American fiction -- 20th century; Gold mines and mining -- Fiction; Western stories
She fled, and called herself a fool for growing scarlet, as she knew
that she did; as though two burning rays had been directed full upon
her back, she could feel his look as she ran from him; she could not
quickly enough vanish from his keen eyes, beyond the thicket. And how
on earth she was going to get dry again until the sun stood high in the
sky, she did not in the least know. She could wring out the free water;
she could make flails of her arms and run up and down until she got
warm.... If only she had a fire; but that would be foolhardy, the smoke
arising to stand a signal for miles of their whereabouts....
And until this moment she had not thought of how they were to convert
freshly caught fish into an edible breakfast! How, without fire? She
began to shiver again, from head to foot now, and, confronted by her
own problem, that of getting warm and dry, she was content to leave all
other solutions to Deveril.
When half an hour later she returned to him, she found him smoking a
cigarette and crouching over a bed of dying coals, whereon certain
tempting morsels lay; Deveril was turning them this way and that; with
the savory odor of the grilling fish there arose from the embers a
whiff of the green sage-leaves which he had plucked at the slope of
the cañon and laid first on his bed of coals. Crisp mountain-trout,
garnished with sage! And plenty of clear, cold, sparkling water to
drink thereafter! Truly a morning repast for king and queen.
"I hope they keep us on the run for a month!" Deveril greeted her. "I
haven't had this much fun for a dozen years!"
"But your fire?" she asked anxiously. "Aren't you afraid? The smoke?"
"Where there's smoke, there's always fire," he told her lightly. "But
when a man's on the dodge, as we are, he can have a fire that gives out
almighty little smoke! It's all bone-dry wood, with only the handful
of sage and a few crisscross willow sticks. Look up, and see how much
smoke you can see!"
He had built his small blaze, ringed about by some rocks, in the heart
of a small grove of trees which stood forty or fifty feet high; he had
got his fire burning with strong, clean flames, from a handful of dry
leaves and twigs; Lynette, looking up, could make out only the faintest
bluish-gray wisp of smoke against the gray-green of the leaves. She
understood; always it was inevitable that they must accept whatever
chances the moment brought them, yet it was not at all likely that
their faint plume of smoke, vanishing among the treetops, would ever
draw the glance of any human eye other than their own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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