“See!” cried Nance waving a hand about at the smiling scene, “it is a magic place—no less!”
The spring itself was a narrow trickle above sands as grey as cloth, a never-ceasing flow of water, clear and icy cold, and beyond it was a round little flat, thick with green grass beneath spreading mush-oaks, a spot for fairy conclaves.
“Yes,” nodded the man, “it is magic—the true magic of Nature in gracious perfection, unmarred by the hand of man.”
“Are we going to have the cookies now?” came the anxious pipe of the boy, and Fair laughed.
“Can’t get away from the deadly commonplace, Miss Allison, with Sonny on the job. Poor little kid—he’s about fed up on untrammeled nature. I’m afraid I owe him a big debt for what I’ve done to him—and yet—I am trying to pay a bigger one which someone else owes him. Let’s camp.”
They dropped the reins and turned the horses loose to graze, and Fair built a little fire of dry wood which sent up a straight column of smoke like a signal.
Nance untied her bundle from the saddle thongs and Fair unrolled a dozen trout, firm and cool in their sheath of leaves. He hung them deftly to the flames on a bent green twig and Romance danced attendance on the hour. He was expert from long experience of cooking in the open, and when he finally announced them done they would have delighted an epicure. Nance laid out a clean white cloth and spread upon it such plain and wholesome things as cold corned beef, white bread and golden butter, home-made cucumber pickles and sugared cookies.
They were poor folk all, the nomad man and boy, the girl who knew so little beyond the grind of work, but they were richer than Solomon in all his glory, for they had health and youth and that most priceless thing of all—a clear conscience and the eager expectation of the good the next day holds.
They sat cross-legged about their sylvan board and forgot such things as work and hardship and the bitterness of threatened feud, and—mayhap—vengeance.
They talked of many things and all the time Nance’s wonder grew at Fair’s wide knowledge of the outside world, at his gentle manners, his quiet reticence in some ways, his genial freedom in others.