The picnic yesterday had been merry, but this one, somehow seemed gayer still. They joked and laughed as they shared in the preparations; he tried to teach her how to make flapjacks and laughed at her awkwardness when she attempted to toss them; she criticized his method of boiling coffee and made him admit that hers was better. As they sat eating he told her tales of past camping adventures; how he had once crawled into a cavern under a cliff to take shelter from the rain and had discovered that it was the home of a most unamiable mountain lion; how, in his tent, far up on Gray Cloud Mountain, a grizzly bear cub had slipped under the canvas and invited itself to share his bed.
“And I had to be polite to the pushing, grunting little beast,” he said, “for its mother and my rifle were both outside.”
After they had finished their lunch they still sat lazily by the fire, watching the thin smoke drift far across the depths below them until it lost itself in the distant blue haze. Beatrice was leaning against the warm rock while her companion sat upright, his clear-cut profile showing against the vast blue sky.
“He looks hardly more than just grown up, when he talks and laughs like that,” was her inward reflection. It seemed as though he had dropped the burden that had been so heavy all these years, and, in this hour of friendliness, had gone back to the boyhood he had cast from him.
He was pointing out to her the wide, dry lands of Broken Bow Valley, which, with irrigation, were some day to be orchards and meadows and rich farming land instead of a broad waste, polka-dotted with sage-brush. At some length he told of the difficulty in getting the irrigation project started, of how long it had taken to form a company and to get construction under way. But of one thing he did not speak, of the interruption in the work, of the threatened strike and the disappearance of the company’s funds. Beatrice waited, hoping that he would let fall some explanation, throw some light on that mystery, and refute forever the dismaying suspicions of Dabney Mills. Of that phase of the matter, however, he said no single word.
“When it is all finished and the valley is prosperous,” he said, “you must be careful when sharp traders try to buy your cabin from you, or make bids for your big pines. You must not part with them at once.”
“I think I could never part with them,” she assured him. “I did not know how much I could learn to love the woods and the cabin and the mountains.”
He sat for a little while, looking across to where the shadows of clouds moved, one by one, across the dark slopes of the range opposite.
“They are friendly things, these mountains,” he observed. “They stand by you when you are in trouble, somehow, they are so big and calm and untroubled themselves.”
Their friendship and confidence had brought them so close together that Beatrice felt suddenly the thrill of a bold impulse. She cast aside Dr. Minturn’s advice to let John Herrick make the first move toward reconciliation. It did not occur to her that the man beside her might be talking so freely only because he meant so soon to close his friendship to her forever. She reflected only on how triumphant she would be when her management had brought the whole misunderstanding to a happy end. Yet she did not dare speak out at once.