It was in the early days of their stay, that Lance, with the air of a boy disclosing to some chosen companion a long-cherished treasure, took her by a circuitous way up the steep wall of their little valley, and helping her around a big boulder and through a thicket of laurel, showed her the opening of a cave. Man-high the entrance was, with a tiny cup of a spring in its lap; but six or eight feet in there was an abrupt turning so that the cave's extent was entirely hidden. He stood smilingly by, enjoying her astonishment. "Why, Lance!" she cried. "Well, I vow! Why, no one in the world would ever suspicion there was a cave here!" The two turned to look back at their camp, only to find themselves wholly screened by the oblique side of the great boulder and the laurel bushes, cut off from sight and sound of all that went on in the little valley. "They sure never would," Lance assented. [260] "And I've never told a soul--_but_ Sylvane--about the place. I was even kind o' duberous about showing you," and he laughed teasingly. "Might need a hide-out some time, that nobody didn't know where to find." There was a Phoebe-bird's nest just at the opening of the cave. Lance drew Callista back, both of them standing half crouched, while the mother, returning home, flitted past them and fed her babies. "Mighty late for that business," whispered Lance. "Second brood, I reckon," Callista murmured back. "Or maybe got broke up with the first brood," Lance added. The little dell was so remote that the birds were less shy than where they have been intruded upon by man and civilization, and the mother betrayed little uneasiness when the two visitors crept closer. "My, ain't it scairy!" Callista said, peering beyond into the cave. Then, as they descended the bank once more, "Hit looked like there might be wildcats in it." "I aimed to explore it this time and get to the end if I could," Lance replied. "I was fifteen year old when I found that place, and I used to scheme it out, like a boy will, that if I'd ever go with the Jesse James gang, or kill a man, or anything [261] to get the law out after me, I'd hide there; and then, oncet Caney was up, all the world couldn't find me." "What'd you eat?" objected practical Callista. Lance smiled. "I could take care of myself in the woods about as well as any of the critters," he told her. "I reckon I'd have to come and bring you a pone," bantered Callista. And they turned and smiled happily into each other's eyes, all in the blue, unclouded summer, with the baby asleep back in the rock house, and the two of them climbing down to him and their gipsy home hand in hand.