The last portion of the walk was again through thickets, up a hill where the poison oak grew close and high, and then among larger growths of bay and alder, with the Digger pines raising their dim bluish shapes among the more juicy greens. Here they began to follow a faint rill, a tiny thread that broke into a shower of drops over roots and splinters of stone. Finally, pushing aside intruding boughs, she led him into an opening ringed by tall pine trunks, and cried triumphantly:
“Here it is! Do you wonder no one ever found it?”
There was a hollowing out of the bank under the eaves of a large pine root, and here the spring had been bubbling unnoticed for centuries. A delicate fringing of fern hung from the moist earth motionless over its reflection in the small, quivering mirror. Near by there was an outcropping of rock, and broken bits had been used to pave the edge where the crystal lip of water trembled, and to make a little channel for it to slip down. A rusty tin cup hung on a dead bough, and the girl rinsed it, and dipping it in the clear depths, handed it to him.
“Try it,” she said. “It tastes quite different here among the pine roots with the smell of the woods all round.”
He drank it, marveling at the sharp, acrid tang. She hung the cup back on the twig, and taking off her hat, sat down on a bent root that the pine above it seemed to have thrown out in a kindly desire to be hospitable. The Colonel subsided on to a flat shoulder of rock, rusted with lichen.
“Hasn’t it hidden itself in a pretty spot?” she said. “And didn’t it hide itself well? Coming on it from the other side you never would have suspected a spring was here among the roots of the trees.”
“And you discovered it?”
She nodded, looking down into the tiny basin.
“Here it is! Do You Wonder no one Ever Found it?”