"No," he told her, suddenly stubborn, and resentful that he could not have free entrance into her sleeping-life. "We went without it when we needed it most; now the sun's up and we don't need it; since, above everything, there's no breakfast to cook."
"So you woke up hungry, too?"
"Hungry? I was eating my supper when first you showed upon my horizon. And, what with looking at you or trying to look at you, I let half of my supper go by me! I'd give a hundred dollars right this minute for coffee and bacon and eggs!"
"You want a lot for a hundred dollars," she smiled back at him. Her hands were already busy with her tumbled hair, for always was Lynette purely feminine to her dainty finger-tips. "I'd give all of that just for coffee alone."
"Come," said Deveril, "Let's go. Are you ready?"
"To move on? Somewhere, anywhere? And to search for breakfast? Yes; in a minute."
First, she worked her way back through the brush, down into the creek bed, and for a little while, as she bathed her face and neck and arms, and did the most that circumstances permitted at making her morning toilet, she was lost to his following eyes. Slowly he rolled himself a cigarette; that, with a man, may take the place of breakfast, serving to blunt the edge of a gnawing appetite. Long draughts of icy cold water served her similarly. She stamped her feet and swung her arms and twisted her body back and forth, striving to drive the cold out and get her blood to leaping warmly. Then, before coming back to him, she stood for a long time looking about her.
All the wilderness world was waking; she saw the scampering flash of a rabbit; the little fellow came to a dead halt in a grassy open space, and sat up with drooping forepaws and erect ears; she could fancy his twitching nose as he investigated the morning air to inform himself as to what scents, pleasurable, friendly, inimical, lay upon it.
"In case he is hungry, after nibbling about half the night," she mused, "he knows just where to go for his breakfast."
The rabbit flapped his long ears and went about his business, whatever it may have been, popping into the thicket. There grew in a pretty grove both willows and wild cherry; beyond them a tall scattering of cottonwoods; on the rising slope scrub-pines and juniper. And while she stood there, looking down, she heard some quail calling, and saw half a dozen sparrows busily beginning office hours, as it were, going about their day's affairs. And one and all of these little fellows knew just what he was about, and where to turn to a satisfying menu. When, returning to Deveril, she confided in him something of her findings, which would go to indicate that man was a pretty inefficient creature when stood alongside the creatures of the wild, Deveril retorted: