"You won't eat with me in civilization, you won't meet any of my friends, and I don't believe you ever want to please me," I said as I turned away from his provocation and began again with the scissors.
"I don't like world girls," he said with the fluty coo in his voice that always calms the Ladies Leghorn when they are ruffled. "I only love farm women. The moon is beginning to get a rise out of the setting sun, and let's go away from these haunts of men to our own woods home. Come along!" As he spoke Pan pocketed his long knife, picked up his stick and bundle, and began to pad away through the trees down towards the spring, with me at his shoulder, and for the first time he held my hand in his as I followed in my usual squaw style.
In all the long dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed to end, as I went upon my round of duties, I put the ache of the memories of it from me, but in the night I took the agony into my heart and cherished it.
"And it's the Romney hand ye have with the herb-pot, Woman dear," said Adam as he squatted down beside our simmering pot and stirred it with the clean hickory stick I had barked for that purpose when, very shortly after high noon, I had put the greens, with the two wild onion sprigs and the handful of inevitable black-walnut kernels, into the iron pot set on the two rocks with their smoldering green fire between. "You know you'd rather be eating this dinner of sprouts and black bread with your poor Adam than—than dancing that 'Cloud Drift' in town with Matthew Berry—or Baldwin the enemy."
"Yes," I answered, as I knelt beside him and thrust in another slim stick and tasted the juice of the pot off the end. "But it would be hard to make Matthew believe it. I forgot to tell you that Matt is really going in for farming, thanks to the evil influence of your friend Evan Baldwin, who wouldn't know a farm if he met one on the road, a real farm, I mean. Poor Matt little knows the life of toil he is plotting for himself."
"Is he coming to live at Elmnest?" asked Adam, in a voice of entire unconcern, as he took the black loaf from his gypsy pack and began to cut it up into hunks and lay it on the clean rock beside the pot.
"He is not," I answered with an indignation that I could see no reason for.
"Sooner or later, Woman, you'll have to take a mate," was the primitive statement that confronted me as I lifted the pot with the skirt of my blouse and poured the greens into two brown crockery bowls that Adam kept secreted with the pot on a ledge of the old spring-house.
"Well, a husky young farmer is the only kind of a man who need apply. I mean a born rustic. I couldn't risk an amateur with the farm after all you've taught me," I answered as we seated ourselves on the warm earth side by side and began to dip the hunks of black bread into our bowls and lift the delicious wilted leaves to our mouths with it, a mode of consumption it had taken Pan several attempts to teach me. Pan never talks when he eats, and he seems to browse food in a way that each time tempts me more and more to reach out my hand and lift one of the red crests to see about the points of his ears.
"Do you want to hear my invocation to my ultimate woman?" he asked as he set his bowl down after polishing it out with his last chunk of bread some minutes after I had so finished up mine.