“It is worth being raised like this,” Farley was thinking, “just to be able to walk out into the other life—the life filled with the things man has done. To wander through it a little—and then to come back, to stay.”
When all of the chill of the mountain morning had gone, drunk up by the warm, thirsty sun, she allowed her sick man to get up. Farley found that his wrist was more swollen, more painful than it had been last night, but began to hope that there were no bones broken in it, that he had sprained it badly and that in a few days it would mend itself. His right side was very nearly useless to him, the shoulder, lower ribs and leg being sore and stiff; but with a cane which she cut for him from a sapling in the grove he was able to hobble around slowly.
He realized, as he worked his way unsteadily to the door, that it would be many days before he could take up the trail which he had vowed over his dead partner’s body to follow until he found its end.
The morning passed, and they had lunch together out under the trees at the edge of the grove. Still Dalton had not come in. But the girl seemed in no way surprised, saying lightly that her father often was gone a day or so without warning, that perhaps he had found and was following the tracks of a bear.
“I am going for my mail,” she told him, laughing at his wonder. “Do you feel strong enough to come with me?”
“Mail?” he demanded incredulously.
“Yes! There may be a letter from Daddy. The post-office is over yonder, across the lake. If you think that you can walk down to the canoe, we can paddle over.”
With the help of his cane, with the aid of her hand when they came to the rude steps in the cliff side, he finally reached the edge of the lake where they had left the canoe yesterday. Leaving him here for a little, she disappeared into the trees and came back presently, carrying the light boat upon her shoulders.
Helping him to get into it, she pushed out from the shore, jumped in and paddled out into the water, heading straight for the western side a half-mile away. Upon a little beach there, sandy and strewn with white pebbles she grounded the canoe; and with a word to him to wait while she asked for her letter, hurried to a big rock, flat-topped, set back a little from the water’s edge.
Turning so that he could see what she did, she tossed toward him five pebbles which she had picked up from the rock. And then she came back to him.