That night under the pine he turned over the situation in his mind. The conclusion he arrived at was that there was nothing better to be done than stay by the stream bed and work it for all it was worth. Lucy would continue to improve in the fine air and the child was thriving. If the snows would hold off till late, as they had done in the open winter of ’50, he could amass a fair share of dust before it would be necessary to move Lucy and the baby to the superior accommodations of Hangtown or Sacramento. It was now October. In November one might expect the first snows.
He must do a good deal in the next six weeks. This he started to do. The next day he spent in raising a brush shed against the back of the cabin where the chimney would offer warmth on cold nights. Into this he moved such few belongings as he had retained after Lucy and the baby had taken possession of the cabin. Then the working of the stream bed went on with renewed vigor. The water was low, hardly more than a thread, rendering the washing of the dirt harder labor than during the earlier summer when the watercourses were still full. But he toiled mightily, rejoicing in the splendor of his man’s work, not with the same knightly freedom that he felt when he had been that king of men, the miner with his pick on his shoulder and all the world before him, but with the soberer joy of the man into whose life others have entered to lay hold upon it with light, clinging hands.
Against the complete and perfect loneliness of his life the woman and child, who had started up from nowhere, stood out as figures of vital significance. They had grown closer to him in that one month’s isolation than they would have done in a year of city life. The child became the object of his secret but deep devotion. He had been ashamed to let Fletcher see it. Now that Fletcher was gone, Moreau often stole up from his work in the creek to look at it as it slept in a box by the open door. It was as fresh as a rosebud, its skin clean and satiny, its tiny hands, crumpled, white and pink, like the petals of flowers. The big man leaned on his shovel to watch it adoringly. The miracle of its growth in beauty never lost its wonder for him.
Lucy, too, grew and bloomed in these quiet autumn days. Never talkative, she became less laconic after the departure of Fletcher. She seemed relieved by his absence. Moreau began to understand, as he saw her daily increase in freshness and youthful charm, that she was as young in nature as she was in years. Points of character that were touchingly childish appeared in her. Her casting of all responsibility on him was as absolute as if she had been ten years of age. She obeyed him with trustful obedience and waited on him silently, her eyes always on him to try to read his unexpressed wish. Sometimes he caught these watching eyes and read in them something that vaguely disturbed him.
One day, coming up from the creek for one of his surreptitious views of the baby, he found its cradle empty, and was about to return to his work, when he heard a laugh rising from a small knoll among the aspens. It was a laugh of the most infectious, fresh sweetness, and made Moreau’s own lips part. He stole in its direction, and as he advanced it sounded again, rippling deliciously on the crystal air. He brushed through the aspens and came on Lucy and her baby. She was holding it in her lap, one hand on the back of its head. Something had touched its unknown sense of the ludicrous, and its lips were parting in a slow but intensely amused smile over its toothless gums. Each smile was answered by its mother with a run of the laughter Moreau had heard.
He looked at them for a moment, and then, advancing, his foot cracked a dry branch, and Lucy turned. Her face was flushed, her eyes still full of their past merriment, her smiling lips looked a coral red against the whiteness of her small, even teeth. Her sunbonnet was off and her rich hair glowed like copper in the sun. He had never seen her look like this, and stopped, regarding her with a curious, sudden gravity. The thought was in his heart:
“She’s only a girl, and—and—almost beautiful.”
Lucy looked confused.
“Oh, I was just laughing at the baby,” she said apologetically; “she looked so sorter cute smiling that way.”
“I never heard you laugh like that before. Why don’t you do it oftener?”