“I have been down to the lake—for my morning plunge primarily, to tell the truth. And in the second place for something for my sick man to eat. Hungry?”
As she went to set the rod in its place in the corner he looked after her approvingly. Her hair hung as yesterday in two long braids, one flung over her shoulder. Her brown arms were bare from the shoulder.
“Yes,” he answered her, “I think I am hungry. While you are starting breakfast I think I’ll get up——”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” she retorted positively. “I’ll put a table close to your bunk, and we’ll eat here. After breakfast, when the sun is a little higher and it’s good and warm, maybe I’ll let you try to get up.”
As she moved toward the kitchen with her string of fish, he called after her:
“Your father? He hasn’t come in yet?”
“No. But we’ll look for him before long. Dear old Daddy has dreadfully irregular habits!”
Then he heard her clattering with pots and pans, heard her singing broken snatches of songs; and soon the aroma of coffee and the sizzling of the trout told him that breakfast was ready. She came in then, removed the objects from the table across the room—he saw with a little surprise that they were several books carelessly scattered—pushed the table to his side, dragged her own chair up to it, and brought in the fish and coffee and biscuits with tin cups, tin plates, heavy iron knives, forks and spoons.
“There is no sugar, no butter, no cream,” she laughed at him. “But you won’t mind, will you?”
While they ate she told him more of herself; how she fished, or used the rifle to bring down a squirrel from a pine, or to get a deer, sometimes; how from her lookout, a peak a mile behind the cabin, she mused over the pale, shifting shades of daybreak or the vivid splashes of color in the west before the dusk came; how she let her eyes go far out to the furthermost rim of the vague, distant mountains and dreamed of the other side—the land of men and women, of cities where the cañons were streets, and the peaks many-storied buildings. She was not lonely because no one had taught her the word, because she had known no existence but this. She did not know unrest, because she had not lived in cities.