“You were! Well, I don’t care. You’d never be tempted to disobey the Lord—not by Eve with all her stolen apples!”
“All right, called me Wanny,” returned Adam, and he made haste to change the subject. There were times when Genie, with her simplicity, her directness, her curiosity, and her innocence, caused Adam extreme perplexity, not to say embarrassment. He remembered his own bringing up. It seemed every year his childhood days came back closer. And thrown as he was in constant companionship with this child of nature, he began to wonder if the sophisticated education of children, especially girls, as it had been in his youth, was as fine and simple and true to life as it might have been.
Andreas Canyon yawned with wide mouth and huge yellow cliffs. Just beyond the mouth of the canyon and across the wide space from cliff to slope bloomed the most verdant and beautiful oasis of that desert region. Huge gray bowlders, clean and old, and russet with lichen, made barricade for a clear stream of green water, as if to protect it from blowing desert sand. Yet there were little beaches of white sand, lined by colored pebbles. Green rushes and flags grew in the water. Beyond the stream, on the side of the flat-rocked slope, lay a many-acred thicket of mesquite, impenetrable except for birds and beasts. The green of the leaves seemed dominated by bronze colors of the mistletoe.
The oasis proper, however, was the grove of cottonwoods, sycamores, and palms. How bright green the foliage of cottonwoods—and smooth white the bark of sycamores! But verdant and cool as it was under their shade, Adam and Genie always sought the aloof and stately palms, wonderful trees not native there, planted years and years before by the Spanish padres.
“Oh, I love it here!” exclaimed Genie. “Listen to the palms whisper!”
They stood loftily, with spreading green fanlike leaves at the tops, and all the trunks swathed and bundled apparently in huge cases of straw. These yellow sheaths were no less than the leaves that had died. As the palms grew the new leaves kept bursting from the tufted tops, and those leaves lowest down died and turned yellow.
“Genie, your uncle seems a long time coming back for you,” remarked Adam.
“I hope he never comes,” she replied.
Adam was surprised and somewhat disconcerted at her reply, and yet strangely pleased.
“Why?” he asked.