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Page 46
A flush came to Hemmingway's cheek, but with it a gleam of
intelligence. Of course the inundation was known to them FIRST,
and there was the wreckage to support them. They had clearly saved
themselves. If they had abandoned the cabin, it was because they
knew its security, perhaps had even seen it safely adrift.
"Has this ever happened to the cabin before?" he asked, as he
thought of its peculiar base.
"No."
He looked at the water again. There was a decided current. The
overflow was evidently no part of the original inundation. He put
his hand in the water. It was icy cold. Yes, he understood it
now. It was the sudden melting of snow in the Sierras which had
brought this volume down the canyon. But was there more still to
come?
"Have you anything like a long pole or stick in the cabin?"
"Nary," said the girl, opening her big eyes and shaking her head
with a simulation of despair, which was, however, flatly contradicted
by her laughing mouth.
"Nor any cord or twine?" he continued.
She handed him a ball of coarse twine.
"May I take a couple of these hooks?" he asked, pointing to some
rough iron hooks in the rafters, on which bacon and jerked beef
were hanging.
She nodded. He dislodged the hooks, greased them with the bacon
rind, and affixed them to the twine.
"Fishin'?" she asked demurely.
"Exactly," he replied gravely.
He threw the line in the water. It slackened at about six feet,
straightened, and became taut at an angle, and then dragged. After
one or two sharp jerks he pulled it up. A few leaves and grasses
were caught in the hooks. He examined them attentively.
"We're not in the creek," he said, "nor in the old overflow.
There's no mud or gravel on the hooks, and these grasses don't grow
near water."
"Now, that's mighty cute of you," she said admiringly, as she knelt
beside him on the platform. "Let's see what you've caught. Look
yer!" she added, suddenly lifting a limp stalk, "that's 'old man,'
and thar ain't a scrap of it grows nearer than Springer's Rise,--
four miles from home."
"Are you sure?" he asked quickly.
"Sure as pop! I used to go huntin' it for smellidge."
"For what?" he said, with a bewildered smile.
"For this,"--she thrust the leaves to his nose and then to her own
pink nostrils; "for--for"--she hesitated, and then with a
mischievous simulation of correctness added, "for the perfume."
He looked at her admiringly. For all her five feet ten inches,
what a mere child she was, after all! What a fool he was to have
taken a resentful attitude towards her! How charming and graceful
she looked, kneeling there beside him!
"Tell me," he said suddenly, in a gentler voice, "what were you
laughing at just now?"
Her brown eyes wavered for a moment, and then brimmed with
merriment. She threw herself sideways, in a leaning posture,
supporting herself on one arm, while with her other hand she slowly
drew out her apron string, as she said, in a demure voice:--
"Well, I reckoned it was jest too killin' to think of you, who
didn't want to talk to me, and would hev given your hull pile to
hev skipped out o' this, jest stuck here alongside o' me, whether
you would or no, for Lord knows how long!"
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