Strong, clear-eyed and masterful, she knew him a man among ten thousand. He might be capable of great sin, but what he did would be done with his eyes wide open and not from innate weakness. Her heart sang jubilantly. How could she ever have dreamed this crime of him? Her trust was now a thing above any evidence.
"And you'll sit down with me now if I ask you, neighbor," he laughed.
She did not wait to be asked, but sat down, tailor fashion, and looked expectantly up with a humorous little twist of the eyebrows. Flakes of dappled sunlight played on her through the moving leaves and accented the youthful bloom of her.
With a sigh of content he stretched himself on the sun-warmed loam. His glance swept up the gulch, a sword cleft in the hills, passed over the grove of young pines through which he had recently descended, and came back to the slim Irish girl sitting erectly on the turf.
"It's sometimes a mighty good world, neighbor," he said.
"I'm thinking that myself," she admitted, laughter welling softly out of her.
The sun lit the tips of the pines, so that they looked like burnished lances in battle array, poured its beams over the scarred hillside, and bathed the little valley in effulgent glory.
"You can always find it somewhere," he said with deep content, leaning on an elbow indolently.
She asked for no antecedent to his pronoun. What he meant was not ambiguous to her.
"If one knows where to look for it," she added softly.