Bud and Lovin Child. As in the cabin, so here she felt the individuality
in their belongings. Last night she had been tormented with the fear
that there might be a wife as well as a baby boy in Bud's household.
Even the evidence of the mail order, that held nothing for a woman and
that was written by Bud's hand, could scarcely reassure her. Now she
knew beyond all doubt that she had no woman to reckon with, and the
knowledge brought relief of a sort.
She went up and touched the little overalls wistfully, laid her cheek
against one little patch, ducked under the line, and followed a crooked
little path that led up the creek. She forgot all about her horse,
which looked after her as long as she was in sight, and then turned and
trotted back the way it had come, wondering, no doubt, at the foolish
faith this rider had in him.
The path led up along the side of the flat, through tall grass and all
the brilliant blossoms of a mountain meadow in June. Great, graceful
mountain lilies nodded from little shady tangles in the bushes.
Harebells and lupines, wild-pea vines and columbines, tiny, gnome-faced
pansies, violets, and the daintier flowering grasses lined the way with
odorous loveliness. Birds called happily from the tree tops. Away up
next the clouds an eagle sailed serene, alone, a tiny boat breasting the
currents of the sky ocean.
Marie's rage cooled a little on that walk. It was so beautiful for Lovin
Child, up here in this little valley among the snow-topped mountains;
so sheltered. Yesterday's grind in that beehive of a department store
seemed more remote than South Africa. Unconsciously her first nervous
pace slackened. She found herself taking long breaths of this clean air,
sweetened with the scent of growing things. Why couldn't the world be
happy, since it was so beautiful? It made her think of those three weeks
in Big Basin, and the never-forgettable wonder of their love--hers and
Bud's.
She was crying with the pain and the beauty of it when she heard the
first high, chirpy notes of a baby--her baby. Lovin Child was picketed
to a young cedar near the mouth of the Blind ledge tunnel, and he was
throwing rocks at a chipmunk that kept coming toward him in little
rushes, hoping with each rush to get a crumb of the bread and butter
that Lovin Child had flung down. Lovin Child was squealing and
jabbering, with now and then a real word that he had learned from Bud
and Cash. Not particularly nice words--"Doggone" was one and several
times he called the chipmunk a "sunny-gun." And of course he frequently
announced that he would "Tell a worl'" something. His head was bare and
shone in the sun like the gold for which Cash and his Daddy Bud were
digging, away back in the dark hole. He had on a pair of faded overalls
trimmed with red, mates of the ones on the rope line, and he threw rocks
impartially with first his right hand and then his left, and sometimes
with both at once; which did not greatly distress the chipmunk, who knew
Lovin Child of old and had learned how wide the rocks always went of
their mark.