“I dunno how we happened to come out so far as this—we didn't allow to spend over two hundred dollars, but I allow we've spent over five hundred or six hundred dollars now. The funny thing is, Paw don't seem to care. He always was aggressive. He just driv right on West till we got here. He said his Paw traveled across all that country in a ox team, and he allowed he could in a automobile. So we done it, and here we are. I don't care if we don't get home till after harvest.”
Many and many a talk I had with Maw, dear old Maw, some sixty thousand of her, this past summer. The best of all vacations is to see someone else having a vacation who never has had a vacation before in his or her life. The delight of Maw in this new phase of her existence has been my main delight for many a week in the months spent, not so much in watching geysers as in watching Maw. Sometimes I steal away from the pleadings of the saxophone, leaving even Stella O'Cleave with the slumberous eyes sitting alone at the log rail of Old Faithful Inn. I want to see Maw once more, and talk with her once again about the virtues of a vacation now and again; at least once in a lifetime spent in work for others.
I do not always find the girls at home in the camp. For some reason they seem of late to be out later and later of evenings. Paw has found a crony here and there about the camps, and swaps reminiscences of this sort or that. Sometimes I find Maw alone, sitting on the log, gazing into her little camp fire. Once, I recall, one of the girls was at home.
“Roweny!” called out Maw suddenly. “Roweny, where are you? Come and talk to the gentleman.”
A voice replied from the other side of the car, where Rowena was sitting on the running board. I discovered her, chin in hand, looking out into the dark.
“I was afraid some perfessor had got her,” explained Maw to me. “Come on out, Roweny, and set by the fire. This gentleman seems sort of nice, and he's old.”
Rowena, seventeen years of age, uncrossed her long young limbs and came out of the darkness, seating herself on the running board on our side, where the firelight shone on her clean young features, her splendid young figure of an American girl. She was comely enough in her spiral putties and her tanned boots as she sat, her small round chin on the hand whose arm was supported by a knee. Rowena appeared downcast. While Maw was busy a moment later, I asked her why.
I think it must have been the mountain moon again; for Rowena, seventeen years of age, once more looked gloomily out into the night.
“If I thought I could ever find a man that would understand me I believe I would marry him!” said she, as has every young girl in her time.
“Tut, tut! Rowena!” I replied. “I believe that I understand you, simple as I am myself, and you need not marry me at all. I understand you perfectly. You are just a fine young girl, out on almost your first vacation, with your Maw. It is the moon, Rowena. It is youth, Rowena, and the air of the hills. Believe me, it will all come right when the cook has finished his Princeton; of that I am sure.