But as soon as the sun dropped behind the hills each day, and the breeze started up from the far-away Gulf, their discomfort was forgotten. In the wonderful brilliance of the starry nights when there was no moon, or in the times when one hung like a luminous pearl above a silver world, the air grew fresh and cool, and they sat late in the open, making the most of every minute. In the early mornings there was that same crisp freshness of the hills again, so one could endure the merciless, yellow glare and the panting heat of the afternoons, for the sake of the nights and dawns. Even without that, however, they would have been content to stay on, enduring it gladly, for Jack was daily growing stronger; and to see him moving about the house on his own feet, no matter how falteringly at first, was a cause for hourly rejoicing. Mary still played the part of Baloo with Brud and Sister, starting early in the morning and taking them over to the old mill-dam, in the shade of some big cypress and sycamore trees. She was teaching them to read and write, but there was little poring over books for them. They built their letters out of stones, and fashioned whole sentences of twigs; wrote them in the sand and modelled them in mud, scratched them on rocks with bits of flint, as Indians do their picture language, and pricked them in the broad sycamore leaves with thorns. By the end of the summer they had enough of a vocabulary to write a brief letter to their father, and their pride knew no bounds when each had achieved one entirely alone, from date to stamp, and dropped it into the box at the post-office. His pride in them was equally great, and the letter that he sent Mary with her final check was one of the few things which she carried away from Texas as a cherished memento.