"I guess I should like that pretty well," he answered after a moment's pondering. "I don't believe I've ever talked much; but now I feel as if I could tire you out, talking as we did yesterday. Queer, wasn't it?"
He fell silent, however, when the trail narrowed to climb the long ridge, as if the acknowledgment of his desire to speak had somehow quenched it. She fell in ahead, half turning in her saddle to address him from time to time, but he would talk only about things of the moment. In a marshy spot at the edge of the meadow he pointed out a bear wallow, and farther on a deer lick. "It's a sulphur spring," he exclaimed, "and deer come from miles around to drink there."
"Do you shoot them?" she asked.
"We always have fresh meat when we need. Ben Crider says he won't let a deer come up and bite him without trying to defend himself."
"It's like murder, isn't it?"
"Well, I never murdered anyone myself, but I hit the first deer I ever shot at, and I felt as if I'd lain in wait at a street corner and killed a schoolboy on his way home. But I missed the next three or four, and that made me blood-thirsty. I guess if you carried that feeling back far enough a man could go out and shoot his little sister if he'd had to still-hunt her over rough ground all day, and especially if he'd missed two or three cousins or an uncle in the meantime. I think that would raise the savage in him enough."
They were skirting the lake now, a glinting oval of sapphire in its setting of granite. Beyond this they rode through the thinned timber—where Cooney was dissuaded, not without effort, from pursuing his ancient charge, and emerged into the glare of the clearing.
As they dismounted at the door of the cabin a melancholy of minor chords from a guitar came to their ears, and a voice, nasal, but vibrant with emotion, sang the final couplet of what had too plainly been a ballad of pathos:
"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill,
Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."
"That's one of Ben's best songs," said Ewing, with so genuine a gravity that he stifled quite another emotion in the lady as she caught his look.