It soon became evident that the brightness of the morning was reflected
from the girl's mood. She fairly sparkled with gaiety and high spirits.
The two got along famously.
"Where are you going?" asked Bennington at last.
"On the picnic, of course," she rejoined promptly. "Weren't you
invited? I thought you were."
"I thought it would be too wet," he averred in explanation.
"Not a bit! The rain dries quickly in the hills, and the cloud-burst
only came into this gulch. I have here," she went on, twisting around
in her saddle to inspect a large bundle and a pair of well-stuffed
saddle bags, "I have here a coffee pot, a frying pan, a little kettle,
two tin cups, and various sorts of grub. I am fixed for a scout sure.
Now when we get near your camp you must run up and get an axe and some
matches."
Bennington observed with approval the corpulency of the bundle and the
skilful manner with which it was tied on. He noted, with perhaps more
approval, her lithe figure in its old-fashioned painter's blouse and
rough skirt, and the rosiness of her cheeks under a cloth cap caught on
awry. As the ponies sought a path at a snail's pace through the sharp
flints, she showed in a thousand ways how high the gaiety of her
animal spirits had mounted. She sang airy little pieces of songs. She
uttered single clear notes. She mocked, with a ludicrously feminine
croak, the hoarse voice of a crow sailing over them. She rallied
Bennington mercilessly on his corduroys, his yellow flapped pistol
holster, his laced boots. She went over in ridiculous pantomime the
scene of the mock lynching, until Bennington rolled in his saddle with
light-hearted laughter, and wondered how it was possible he had ever
taken the affair seriously. When he returned with the axe she was
hugely alarmed lest he harm himself by his awkward way of carrying it,
and gave him much wholesome advice in her most maternal manner. After
all of which she would catch his eye, and they would both laugh to
startle the birds.
Blue Lead proved to be some distance away, for which fact Bennington
was not sorry. At length they surmounted a little ridge. Over its
summit there started into being a long cool "draw," broad and shallow
near the top, but deepening by insensible degrees into a cañon filled
already with broad-leaved shrubs, and thickly grown with saplings of
beech and ash. Through the screen of slender trunks could be seen
miniature open parks carpeted with a soft tiny fern, not high enough to
conceal the ears of a rabbit, or to quench the flame of the tiger lily
that grew there. Soon a little brook sprang from nowhere, and crept
timidly through and under thick mosses. After a time it increased in
size, and when it had become large enough to bubble over clear gravel,
Mary called a halt.