But this! It was like the blossom-strewn plain that burst upon them as, desert-wearied, they travelled into Central Texas; like the glimpses of April woodland in the Upper and Lower Cross Timbers. It made generous return for the long, merciless winter; more—in one glance, in one breath, it swept away a whole winter of hateful memories!
She caught up bonnet and horn and chose a seat close to the river. Before her was a gap in the knotted grapevine heaps that clung along the brink of the bank; through it, veiled only by some tendrils that swung wishfully across, lay a wedge-like vista of muddy water, bottom-land, bluff, and sky. The mid-morning sun glinted upon the treacherous current, upon the wet grass of the bottom-land, upon the green-brown bluff and the Gatling at its top, upon the far, curving azure of the sky. Against the dazzle, her blue eyes winked harder than the breeze-tossed anemones; stretching out upon her back, she rested them in the shifting canopy of foliage.
A startled kingbird flashed past her, coming from a tree by the cut. She got up, and saw a man in uniform standing near. He was a young man, with a flushed face and wildly rumpled hair. In one hand he held a tasselled hat; in the other, a rifle. He leaned forward from behind a bull-berry bush, and his look was guiltily eager and admiring.
As startled as the kingbird, she grasped the cow-horn and lifted it to her lips.
But she did not blow a warning. The uniform retreated in cowardly haste, the tasselled hat lowered, and the eyes beseeched.
A moment. Then, the man smiled and shook his hat at her roguishly. "A-ah!" he said—in the tone of one who has made a discovery—"I didn't know before that a fairy lives in this grove!"
Marylyn glanced over a shoulder. "Does there?" she questioned, half whispering.
He took a forward step. "There does," he answered solemnly. "It's Goldenhair, as well as I can make out. But where on earth are the bears?"
Instantly, she had her bonnet. "My! my!" she said. "Bears! Indians is bad enough." She peered into the long heaps of tangled grapevine.
"Oh, now!" he exclaimed self-accusingly. He whipped a knee with the hat. "Now, I've gone and scared you! Say, honest! There isn't a bear in a hundred miles—I'd stake my stupid head on it."