New Mexico -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
Then, business-like, Florence fell to questioning Madeline about details
of camp arrangement which Stewart, and Florence herself, could hardly
see to without suggestion.
Before any of Madeline’s sleepy guests awakened the camp was completed.
Madeline and Florence had a tent under a pine-tree, but they did not
intend to sleep in it except during stormy weather. They spread a
tarpaulin, made their bed on it, and elected to sleep under the light
of the stars. After that, taking the hounds with them, they explored. To
Madeline’s surprise, the park was not a little half-mile nook nestling
among the crags, but extended farther than they cared to walk, and was
rather a series of parks. They were no more than small valleys between
gray-toothed peaks. As the day advanced the charm of the place grew upon
Madeline. Even at noon, with the sun beating down, there was comfortable
warmth rather than heat. It was the kind of warmth that Madeline liked
to feel in the spring. And the sweet, thin, rare atmosphere began
to affect her strangely. She breathed deeply of it until she felt
light-headed, as if her body lacked substance and might drift away
like a thistledown. All at once she grew uncomfortably sleepy. A dreamy
languor possessed her, and, lying under a pine with her head against
Florence, she went to sleep. When she opened her eyes the shadows of
the crags stretched from the west, and between them streamed a red-gold
light. It was hazy, smoky sunshine losing its fire. The afternoon had
far advanced. Madeline sat up. Florence was lazily reading. The two
Mexican women were at work under the fly where the big stone fireplace
had been erected. No one else was in sight.
Florence, upon being questioned, informed Madeline that incident about
camp had been delightfully absent. Castleton had returned and was
profoundly sleeping with the other men. Presently a chorus of merry
calls attracted Madeline’s attention, and she turned to see Helen
limping along with Dorothy, and Mrs. Beck and Edith supporting each
other. They were all rested, but lame, and delighted with the place, and
as hungry as bears awakened from a winter’s sleep. Madeline forthwith
escorted them round the camp, and through the many aisles between the
trees, and to the mossy, pine-matted nooks under the crags.
Then they had dinner, sitting on the ground after the manner of Indians;
and it was a dinner that lacked merriment only because everybody was too
busily appeasing appetite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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