She lay for hours on some bleached log high in a sunny glade, her hands under her fair head, her lips smiling unconsciously, her long blue eyes dreaming into the cloud-flecked heavens, and sometimes she wondered what the future held for her after the fashion of maids since the world began. She recalled the restless wanderings of the family in her early years, remembered vaguely the home and the school in old Missouri, her father’s ceaseless urge for travel. And then had come their journey’s end, here in the austere loneliness of Nameless Valley, where his nomad heart had settled down and had been at home. She thought of these familiar things, and of others not familiar, such as picturing the house she and Bud would one day build on the big meadow, with running water piped from the rushing stream itself, with carpets—Mrs. Allison was already sewing interminable balls of “rags” for the fabric—and with such simple comforts as seemed to her nothing short of luxuries. She knew of a woman in Bement who wove carpets, a Mrs. Porter, at the reasonable price of thirty cents a yard, warp included. The warp should be brown-and-white, she decided—at least she had so decided long back after many conferences with her mother.
Brown and white running softly through the dim colors of the rags—nothing new enough to be bright went into the balls, though there would be a soft golden glow all through the hit-and-miss fabric from the “hanks” dyed with copperas—brown and white, Nance thought, would make it seem like the floor of the woods in fall, weathered and beautiful.
She could scarcely wait the time of the fulfillment of this dress, when the cabin floors should be soft under foot.
Longing for the refinements was strong in her, though limited painfully to such simple scope as Cordova supplied, or as she remembered dimly from the days of her childhood in Missouri.
But the glory of the land was too compelling for idle dreams of the future. Here at hand were carpets of brown pine needles, shot through with scarlet bleeding hearts.
Here were mosses soft and wonderful when one bent close enough to study their minute and intricate patterns. Here were vast distances and dropping slopes, veiled in pale blue haze so delicate as to seem an hallucination.
Here also, were the mysterious fastnesses of Blue Stone Cañon, its perpendicular walls of eroded rock cut by seam and fissure, its hollow aisles resonant always of the murmurous stream that tumbled through them.
Nance loved the cañon. She liked to climb among its boulders, to whip its frequent pools for the trout that hung in their moving smoothness, to listen to the thousand voices that seemed always whispering and talking. They were made of fairy stuff and madness, these voices. If one sat still and listened long enough he could swear that they were real, that strange concourses discussed the secrets of the spheres. On the hottest days of summer the cañon was cool, for a wind drew always through it from its unknown head somewhere in the Deep Hearts themselves far to the north and east. Buckskin felt the mysterious influence of the soundful silence, pricking his ears, listening, holding his breath to let it out in snorts, and Nance laughed at his uneasiness.
“Buckskin,” she said one day, as she lay stretched at length on a flat rock beside a boiling riffle, “you’re a bundle of nerves, a natural-born finder of fears. There isn’t a thing bigger or uglier than yourself in all the cañon—unless it’s a panther skulking up in the branches, and he wouldn’t come near for a fortune—though what could be fortune to a cougar, I wonder?” she went on to herself, smiling at the strip of sky that topped the frowning rimrock, “only a full belly, I guess—the murderer.”
She lay a long time basking in the sun that shone straight down, for it was noon, revelling in the relaxation of her young body, long worked to the limit and frankly tired.