"Of course it was, and I insist on paying up."
Bennington considered.
"I think I would like to go to the top of the rock there, and see the pines, and the skull-stones, and the prairies."
She glanced toward him, knitting her brows. "It is my very own," she said doubtfully. "I"ve never let anybody go up there before."
One of the diminutive chipmunks of the hills scampered out from a cleft in the rocks and perched on a moss-covered log, chattering eagerly and jerking his tail in the well-known manner of chipmunks.
"Oh, see! see!" she cried, all excitement in a moment. She seized the rifle, and taking careful aim, fired. The chattering ceased; the chipmunk disappeared.
Bennington ran to the log. Behind it lay the little animal. The long steel-jacketed bullet had just grazed the base of its brain. He picked it up gently in the palm of his hand and contemplated it.
It was such a diminutive beast, not as large as a good-sized rat, quite smaller than our own fence-corner chipmunks of the East. It"s little sides were daintily striped, its little whiskers were as perfect as those of the great squirrels in the timber bottom. In its pouches were the roots of pine cones. Bennington was not a sentimentalist, but the incident, against the background of the light-hearted day, seemed to him just a little pathetic. Something of the feeling showed in his eyes.
The girl, who had drawn near, looked from him to the dead chipmunk, and back again. Then she burst suddenly into tears.
"Oh, cruel, cruel!" she sobbed. "What did I do it for? What did you _let_ me do it for?"
Her distress was so keen that the young man hastened to relieve it.
"There," he rea.s.sured her lightly, "don"t do that! Why, you are a great hunter. You got your game. And it was a splendid shot. We"ll have him skinned when we get back home, and we"ll cure the skin, and you can make something out of it--a spectacle case," he suggested at random. "I know how you feel," he went on, to give her time to recover, "but all hunters feel that way occasionally. See, I"ll put him just here until we get ready to go home, where nothing can get him."
He deposited the squirrel in the cleft of a rock, quite out of sight, and stood back as though pleased. "There, that"s fine!" he concluded.
With one of those instantaneous transitions, which seemed so natural to her, and yet which appeared to reach not at all to her real nature, she had changed from an aspect of pa.s.sionate grief to one of solemn inquiry. Bennington found her looking at him with the soul br.i.m.m.i.n.g to the very surface of her great eyes.
"I think you may come up on my rock," she said simply after a moment.
They skirted the base of the dike together until they had reached the westernmost side. There Bennington was shown the means of ascent, which he had overlooked before because of his too close examination of the cliff itself. At a distance of about twenty feet from the dike grew a large pine tree, the lowest branch of which extended directly over the little plateau and about a foot above it. Next to the large pine stood two smaller saplings side by side and a few inches apart. These had been converted into a ladder by the nailing across of rustic rounds.
"That"s how I get up," explained the girl. "Now you go back around the corner again, and when I"m ready I"ll call."
Bennington obeyed. In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air summoning him to approach and climb.
He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated.
"Hi!" he called, "how did you get up this?"
He looked across the intervening s.p.a.ce expectantly, and then, to his surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously.
"I--I," stammered a small voice after a moment"s hesitation, "I guess I--_shinned_!"
A light broke across Bennington"s mind as to the origin of the two dark streaks on the gown, and he laughed. The girl eyed him reproachfully for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarra.s.sed manner. Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder. He shinned up the tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was a matter of no great difficulty. In another instant he stood upon the top of the dike.
It was, as he had antic.i.p.ated, nearly flat. Under the pine branch, which might make a very good chair back, grew a thick cushion of moss.
The one tree broke the freedom of the eye"s sweep toward the west, but in all other directions it was uninterrupted. As the girl had said, the tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating, rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping the foot of a great round boulder-mountain. Here and there a darker spot suggested a break for a mountain peak; rarely a fleck of white marked a mountain road. Back of them all--ridge, mountain, cavernous valley--towered old Harney, sun-browned, rock-diademed, a few wisps of cloud streaming down the wind from his brow, locks heavy with the age of the great Manitou whom he was supposed to represent. Eastward, the prairie like a peaceful sea. Above, the alert sky of the west. And through all the air a humming--vast, murmurous, swelling--as the mountain breeze touched simultaneously with strong hand the chords, not of one, but a thousand pine harps.
Bennington drew in a deep breath, and looked about in all directions.
The girl watched him.
"Ah! it is beautiful!" he murmured at last with a half sigh, and looked again.
She seized his hand eagerly.
"Oh, I"m so glad you said that--and no more than that!" she cried. "I feel the sun fairy can make you welcome now."
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRIT MOUNTAIN
"From now on," said the girl, shaking out her skirts before sitting down, "I am going to be a mystery."
"You are already," replied Bennington, for the first time aware that such was the fact.
"No fencing. I have a plain business proposition to make. You and I are going to be great friends. I can see that now."
"I hope so."
"And you, being a--well, an open-minded young man" (Now what does she mean by that? thought Bennington), "will be asking all about myself. I am going to tell you nothing. I am going to be a mystery."
"I"m sure----"
"No, you"re not sure of anything, young man. Now I"ll tell you this: that I am living down the gulch with my people."
"I know--Mr. Lawton"s."
She looked at him a moment. "Exactly. If you were to walk straight ahead--not out in the air, of course--you could see the roof of the house. Now, after we know each other better, the natural thing for you to do will be to come and see me at my house, won"t it?"
Bennington agreed that it would.
"Well, you mustn"t."
Bennington expressed his astonishment.
"I will explain a very little. In a month occurs the Pioneer"s Picnic at Rapid. You don"t know what the Pioneer"s Picnic is? Ignorant boy!
It"s our most important event of the year. Well, until that time I am going to try an experiment. I am going to see if--well, I"ll tell you; I am going to try an experiment on a man, and the man is you, and I"ll explain the whole thing to you after the Pioneer"s Picnic, and not a moment before. Aren"t you curious?"
"I am indeed," Bennington a.s.sured her sincerely.
She took on a small air of tyranny. "Now understand me. I mean what I say. If you want to see me again, you must do as I tell you. You must take me as I am, and you must mind me."
Bennington cast a fleeting wonder over the sublime self-confidence which made this girl so certain he would care to see her again. Then, with a grip at the heart, he owned that the self-confidence was well founded.