To have chafed and been unhappy here, to a spirit like either Bruce Standing's or Lynette Brooke's, would have seemed next door to an impossibility. Even the girl, though restrained, a prisoner of a man's will when the bright star of her life had ever been one of splendid independence, found it easier to smile or laugh aloud at the sober-faced antics of Thor ... when she and Thor were alone with none to see!... than to sigh. She knew her periods of restiveness and bitter rebellion; they were due not to her environment, but to the thought that another than herself was dictating to her. But for one reason or another these periods were rarer and briefer than her other hours of a strange sort of peacefulness.
"It's because I've been worn out and only now am resting," she tried to tell herself. "Recuperating from a condition of exhausted mind and body."
Thus four days and nights passed. There had been, during all that time, not the slightest opportunity to escape. The first day Standing had hurled the chain from him, as far as he could send it. But he had not lost sight of her for more than a few minutes at a time, saving such times that she gave him her promise that she would wait for him to come back. He accepted her word as he expected all the world to accept his. On other occasions, when he allowed her briefer freedoms, he had said merely: "No chance to run for it, girl! I'd overtake you, you know, in no time. Even if you hid, here'd be old Thor, nosing you out!" Then he laughed, adding: "For his own sake, the renegade, as well as for his master's! He's fallen in love with you, too." He made her bed in the rock-and-tree grotto; he labored, one-handed, over it for hours. With his heavy clasp knife he cut the tender tips of resinous branches; he heaped them high; he covered all with great handfuls of fragrant grass, thick with the tall red flowers that grew down by the creek, odorous with the tender white blossoms which shyly lifted their little heads to dot the grassy slopes.... He made her a bathing-pool: stiff and sore all up and down his left side, he worked with his right hand, dragging big boulders up out of their ancient beds, piling them in a ring about the pool, plastering them over the top with great handfuls of that carpet-like moss which thrived in these cool places.
"If you'd let me go!"
"No; not yet.... What man can read the mind of a girl? How do I know what you would do? Where you would go? My wounds are healing; until they heal I am only half a man. You might whisk away from me, I tell you; and I'd have to follow and seek you, if you led me through hell on the way to heaven; and I must be whole again. And I've got to get everything straight...."
Always when he left her he returned before the end of the time she had promised to wait for him. And always he sent, as herald of his approach, his golden voice forward to her. At times in an echoing shout. More than once in an outburst of singing which thrilled her strangely. What a voice the man had! And once, when he had elected to bathe in the starlight, he sent down to her that cry which she had heard the first time from the door of Babe Deveril's cabin in Big Pine ... the wild, fierce call of the timber-wolf which, despite her naming herself "fool," sent a shiver into her blood.... Once this happened: He had left her in the forenoon, accepting her word that she would not stir until high noon. Usually he came well in advance; this time she watched the climbing sun and the creeping shade and suddenly her heart began its wild beating; it was almost noon and he was not here; no sound of his coming. When he shouted to her and then came rushing into camp, he found that she had been working frenziedly with a stick and a stone; driving the sliver of wood like a stake into the ground.... She started up, her face crimson.
"Well?" he said, his hands on his hips, staring down at her. "What's that?"
She blurted out the explanation and then was angry with herself for telling him. She had meant to stay until the tip end of the giant pine's shadow fell where it marked midday; she had meant there to drive in her stake; for him it would be a marker, an assurance from her that she had kept her word with him, that she had waited as she had promised to wait ... that then, scorning him, she had snatched at her rights and had fled!
His first impulse was toward laughter. And then, strangely quiet, he stood looking at her and she saw a gathering mist in his eyes!