It was in the flush of this exultation over winter's downfall that they planned camp life in a vale at the edge of the lake, where the spruces thinned to leave wide-vaulted arches, and spread the floor with yielding brown rugs of the pine needle. They began it as a play, and finished with a permanent camp into which they moved from the cabin. There were tents and beds, a table, a sheet-iron stove, chests for their stores, and hammocks in which to be fanned by the south wind.
Bartell promised his sister vast benefits from this life.
"This will put the finishing touches to you, Sis. A month here and you'll be loping over the range, high, wide, and handsome. It'll take an elk-high fence to hold you after you've slept awhile out here."
She felt the truth of what he said, and was appalled by it. Almost daily she dismayed herself by recalling some unpremeditated feat of strength or endurance. Life had crept back to her like a whipped dog, and bitterly she felt the sting of its satire. She was loath to leave the cabin in which she had so long nursed death. She had impregnated the very walls with an atmosphere of dissolution. But she understood now that that prison house could no longer suffice her. Stubborn life had prevailed over all its powers of suggestion. There she had clung stubbornly to the old solution, cherishing a hope of some sudden relapse, despite the new life that taunted her with its animal buoyance. But once in the open, her brain was washed of that. Her mind was as clear as the fathomless blue above them at noon; and the stars at night were not more coldly luminous than the reasoning she bent upon herself, nor sharper than a certain deduction she made.
Ewing brought his drawing to the camp and spent the mornings in work. He had finished his series for the Knickerbocker during the winter, and these drawings, with the illustrations for the story previously made, had brought him enough to discharge the Teevan debt. He had reported this transaction significantly to Mrs. Laithe, and was now busy on pictures for another story for the Knickerbocker.
"Only a little longer," he said, with a meaning she could not fathom, and he returned to his work with a singular absorption. Not even Ben could distract him when he sauntered up for his daily criticism. Ben was respectful to the drawings after he saw the checks they brought, but his summing up of the purchaser's acumen never varied.
"Well, well—fools and their money! The idee of payin' out cash for a thing that looks as much like Red Phinney as that there does!"
When work was done for the day Ewing would turn to Mrs. Laithe with a smile of release, and they would stray along some dim trail or off into pathless, shaded silences of the wood, lingering in grassy mountain meadows, or skirting the base of bleak crags where streaks of snow in shadow still clung to the gray walls. She was conscious then of a tumult throbbing wonderfully beneath the surface of their companionship—a tumult of life aching for release. In little chance moments of silence this rumbled ominously, leaving her fearful, but curiously resigned, moved to blind flight, yet chained and submissive as were the hills themselves.
One afternoon they sought their cañon of delayed winter after many days' neglect of it. They wondered if spring might not have reached even that secret recess at last. They left the trail that skirted the edge and descended a rocky way that Ewing found, emerging at last through a fringe of the stunted cedars into the gloom of the depths.
At first glance this last stronghold of winter seemed to have remained impregnable. Snow lay deep along the bottom, enormous stalactites of ice depended from overhanging ledges, and the stream itself appeared to be still only a riven glacier. But, listening intently, they heard a steady liquid murmur, the very music of spring come at last to sing the gorge awake. As they stood, listening, there was a shivering crash; one of the huge icicles had dropped, shattering on a lower ledge and raining its fragments into the soft snowbed below.