“Let her stay, then!” she exclaimed, setting her face to the forest, and smiling in more gracious fashion upon Young Dave. Kroof was certainly very provoking.
“That’s all right!” said Dave, more pleased than he dare show. “She’ll be company for yer mother till we git back.”
“Kroof seems to think she owns me!” mused Miranda. “I love her better than any one else in the world except mother; but I mustn’t spoil her when she gets cross about nothing. She oughtn’t to be so jealous when I’m nice to you, Dave! I’m very angry at her for being so silly. She ought to know you’re nothing to me alongside of her; now, oughtn’t she?”
“Of course,” assented Dave, with such cheerfulness as he could assume. Then he set himself craftily to win Miranda’s approval by a minute account of the characteristics—mental, moral, and physical—of a tame bear named Pete, belonging to one of the lumbermen at the Settlement. The subject was sagaciously chosen, and had the effect of making Miranda feel measurably less remote from the world of men. It suggested to her a kind of possible understanding between the world of men and the world of the ancient wood.
As they left the moonlit open, the long white fingers of the phantom light reached after them, down the dissolving arches. Then the last groping ray was left behind, and they walked in the soft dark. Dave found it an exquisite but imperative necessity to keep close at Miranda’s elbow, touching her very skirt indeed, for even his trained woodland eyes could at first distinguish nothing. Miranda, however, with her miraculous vision, moved swiftly, unhesitatingly, as if in broad day and a plain way.
Soon, however, Dave’s eyes adapted themselves, and he could discern vague differences, denser masses, semi-translucencies in the enfolding depth of blackness. For there was a light, of a kind, carried down by countless reflections and refractions from the lit, wet surfaces of the topmost leaves. Moreover, clean-blooded and fine-nerved as he was from his years of living under nature’s ceaseless purgation, his other senses came to the aid of his baffled sight. He seemed to feel, rather than see, the massive bulk of the pine and birch trunks as his face approached them to the nearness of an arm’s length. He felt, too, an added hardness and a swelling under the moss, wherever the network of roots came close to the parent trunk. His nostrils discerned the pine, the spruce, the hemlock, the balsam poplar, the aromatic moose-wood, as he passed them; and long before he came to it he knew the tamarack swamp was near. Only his ears could not aid him. Except for Miranda’s footsteps, feather-soft upon the moss, and his own heavier but skilfully muffled tread, there was no sound in the forest but an indeterminate whisper, so thin that it might have been the speech of the leaves conferring, or the sap climbing through the smaller branches. Neither he nor Miranda uttered a word. The stillness was such that a voice would have profaned it. Finding it difficult to keep up without stumbling and making a rough noise, Dave frankly resigned himself to the girl’s superior craft.
“You’ve got to be eyes fer me here, you wonderful Mirandy, er I can’t keep up with ye!” he whispered at her ear. The light warmth of his breath upon her neck made her tingle in a way that bewildered her; but she found it pleasant. When he took hold of her arm, very gently, to steady himself, rather to his surprise he was permitted. He was wise enough, however, not to attach too much importance to the favour. He pondered the fact that to Miranda, who was not a Settlement girl, it meant altogether nothing.
Presently, just ahead of them, they saw a pair of palely-glowing eyes, about two feet from the ground. Miranda squeezed the hand inside her arm, as a sign that Dave was not to regret his rifle. As a matter of fact, he was not disposed to regret anything at that moment.
“Lou’-cerfie!” he whispered at her ear, meaning the lynx, or loup-cervier of the camps.
“No, panther!” murmured Miranda, indifferently, going straight forward. At this startling word, Dave could not, under the circumstances, refrain from a certain misgiving. A panther is not good to meet in the dark. But the palely-glowing eyes sank mysteriously toward the ground and retreated as Miranda advanced; and in a few seconds they went floating off to one side and disappeared.