Into the corner cupboard and the drawers of course she did not look. There was nothing else in the room to attract her attention, save some piles of manuscript neatly arranged on one of the shelves, each one covered with a square of board and kept in place by pieces of glistening quartz. There were four of these piles and another half the size of the first four on the table. These of course she did not examine, further than to note that the writing was in the same bold free hand as the signature in the books. If she had been an expert she might have deduced much from the writing; as it was she fancied it was strong, direct, manly.
Having completed her inspection of this room, she opened the door and went into the other; it was smaller and less inviting. It had only one window and a door opening outside. There was a cook stove here and shelves with cooking utensils and granite ware, and more rude box receptacles on the walls which were filled with a bountiful and well selected store of canned goods and provisions of various kinds. This was evidently the kitchen, supply room, china closet. She saw no sign of a bed in it and wondered where and how the man had spent the night.
By rights her mind should have been filled with her uncle and his party and in their alarm she should have shared, but she was so extremely comfortable, except for her foot, which did not greatly trouble her so long as she kept it quiet, that she felt a certain degree of contentment not to say happiness. The Adventure was so romantic and thrilling—save for those awful moments in the pool—especially to the soul of a conventional woman who had been brought up in the most humdrum and stereotyped fashion of the earth's ways, and with never an opportunity for the development of the spirit of romance which all of us exhibit some time in our life and which thank God some of us never lose, that she found herself reveling in it.
She lost herself in pleasing imaginations of the tales of her adventures that she could tell when she got back to her uncle and when she got further back to staid old Philadelphia. How shocked everybody would be with it all there! Of course she resolved that she would never mention one episode of that terrible day, and she had somehow absolute confidence that this man, in spite of his grim, gruff taciturnity, who had shown himself so exceedingly considerate of her feelings would never mention it either.
She had so much food for thought, that not even in the late afternoon of the long day, could she force her mind to the printed pages of the book she had taken at random from the shelf which lay open before her, where she sat in the sun, her head covered by an old "Stetson" that she had ventured to appropriate. She had dragged a bear skin out on the rocks in the sun and sat curled up on it half reclining against a boulder watching the trail, the Winchester by her side. She had eaten so late a breakfast that she had made a rather frugal lunch out of whatever had taken her fancy in the store room, and she was waiting most anxiously now for the return of the man.
The season was late and the sun sank behind the peaks quite early in the afternoon, and it grew dark and chill long before the shadows fell upon the dwellers of the lowlands.
Enid drew the bear skin around her and waited with an ever growing apprehension. If she should be compelled to spend the night alone in that cabin, she felt that she could not endure it. She was never so glad of anything in her life as when she saw him suddenly break out of the woods and start up the steep trail, and for a moment her gladness was not tempered by the fact, which she was presently to realize with great dismay, that as he had gone, so he now returned, alone.