“Get out the stuff,” he bade her. “We’ll have a fire.”
He built and lighted the fire, brought the water, and found his way down to the brook. He threw off his clothes, and lay flat in the bed of the stream, his head on a rock. The sharp stones cut his flesh, and the water somehow helped to heal him. He shook himself, dried by a run down the trail, dressed, and returned, glowing.
The coffee was on the fire, and she was making toast on a stick. She had spread what food she had brought, chiefly fruit and cooked meat and cheese.
“The bird,” she answered. “The big bird.”
“That’s for dinner,” he observed, gruffly, and said no more.
He took the stick from her and made the toast. When she poured the coffee, it was clear and golden and fragrant. She had two plates and two cups, the Inger noticed. She made him roll the blankets for seats. In spite of his suffering—which was the more real that it was new to him—the cheer and the invitation of the time warmed him. But as for her loveliness, he found himself now hardly looking at that, save when he must, as if what she was had become to him something utterly forbidden.
As for her, while she ate, she continually listened, and if a twig broke, she started. For this she laughed at herself once.
“But if he should come,” she said, “if he should come....”
The Inger looked at her, that once, steadfastly.
“If he should come,” he said, “I could save you—now.”
The elusive trail which had baffled him, led with perfect distinctness along a little shelf three steps up and around that sharp height of rocks which he had scaled, and then the trail dipped down into a narrow cañon, and up. Before the sun was an hour high, they were on their way again.
With their brisk progress, her spirits rose, and once, to the Inger’s exquisite delight, she broke into a lilt of song.
“You sing the way you laugh,” he said awkwardly. And she flashed him a smile, over shoulder, as she had done that morning on the desert.
A tanager drew a line of scarlet through the trees, and burned from a bough before them. In an instant the Inger’s hand was raised, and he had aimed. But in that second, his arm was struck aside, the shot glanced harmlessly among the trees, and the bird flashed safe to the thicket.