And before the brief reverberations of a distant rifle-shot had done echoing through the gorges, they came to a full stop and determined to make camp. Not for a second, all day long, had Deveril swerved from his determination to "dig in in comfort for the night." They were, as both were willing to admit, "done in."
Deveril employed his pocket-knife, long ago dulled, and now whetted after a fashion upon a rough stone, to whack off small pine and willow and the more leafy of sage branches. He made of them a goodly heap. Then he gathered dead limbs, fallen from the parent trees, making his second pile. All the while Lynette kept a small dry-wood and pine-cone fire going hotly; little smoke, little swirl of sparks to rise above the grove in which they were encamping; plenty of heat for body warmth and for cooking. She was preoccupied, moving about listlessly. So this was Bruce Standing's country? She looked about her with an ever-deepening interest; this was a fitting land for such a man. Bigness and dominance and a certain vital freshness struck altogether the key-note here—and suggested Timber-Wolf. If he were not dead after all—— Well, then, he would be somewhere near now for like a wounded animal, he would have returned to his solitudes.
Deveril found near by a level space under the pines. Here he sought out a scraggly tree which expressed an earth-loving soul in low-drooped branches. Against a low arm which ran out horizontally from the trunk he began placing his longer dead limbs, the butts in the ground, sloping, the effect soon that of a tent. Against these a high-piled wall of leafy branches. He stood back, judging from which direction the wind would come. He piled more branches. Into his nostrils, filled with the resinous incense of broken pine twigs, floated the tempting aromas which spread out in all directions from Lynette's cooking. He cocked his eye at the slanting sun; it was still early. He yielded to the insistent invitation, and came down into the little cup of a meadow to her, and she watched him coming: a picturesque figure in the forest land, his black hair rumpled, his slender figure swinging on, his sleeves rolled back, his eyes full of the flicker of his lively spirit.
When Deveril was hard pressed along the trail, worn out and on the alert for oncoming danger from any quarter, he was impersonal; a mere ally on whom she could depend. At moments like this one, when he was rested and relaxed, and grasped in his eager hands a bit of the swift life flowing by, he became different. A man now—a young man—one with quick lights in his eyes and a lilting eagerness in his voice.
"It would be great sport," he said, "all life long ... to come home to you and find you waiting ... with a smile and a wee cup o' tea! And...."
He was half serious, half laughing; she made a hasty light rejoinder, and invited him to a hot supper waiting him.
They made a merry, frivolously light meal of it. There was plenty to eat; water near by; there was coffee; above them the infinity of blue, darkening skies, about them the peace and silence of the solitudes. And within their souls security, if only for the swiftly passing moment. They chose to be gay; they laughed often; Deveril asked her where she had learned to quote Scott and she asked him, in obvious retort, if he thought that she had never been to school! He sang for her, low-voiced and musically, a Spanish love-song; she made high pretense at missing the significance of the impassioned southern words. He, having finished eating and having nearly finished his cigarette, lying back upon the thick-padded pine-needles, jerked himself up, of a mood for free translation; she, being quick of intuition, forestalled him, crying out: "While I clean up our can dishes, if you will finish making camp...."
He laughed at her, but got up and went back, whistling his love-song refrain to his house-building. She, busied over her own labors, found time more than once to glance at him through the trees ... wondering about him, trying to probe her own instinctive distrust of one who had all along befriended her.
When she joined him a few minutes later, coming up the slope slowly, she looked tired, he thought, and listless. She sat down and watched him finishing his labors; all of her spontaneous gaiety had fled; she was silent and did not smile and appeared preoccupied. She sighed two or three times, unconsciously, but her sighs did not escape him. Always he had held her sex to be an utterly baffling, though none the less an equally fascinating one. Now he would have given more than a little for a clew to her thoughts ... or dreamings ... or vague preoccupation....
"My lady's bower!" he said lightly. "And what does my lady have to say of it?"