him bread baked from a curious kind of meal made of pounded seeds.
Once, too, when a sudden storm had chilled the air, she kindled a fire for him within a smaller cave, receding like a fire-place into the rocky wall opposite the opening. It was a long and tedious process which the man watched curiously. First, kneeling on the ground, she rubbed together two dry willow sticks until a little pile of dust had gathered. Then, still stooping, she struck two flints together until at last a spark fell into the dust. Some dry leaves were dropped upon the tiny blaze, then twigs, and lo, a fire!