It was in the flush of this exultation over winter's downfall that they planned camp life in a vale at the edge of the lake, where the spruces thinned to leave wide-vaulted arches, and spread the floor with yielding brown rugs of the pine needle. They began it as a play, and finished with a permanent camp into which they moved from the cabin. There were tents and beds, a table, a sheet-iron stove, chests for their stores, and hammocks in which to be fanned by the south wind. Bartell promised his sister vast benefits from this life. "This will put the finishing touches to you, Sis. A month here and you'll be loping over the range, high, wide, and handsome. It'll take an elk-high fence to hold you after you've slept awhile out here." She felt the truth of what he said, and was appalled by it. Almost daily she dismayed herself by recalling some unpremeditated feat of strength or endurance. Life had crept back to her like a whipped dog, and bitterly she felt the sting of its satire. She was loath to leave the cabin in which she had so long nursed death. She had impregnated the very walls with an atmosphere of dissolution. But she understood now that that prison house could no longer suffice her. Stubborn life had prevailed over all its powers of suggestion. There she had clung stubbornly to the old solution, cherishing a hope of some sudden relapse, despite the new life that taunted her with its animal buoyance. But once in the open, her brain was washed of that. Her mind was as clear as the fathomless blue above them at noon; and the stars at night were not more coldly luminous than the reasoning she bent upon herself, nor sharper than a certain deduction she made. Ewing brought his drawing to the camp and spent the mornings in work. He had finished his series for the _Knickerbocker_ during the winter, and these drawings, with the illustrations for the story previously made, had brought him enough to discharge the Teevan debt. He had reported this transaction significantly to Mrs. Laithe, and was now busy on pictures for another story for the _Knickerbocker_. "Only a little longer," he said, with a meaning she could not fathom, and he returned to his work with a singular absorption. Not even Ben could distract him when he sauntered up for his daily criticism. Ben was respectful to the drawings after he saw the checks they brought, but his summing up of the purchaser's acumen never varied. "Well, well--fools and their money! The idee of payin' out cash for a thing that looks as much like Red Phinney as that there does!"